Charon

This is exactly like X-Division started too. A few changes here, some tweaks there, and all of a sudden you see the necessity for feature X, and some balance at point Y, and ofcourse some unique things. This is what i want to, and what X-Division basically is, or rather my vision of it is. I see X-Division of a project where EVERYBODY can contribute to a experience, no matter how small or big it is, and a lot of people are doing this right now. This is why i want you for the team @Policenaut. If you make some content why not integrate it into X-Division, a joint project ? The main reason i want to integrate everything into 1 experience is because the modloader system simply doesnt cut it. We have people asking on reddit what mods to use and which are compatible with what. AND they are right about this. To fully understand if something is compatible means you have to look into the code, and check for yourself, but first you have to understand the code. 95% of people wont do that, and it shouldnt be necessary for them. There are so many mods for xenonauts, but its mostly about people asking if mod X is compatible with mod Y. I believe the reason why this whole modding fails is because there wasnt a joint venture in all of this., and i dont know about XNT, although i have played it as a part of Xenophobia. Sure Armored Assault is a great mod and expands the vanilla experience, but as soon as you want to add another vehicel changing mod you will most likely get an error that you cant cope with. And thats the way with most mods here, they are all fractured and nobody is even sure if those 3 mods fit together. I want to see all the content here merged into 1 experience, where people get support, and not 200 fractured and outdated mods. So i am all for a middle step between the vanilla experience and X-Division, where you put in as much content as you see fit. But this also needs some maintenance over the years, and some people caring about this. Like i said, X-Division is a structured team, why not take advantage of a structure and support which is already there ? Nobody will force you to do things you dont want to. Its rather a give and take where you can do the things you like, with the people who know something, and the testers who want to have a better game. Ditto, read what i wrote.

Throwing in my 50 cents here. Most of the things are ones that i have addressed here: and heres a quote: In all honesty, i think X-Division addresses all those issues, and adds a lot of content. Heres the question: Could you make the same improvements without the content ? The answer: Propably not. One example: A second strike team is useless because You dont need it You dont need it You dont need it Its a waste of time and you are going to win with and without it anyway, only your Team A is important X- Division addresses this in a roundabout way by: Making you need more bases for the game because of the global coverage, and because you simply need more space to build labs/workshops Making Base Assaults UFOs night unbeatable More bases means you need more staff to protect them in case of a raid, means you have to moderately update your armour and weapons too The increased resource need means you need to raid more UFOs, until you find a stable balance of resource consumption and resource gain Could you make this for the vanilla/XCE game ? Propably not, because you simply would change the game too much. This is the main problem - the vanilla game is just the vanilla game. Its the best solution for what it wants to achieve. All that the vanilla game is about is Achieving air supremacy Raid technological granting crashsites Train your team for the last mission Thats the vanilla Xenonauts in a nutshell. If you would change this you would change the basics of the game, and thuse drift away from the vanilla experience. What i can think of off the hook is Increase airplane maintenance cost so that it is no longer sustainable to build airplanes, but that GC loot has to balance out the negative cost. - Or another method of making airplanes not viable. Increase GC loot money Increase the landing chance, duration and UFOs that can land Make the dropships faster, OPTIONALLY with less range so more dropships have to be ready any time to cover the whole globe. Dont forget to fix the valkyrie so it can pull out. Give the dropships about radar range for this, or a bit more. Increase the air supremacy missions to force the player to have anti fighter aircraft if he wants to take off with his dropships. Buff the the interceptors and their numbers. Increase the bomber mission UFOs, which never land, to force the player to build anti bomber aircraft and thuse have a high maintenance cost. Increase bombing relationship damage OPTIONALLY make the game harder The idea behind this is that the player needs anti fighter aircraft, to even send dropships to the landed "normal" UFOs. Thuse bringing his maintenance into the red. Additonally, he needs some anti bomber to prevent the bombing UFOs from simply bombing him out of this playthrough > the balance gets even more in the red. To balance this out he has to make successful GC missions. Because of the low range he needs more than 1 squad More than 1 squad means he needs more ressources Put all of this together and tweak the individual points and there you go ! Heres a picture to illustrate this: Now someone only has to make a mod out of this idea, and balance it and you are halfway on it to majorly change the game. You can thank me later for suggesting this.

+1 Im all for it. This could mean a lot. And we already got some dedicated modders, why not spending some time to track down some individual guys. We should talk to @Chris first about this though. And Solver needs to give a green light too.

I know, and this really hurts me because ive already set up my sound workstation perfectly, to produce high quality sounds for the aircombat endlessly. You should really take a look ( and a listen ) to those sounds to know what i mean. They sound so gorgeous and are so needed. You can also watch my latest developer diaries to get a taste. I guess i will publish them as a small package first, to minimise stability issues. Btw i m only talking about aircombat sounds, i dont add GC sounds. GC sounds seem to be fine as long as you dont add ambient sound. If you want to fix something it should be the buggy loading of GC, but i dont think thats possible, because honestly, i dont even know where we should start there.

@YaK Can see if never loading a GC save changes things in your next playthrough ?

I know, i read it . My 900 - 1000 sounds mods will come with the instability issues. Its really frustrating, but i know now you cant do anything. Looks like the best choice is to simply wait for X2 and start over, or something along those lines.

Odd points: If i think about it, this is the first time i ever saved a GC and loaded it, correctly from startup and the main menu. So this problem purely could originate from the fact that i loaded a GC save, which is problematic as i mentioned earlier. I went to look through the debugger, and oddly enough, although i activated that 50% of damage gets dealt as stun damage, the harridan soldier has a multiplier of "0". Even more oddly there is a different random bonus/penalty for everything. As far as i can discern from past experience, it should be all teh same, for the same bullet. And there is nothing that hints to the damage being converted into 50% stun damage. ... wait a second ... . Could you check if all damage to stun damage gets blocked on crashsites with an andron as the main race ? I just loaded the save game seconds before i entered teh GC on the geoscape and it looks like this solves most of the problems. At least i can windows tab in and out of the game again, while the other save plainly crashed. I guess i will just give out a note that it is not recommended to load a GC save anymore, sooner or later. It looks to me like a savegame issue, not loading things correctly although it should.

I have no clue. Some facts: This bug appears to "wait" until the fireing animations of the shooter has finished, and freezes after the last bullet gets shot, and before the bullet hits ( which you can tell most of the time). So this might be animation related. The bug does not appear if no bullet hits. It only occurs for bullets which would "hit" Only certain angles produces this bug, and only under certain circumstances Its not 100% angle related as all angles can be achieved without causing the bug, but some angles appear to be prone to produce this bug. It could also be that there is something else which causes this in the background. The most notable features of this are This bug is reproducable 100% of the time, once you find the spot which causes it You can see the last bullet millimeters away from teh unit for all occurences. Some might be covered up by the environment. This is as far as i am.

This is very frustrating.

+1 as @Policenaut and I have been going over the code extensively. Wut ? I thought all XCE coders have soruce code access. Is it only half of the package ?

Ive just started up the debugger and it seems like the unit is missing a shadow. I think its save to assume that you can move that thread to wherever you like @Solver, as this doesnt appear to be a X:CE specific bug.

We all dont know, it might be. I didnt know where to put this so i put it here with an appropriate tagg. You can move it around within reasons.

Continuation from this post:

We are currently investigating the game "freeze on hit" bug, and it could be sound related too. I have a save game: Special 7.sav , and the bug is reproducable. It always happens in the same way on the last bullethit. It appears it can happen for single bullets as well. I might be totally wrong here, but it seems like the "hit" sound fades just before the last bullets hits and the last bullet triggers another reaction and the game starts to loop. The bug is only reprdoucable from this position and from this angle, if you move the soldier and shoot from another angle it cant be reproduced. This bug seems to be unit specific, as some units have to be proven more reliable to trigger this bug. The things we counted are sebillian medic, harridan soldier, and a policeofficier at the beginning of the game. Ill try to deactivate the UAS and see if that brings any results, although im unsure how this can be related. Until that im stuck with the most bugged save ever.

Hall of Fame

Well written ! EDIT: Added to the Hall of Fame.

Like i stated, you cant reproduce this without heavily modding your game. XCE functions 99.99% of the time correctly. Once you start modding the fireworks start to happen. We dont know, but take into account that things can also crash on the loading for something. For instance aircombat. It looks like the game trips itself up when too many sound possibilities are present. This is why the 5 radio chatter sounds "rarely" cause this, in comparasion to my added 164 sounds. The same is true for sound mods, the less you have the more stable the game becomes.

Its easy to miss, especially for the more experienced players and developers. because most of them start a game, load a save, and dont really load around except for testing purposes. It can be reproduced very easily by loading a GC game and then quitting, just to reload another GC game from the main menu without leaving the game. This has proven to be the most realiable method of reproducing crashes on load. Here are some facts: GC loading has in incredible higher rate of crashing in comparasion to Geoscape loading. This is true for modded and unmodded games. The relation between modded and unmodded games is roughly 1:10 for the average modded game ( excluding X-Division ) There is an almost 100% certainty that the first load after the startup of the game loads correctly, no matter the save type Sounds have been proven to be especially complicated. Example 1: I´ve just added 164 sounds to the aircombat and experienced my first "on aircomabt load" crash in over 800 hours of gameplay. "Maybe" it was just an coincidence, but it never happened before Example 2: UAS mod has been proven to make GC unstable. This concerns the loading, tabbing, and ingame behaviour. My own X-Division Developers Diary playthrough with the updated UAS and other recommended mods is so buggy that 1. alt tabbing out of the game crashes it 2. Loading a save from a GC produces funny, very unregular behaviour all around. The best bet you have is to never load a GC mission. Beyond that, there cant be any promises that the game fucntions as expected. Unmodded games, like XCE, have proven to not have this many bugs to a point where you can say its a rare occurence. Modded games however pump it up for small mods by around 10%, and for heavily modded games to around 60% of the game where buggy behaviour happens all the time. Every "sound" addition has proven to be especially responsible for those, although nobody can really say how or why. ( Shit game engine we suppose ) So under all of this light the best way to play modded games is to Only load a save ONCE, on startup, and never reload anything DONT load GC saves. Always play it through in one go. Use the least amount of sound mods possible

Looks like the model modloader to me, perfect. Its about how the game saves and loads, it seems to have a lot of problems, like loading sound from aircombat/GC to geoscape and visus verca. The 0 cd bug was something similar, where the game appeared to not be capeable to save non vanilla UFO terror cds. Solver fixed that thankfully . You are welcome, and its Charon .

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Goldhawk Interactive\Xenonauts - but there wont be anything of note, i guess. You best bet is this: If you want to avoid any sort of crashes deactivate every sound mod, like UAS or Ambient Sound mod, as sound has proven to be bproblematic. All in all i believe the safest way to play is the quote mentioned. Just never use the load function inside the game, only once, when you start up the game from the main menu.

Update: Phase 1 X-Division Developers Diary Part 1 - 39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9fd3TOdSBs&list=PLF0CJiHTqevYS2uDAgPTllyJoioJUsev6&t=160s&index=1 - its playlist and all videos are in order Phase 2 X-Division Developers Diary Part 40 - 54 ( ongoing ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1YN4azj6F8&index=1&list=PLF0CJiHTqevbv561dmYBzBxfaDCy5zXdZ - playlist

As far as i know you can get a steam code directly from Chris if you purchased a legal version on desura. Heres the thread: Just write a note there and send Chris the information he needs.

So it should be working if set to -1 ? Can someone test that ?

I checked the Tropical tileset and noticed this line of codes: <Tileset MODMERGEATTRIBUTE="name" MODMERGE="replace" name="farm"> <MissionType name="Common" civilianCount="3" friendlyAICount="1"> As far as i know, and as far as you told us, there is nothing which changes civilian or local forces on a global scale, and i proved this code to be not working. Is this line of code out cold 100%, or does it affect anything ?

Story Time X-Division Developer Diary 49 Our organisation has just entered the next phase of the alien assault. The alien activity became more frequent, their ships faster, harder hitting and better armoured. Their ground forces are streamrolling the ground, and we can hardly withstand them anymore. We already lost a whole platoon of soldiers in a recent event, where the sebillian aliens obliterated our forces as soon as they touched the ground. Only a miracle and the quick reflexes of the pilot ended in that at least our armoured forces could withdraw. But every other soldier got blasted to smitherens by the alien grenades, and pinned down to their demise. The other times we were forced to draw because of their new technological advanced robotic enemies which mercilessly marched forward and broke the defenses before we could even set them up. No casualities this time, but our tanks had to be left behind. Our worst fears came true when the radars were showing an increased activity in south america around the westcoast ... A terror class UFO appeared. Central Intellligence immidiatelly feared a bsae assault on our youngest base stationed at the border of argentina. The green light was given to maximally secure the defenses. But reinforcement would take around 24 hours to arrive, and the locally forces that were stationed there were ill prepared for a full out base attack. The weapons were scarce in number and our armoured forces were proven to be ill equippted and armoured against an a serious extratterestrial thread. Our air forces made some last attempts to find a chink in the UFOs armor but failed. Our soldiers were prepared for the worst. Then came the temporary clearence. It looked like the Carrier Class UFO was circling a city south of the base. Intelligence suggested it could either be Buenos Aires or Montevideo in Uruguay. The data suggested the former. This was better, but still bad enough. The latest bombing runs on this continent decimated the potential support and a terror attack would mean we would hang on in this country by a grain of hair. The economy and logistic routes were in pretty bad shape and could hardly withstand a fatal blow like this. The Terror Carrier set down in Monevideo, against our calculations. Intelligence suggested that an immidiate deployment would look to an disadvantageous fight in the night, and decided to wait as long as possible to ensure a fight during the daytime. [ Data X-Division Developer Diary 48] The closer the dropship came to the zone of terror, it became plain clear that their were miscalcualtions about the timing of the drop, and a potential night mission was a painfull possibility. Central Intelligence considered a withdrawal if a full night mission was inevtiable. And so the day passed while the night did the same on the other end of the globe ... only time could tell ... what their fate holds ... . 5 minutes away from the landing zone. The pilot makes the last report. " This is charlie 1. We are touching down soon. We got some light here but not enough to for the whole city. Good old dusk, sir." 2 minutes later. "Grid Kilo 2 looks hot. I recommend to abort the mission. Your call, Commander" "Lets see what we got." "Aye, aye." Upon touching down, the morning dust and twilight greets the soldier, and the some old enemies they have yet to beat on the ground. Andron soldiers were seizing the city, supported by the most fearsome drones the xenonauts have seen until this date, and definitely the biggest ones. The commander thinks for second and then says: "Soldiers, today we face enemies that we have never routed in the field. We almost succeeded once, and retreated a few times to concentrate our forces to fight another time, ... ... AND TODAY IS THAT DAY ! TODAY WE ARE MAKING THE LAST STAND; AND KICK THEIR ROBOTIC ASSES BACK INTO THEIR UFOS THEY CAME CRAWLING OUT FROM. Dont overextend your reach, and stay safe, as their forces will crush you in an open battle. Fight valiantly like a rat in the city and victory will be ours. Dont fear them, because they dont fear you either, but they will still die equally well like any other alien. Stay concentrated and this should be no problem. Good luck, we´ll be in touch !" This is the video material of what happened next.