Solver

Submaps do not get combined just randomly, there are checks to prevent this kind of stuff.

Not as far as I know. It's one of the explicit checks in submap generation, that there should always be a space between a door and any wall. Really no idea how this happened I can of course come up with a backup fix that prevents the game from freezing should this somehow happen again. A weird door would be a minor bug by itself, it's the freeze that is problematic.

Yeah that save also freezes in Community Edition, to my surprise. It's not difficult to manually unfreeze though.

Or rather, the map itself was bugged, causing this. See something strange in that shack? The door opens into a wall. The door is originally closed in the save, and there's an alien on the outside side of the wall. He wants to run into the shack and then gets stuck at the door. Tries to open the door as usual but fails because somehow there's also a wall in the same tile. I have no idea how that happened in the first place.

I just loaded up your original save - I'm impressed, it's a new freeze I hadn't seen before. And you got it just after buying the game?

If you discover a combat hang in X:CE, definitely report it. I'm quite sure I have fixed most of them though.

You're on Steam, right? Just switch branches - right-click the game in your Steam library, choose Properties, go to the Betas tab and choose "community" there (no password needed). That will give you the best installation of X:CE, which also updates automatically. I think that's the best starting point.

An already frozen save? No. X:CE might salvage it due to being much more stable in general - I've fixed several "freeze in combat" bugs in X:CE. If the save doesn't work even in X:CE, I might look at it and see about making a fix.

You should first install the Community Edition, it's far more stable. Might even work with this save, though I have not tested myself.

Yeah, about that Time to make a fix with that!

Light Scouts should go down to one missile from the Condor. Disable auto-fire on one missile (click it so it turns red). Fire your first missile, wait for the UFO to attempt to dodge, then click the red missile to fire it as the UFO dodges. The second missile will hit and you'll shoot it down. If you send two Condors, just the cannons should be enough. Don't use Foxtrots for Light Scouts, they're too small and agile to be hit with the heavy torpedoes the Foxtrots carry.

I've looked at it, it's too minor to really warrant fixing. It annoys me as well but fixing it can mess quite a lot with equipment / items.

Thanks for the info. The game has to be compiled with VC++ 2008 and I see the linker option also exists back in that tool, so might be worth doing. I wouldn't be surprised if something in the engine breaks when using that much memory anyway, but it starts acting up anyway when pushed to its limits.

It probably won't break anything immediately. What I am unsure about is the long-term stability.

Yeah, there's a linker option to that effect. I cannot claim much familiarity with the MS tech stack though so am not sure how safe applying the flag is. For instance, how will that affect memory allocation when running on 64-bit Windows, that is, most computers? And can I be reasonably sure that the game engine doesn't do ugly hacks with pointers that would break?

That is a likely deadlock, yes. I've seen it several times, but I don't have the engine source code, so there's only so much I can reasonably do. But decreasing the amount of different sounds seems to be the best way of getting the game more stable.

Up to you of course, but I think revamping them (to make them usable in some way) is the one thing about the mod which isn't "vanilla-like". Basically everything else is new content or rebalancing while continuing the vanilla feel and experience for the most part. Making alien weapons an alternative to the usual arsenal is, as I feel it, a more radical departure.

An alloys/alenium conversion would be more interesting than what we have now, though I'm still not sure why (in a mod that's "vanilla style") there's a need to keep alien weapons. What's the idea behind it? Is it a problem in vanilla that you only use human weaponry?

Got the chance to play a bit with this. One biggest complaint to get out of the way - the location of the ammo indicator in the UI sucks. I couldn't even find the counter at first, and I keep running out of ammo because I don't notice when I'm running empty. The way it's hidden under the UI bar, it's like you were trying to hide it. The early game is slightly more difficult perhaps - I see the early aliens have been boosted slightly in HP, which actually matters more not because of killing the aliens but because of suppression. They're a bit harder to suppress. Also it takes longer to get Alenium research. All good though. Androns might be slightly too aggressive. I like their new behaviour overall, they feel like they should, but my first encounter with them was a landed Corvette and the Androns just kept streaming towards my troops without defending the UFO. Their aggression needs to be balanced with the defense goal so that they also do a proper UFO defense. I don't really see the point to making alien weapons remain in your stores unless you sell them. They suck so hard, I'm not sure why I would ever want to use them. The accuracy is so bad that I'd always rather use ballistics than the alien stuff.

Some other bug will have destroyed things by then

Right. There's the base name, then a 1-byte flag indicating "low fuel" status, then mission and kill counters (int), and hit points are after that as a float.

Weird stuff. From the screenshots, it looks as if all soldiers suddenly get 0-range night visibility.

That's a totally new one. Have you tried if this happens without other mods? Are you running any programs that can affect the video display (RivaTuner, f.lux, etc.)? Does this also happen in the main menu, or just in ground combat?

About the portrait generator. Hair (including facial, eyebrows) also needs a black colour option - it's probably not less common than brown hair, and it's different. Facial scar options look really bad right now, very much as if they were painted over the skin as opposed to being part of it. Yes I know that's literally the case More hair styles would also be good if you do go through with the profession distinction. The current styles are a good selection for the military portraits but feel lacking for scientists. I think it will be a success overall, very easy to use, and it creates faces that actually look like realistic human faces, which is the main difficulty with such generators.

You can attach it here on the forums, at the bottom of this reply box.