kabill

I've not done this myself per se but some kind of restriction on aircraft/aircraft weapon upgrades. I've played with a mod before that required aircraft weapon upgrades to be manufactured rather than being finished immediately on research completion. Even with this additional lag (caused by manufacturing time and resource availability) changed the air game somewhat I wasn't constantly ahead of the aliens in air power. So a no air weapons upgrades game might be interesting. But I think you might need a mod to do that as air weapons upgrade off of techs that do other things as well. EDIT: Actually, that probably falls under the 'making it more difficult' category. Never mind.

Regarding 3: That doesn't help because the game still needs to select a map type based of the UFO type and can only select maps based on the vanilla UFO types. Regarding 4: I really like that idea. Just having a couple on terror maps would be cool. Also, it would open up the opportunity for mods to add in a little extra reward from terror missions (as has been requested in the past) by including some recoverable components in the drop-pods.

Are you overwriting the vanilla game files or setting up the mod in the /mods folder? It looks like you're doing the latter (based on looking at the Xenopedia file you've included) in which case the issues you're having will be because you've not used the modmerge functions to make some of the files work. (There's also no modinfo.xml file so it really shouldn't do anything at all, actually). Your best bet, for weapons, would be to look at my mod Expanded Armories (available in the download tab) as that adds in loads of new weapons. But the key things: 1) To make changes to existing unit spectres, you should use MODMERGE="replace" in the very top element of the file. For example, if your text example you'd add it here: <spectre MODMERGE="replace" id="farmer" version="1"> That will result in the entire vanilla file being replaced by the one you're including in your mod. 2) To add new GC weapons, you should only include in weapons_gc.xml the weapons you're adding/changing. To add a new weapon, include the whole entry for the weapon and use MODMERGEATTRIBUTE="name" MODMERGE="insert" in the top element for the weapon to add the new item. Eg. <weapons><Weapon MODMERGEATTRIBUTE="name" MODMERGE="insert" name="weapon.NEWGUN" bulletType="normal" emptySound="Empty Click 1" > <props range="30" hands="2" recoil="0" weight="7" isHeavy="0" clipSize="10" reloadAPCost="30" reloadSound="Weapon Precision Rifle Reload" reactionModifier="0.5" disableShortRangeHitBonus="1" disableDamageScaling="1"/> <SingleShot sound="Weapon Sniper Single" delay="0.6" suppressionValue="25" suppressionRadius="1"> <Set1 ap="38" accuracy="60" /> <Set2 ap="49" accuracy="105" /> <Set3 ap="65" accuracy="165" /> </SingleShot> <BurstFire/> <GUIImage name="gui/weapons/PrecisionRifle.png"/> <GroundImage name="grounditemimages/ballistic_precisionrifle.png"/> <Ammos> <Ammo name="ammo.ballistic.sniper" type="kinetic" damage="35" mitigation="10" isHypervelocity="0"> <Projectile spectre="projectiles/bullet/bullet" speed="1500" delay="2.5" showAfterDistance="60.0"/> <Impact spectre="particles/bulletplume/bulletplume"/> </Ammo> </Ammos></Weapon><Weapons> To make changes to an existing weapon, do the same but use MODMERGE="update" instead. When doing this, you only need to include the elements/attributes you want to mod for the item. E.g. <Weapons><Weapon MODMDERGEATTRIBUTE="name" MODMERGE="update" name="weapon.flamethrower"> <props range="20" /> <SingleShot MODMERGE="update"> <Set1 ap="60" accuracy="50" /> </SingleShot> <Ammos> <Ammo MODMERGEATTRIBUTE="name" MODMERGE=update" name="ammo.ballistic.flamethrower" type="energy" damage="50" mitigation="20"> </Ammo> </Ammos></Weapon><Weapons> In the example above, the flamethrower is changed to have range 20, a 60% TU shot with 50% accuracy, do 50 energy type damage on a hit and ignore 20 points of armour. All other parameters will be based on the vanilla flamethrower item. Note as well that the elements <SingleShot> and <Ammo> should use additional modmerge functions as indicated in the example as both these elements have have their own properties and child elements. Hope some of that is useful. There's more that you'll not doubt need to know but in combination with the documentation found in the modding subforum and examples in other mods you should be able to get your head around it.

95% sure that will be a map issue, as that's one of Skitso's maps. I'm pretty sure I solved this issue as I needed to for my random Arctic map pack but I can't for the life of me remember what I did. (I'm not entirely sure, but I think the problem is caused by there being spawn points elsewhere on the map which are trying to spawn aliens into blocked spaces, thereby causing them to randomise their spawn location and spawning somewhere they otherwise wouldn't.)

If you can upload the mod (even just part of it to demonstrate what you've done) I might be able to diagnose. Seems most likely to be a spectre issue though like drages has suggested. Also: I like the edits you've done.

Might have to do some experimenting to see, then. Thinking about where I've had issues with upper floors before, it wouldn't surprise me if it's caused by standing above tiles with fire or smoke on them (certainly that would be a good explanation for problems I've seen before). I'm not sure what a good fix for that would be, though. I suspect it would take me too long to find and resolve the issue in code, even if I had the skill to do so. On the other hand, there's the possibility of removing all of the hand-placed smoke and fire and increasing the use of power core explosions now that llunak has fixed the issue with fire persisting outside of LoS and the externalised power core explosion variables I added. So assuming the bug doesn't also appear with real smoke and fire that could be a solution (although it might be a time-intensive overhaul).

Don't know what the problem is but I'd recommend turning off Hold the Line! to see if that changes anything. Since that mod makes changes to psionics its plausible it has broken something.

Do you know whether it happens only with fire and smoke on the upper levels or is it necessary to get rid of it from the lower levels as well?

Can you remind me what the problem was exactly? I remember you bringing it up a while ago but don't remember the details.

In the vanilla game, there are two UFO layouts for each UFO type. Fire in the Hole only has one UFO layout but several variants with different levels of damage. These layouts overwrite the vanilla layouts so the latter can't be selected. When the game loads a new ground combat mission, it picks randomly from the available UFO maps. So in vanilla there is a 50/50 chance of each map type being chosen. With Fire in the Hole, there are 10 maps per UFO with different levels of damage so there is a 1/10 chance of any given map being chosen. However, when you combine the two, the 10 Fire in the Hole maps compared with the 2 vanilla maps mean that the vanilla maps are much less likely to be chosen (1/12 for each) compared with the Fire in the Hole maps (10/12, differences in crash damage notwithstanding). I think that answers the question. By 'alternative version' do you mean the old, optional Fire in the Hole maps? If so, yes that should work. The maps from Enhanced Crash Sites are not included in Fire in the Hole because they don't have breach-points. Hence if you want to use them you will need to include Enhanced Crash Sites separately. Honestly, your best bet might be to install Enhanced Crash Sites first, then copy/paste map files from other mods into Enhanced Crash Sites and rename these copied files as appropriate. That way, you're keeping all the maps in one place (making mod organisation easier) and it will avoid missing any file name duplicates. Hope that helps.

The short answer is: you can't. The longer answer is: you can but you will need to change some file names and there will be a few issues. Instructions: - Unpack Fire in the Hole as normal - Open the folder assets/mods/Fire in the Hole/maps/ufos/crashed - For each UFO folder, change the filenames of the two unnumbered files. For example, the Battleship folder change the files battleship_layout and battleship_layout_alt to something like battleship_layout_01 and battleship_layout_02 - Open the folder assets/mods/Fire in the Hole/maps/ufos/landed - For each UFO folder, change the filename of one of the files and delete the other. For example, in the Battleship folder change the file battleship_layout to battleship_layout_mod and then delete the file battleship_layout_alt Doing this will reintroduce the vanilla maps into the map pool. However, there are a few problems: - The vanilla maps will not have any crash damage around them as these features are embedded in the FitH maps. - The vanilla crash maps will be much less likely to be selected than the FitH maps. - The FitH maps will still have destructible sections. To resolve first two issues, I would recommend also using my Enhanced Crash Sites mod. This adds crash damage to the vanilla UFO layouts (resolving problem one) and will increase the likelihood of a vanilla layout being chosen to a ratio of 1:1:2, i.e. there's twice the chance of the FitH layout being chosen compared with each of the two vanilla layouts. To make this work properly, however, you will need to rename all of the UFO crash maps packaged with Fire in the Hole to something different (if you put an underscore at the beginning of each map filename that would work). There's no way of resolving the final issue, however. Most of the time it shouldn't matter as you can simply choose not to exploit the breach-points. However, you will still spawn maps with parts of the hull already destroyed. You could resolve this by removing the corresponding map files but I can't remember which files spawn pre-damaged UFOs and, truth to say, I'm too lazy to check.

Just tried it and it seemed to be working fine, at least with the latest version of XCE. Have you checked that the mod is in the assets/mods folder as a regular folder (not a .zip) and also that the mod is activated in the 'mod tools' tab of the game launcher? EDIT: Ninja'd, but I didn't need to change anything. Might be because I'm using XCE though.

Sorry, yes. I'm used to Skitso's maps being the only other ones available.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The recent update to XCE has created a compatibility issue with this mod that effects the soldier equip screen. As a temporary measure, someone has uploaded a replacement file on this thread on the official Goldhawk forums: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11878-v-1-5-X-CE-Armour-Resource-Pack?p=150419#post150419 Copy and paste the download to assets/mods/Armour Resource Pack/scripts and everything should work fine. I will be updating this mod to be compatible with the new release of XCE but this is unlikely to happen until next weekend (11th July) at the earliest as I need to check whether I can maintain compatibility with both XCE and vanilla 1.59 and won't have time to do this until then.

Thanks for this and I'll check it against 1.59 to see what happens.

That's by design, since all vehicle weapons after the initial two are AoE weapons (but tied to Laser/Plasma/MAG tech rather than explosive tech). However, if you're into mods at all my mod Armoured Assault changes this so there's two parallel weapon trees for vehicles (one explosive and linked to explosive tech and one heavy machine gun linked to general weapons tech).

Not as such, but the random maps will crowd out Skitso's maps so you might not see them often (at least for the tilesets there are random maps for). My standard advice, if you've not played much Xenonauts before, is to play just with Skitso's maps and then add in the random maps if/when you start to feel map-fatigue.

Wasn't aware of this so thanks for mentioning it. What's changed exactly? And do you know whether the new LUA script will work with vanilla 1.59 (I'm hoping so as I really don't want to put out two versions of the mod!). In any case, could I ask you to send me the new file you've made? Updating the Resource Pack itself will be a pain but since it doesn't do anything by itself I could package it with Cybernetic Armour instead until I can come up with a solution for the Resource Pack. (I might have to see about uploading the Resource Pack elsewhere as it's currently uploaded in a place that's very difficult to access.)

Honestly, I don't even remember what was in this mod. I built a new one earlier this year that was a fairly extensive GC mod with new/modified weapons as part of it but I never quite finished off the last few bits. I might get around to finishing and releasing that mod at some point but it's fairly different to the prototype I uploaded here. As I don't have plans to go back to that prototype, you're more than welcome to release a fixed version. Credit appropriately, but otherwise do whatever. And if you want, post a link here to wherever you set things up. (It's be nice to have it on Steam as well. If you're not a Steam user, I could upload it there for you should you be ok with that.)

Heh, so I was right? Never mind, and good work bringing these back in any case.

That's where the swimming pool went! I really liked that submap but didn't realise it was one of Stinky's and just figured GH decided to get rid of it.

The XCE mod is a special case so the order doesn't matter (IIRC anyway). In any case, mods are loaded from bottom to top (with mods at the top taking priority over mods at the bottom) so having the base XCE mod and the Settings/Balance add-ons load before everything else makes sense.

Adding a new spawn point is impossible at the moment because the set of spawn areas (both UFOs and dropships) is hardcoded. As such, you can't add new ones as neither the game nor the map editor can recognise them. So it's something that would need support from XCE to work. (On top of that, yes, you'd need to add the new spawn points on to all of the maps. I don't think there's a good way to do that with unofficial maps as I don't think you could include an adjustment to a map without the game trying to read the adjustment as a full map which obviously wouldn't be good. In other words, I think it would be up to map creators to add support for new spawn point types. A while ago I had the idea of setting up a number of new generic spawn point submaps that could be included as standard in unofficial maps and then other mods could exploit them as desired. Don't know how likely that would be to happen now, though, given that most of the unofficial maps were made by Skitso and me and neither of us are active currently. Although, for what it's worth, I'd be happy for someone else to sort that out for my random map packs.)

Ah, have you downloaded the mapping tiles from the mapping subforum? I assumed you had done this but I'm guessing actually you haven't. If you do this, you will have all the individual prop images as well as the spectres for each.

You can't use assets between tilesets so you need to make copies and put them in the tileset you want to use them in. In doing so, you will also need to edit the copied spectres so that they path to the image in the new tileset rather than the image in the old tileset (honestly, it might still work if you don't do that as it might just be the spectres you need to copy. But copying both the image and the spectre and re-pathing will definitely work).