kabill

The issue with predator armour weapons could be a consequence of how I implemented the no-reloading-in-gc feature. Thanks for reporting; will have a look.

Sure, yes, sorry. Wasn't looking to imply you were wrong. Just a random piece of trivia which popped into my brain (and probably should have gotten filtered away before posting, but never mind).

Pretty sure RPS reported something about Xenonauts 2 based on the forum before there was a proper formal announcement. But I may have made that up.

I have just done a quick test my end and everything seems to be working fine. Can you tell me what you are equipping the soldiers with? I thought it was going to be a problem with the TU cost adjustment applied by the Predator Armour but that seems to be fine.

Ok, in which case it should be something I can fix. Will look when I can.

Sorry, missed that you'd specified that. I can only assume that this is a bug with the game itself and not the mod. I certainly can't think of anything that the mod does which would cause a problem in that specific context. If I have time I may have a play-around though. Very weird. Multi-missile launcher issue sounds like an oversight. I will look. Regarding the weapon class, yes, it's because MAG and Plasma have swapped tiers in the mod. It doesn't make any difference gameplay wise but puts them in the appropriate place.

Have you been able to use Predator Armour and the affiliated weapons effectively outside of a base defence mission?

I don't actually know but I very much doubt it. Good to know and glad I don't have a serious bug to track down!

At this stage I am not likely to add anything other than bug fixes, so it should be pretty safe. I can't say with absolute certainty but I'm pretty confident you shouldn't have problems. I have literally no idea why that might be happening. Is this an existing save or a new game? And how did you install the mod? Hmm, actually, that might be an issue with XCE - I had a similar issue a month or two back. Try loading a game in ground combat then aborting the mission, then load your actual game. I'm not sure how you might fix it if you don't have a ground combat save.

Re: weapons - hmm, shouldn't be the case. Any idea what rank these aliens are or what weapons they should be using (probably not, but hard to pin down the issue without further data). I do know there are some animation issues, mind (e.g. burst fire on the assault plasma) which I had forgotten to track down and fix. re: cells - is this at end game? The balance for cells is pretty rough currently and I'm not honestly sure they do their job very well (looking for a trade-off between cash and weapon manufacturing but I don't think it works). Do you think increasing power cell costs for weapons is warranted?

Update(!) I have just uploaded a new version of Tactical Armouries which can be downloaded as usual. The update should simply overwrite previous versions of the mod. As well as uploading it here, I am also uploading it to Steam Workshop. While I suspect there are a few minor issues still to be resolved, I feel the mod is more or less done at this point. Change log: - (Balance): Vehicles now have a sight range which is short than regular soldiers (20 vs 24). This means that vehicles must rely on mobility and armour to scout alien units and resist their attacks, or rely on soldiers to sport for them. This change was implemented to make vehicles more distinct from soldiers, to encourage synergy between vehicles and soldiers and to offset the quite considerable strengths of vehicles over soldiers. (Thanks to lluank for this suggestion) - (Balance): Added extra soldier slots on missions: Chinook now has 9 (from 8) spaces, Shriek has 12 (from 10) spaces, and the Valkyrie 15 spaces (from 12). In my experience, this mod was somewhat harder than vanilla and I've always liked the idea of having a few more soldiers on missions. Playing with the extra crew slots seems to work quite well. But feedback welcome. - (Balance): Vehicles now take up 3 crew slots rather than 2. Shriek and Valkyrie can carry two vehicles rather than only one. - (Bug Fix): Fix some crash/lock up issues with the tech tree (advanced plasma and alloy shield manufacture) - (UI): Tool-tip weapon info now included (thanks to Grimandevil for sorting this)

Hmm, maybe there were two issues then? I think the thing I fixed was a missing item in items.xml which is supposed to be produced when the project finishes. I don't think I changed the alien alloys thing. Re: Advanced Plasma Weappnry - I will have a look. It is probably a typo somewhere in researches.xml - I've seen similar problems before. Regarding a new upload - I might have time for it mid this week. I have a big deadline for Monday and might have to deal with some overspill of work. But hopefully.

This is fixed in the unreleased build of this mod. But thanks for reporting, and if you do find any other problems please pass them on.

I'm not 100% sure what the issue was. Was the % character stopping it from being read properly as a string? Well, never mind. Thanks for finding the issue - I'm not sure I'd have figured that out. Re: selling alien weapons - I was originally going to use weapon parts as a resource. However, this makes things very complicated. The easiest solution is for aliens to be given useless 'weapon fragment' items but this will be weird if you go to loot an alien as they will be carrying the weapon and the parts and in theory you could just loot the parts and not the weapon. Alternatively, it would be possible to have a manufacturing project which turns weapons into parts but that's adding a layer of faff for no good reason. So the solution I went with instead was to use the alien power cells essentially as a representation of dismantled alien weapons. Lore-wise, it is assumed that all alien weapons are dismantled for parts by default but rather than keeping a separate tally the power cells are used as a catch-all. Since aliens don't actually use ammo clips, the number of power cells they carry doesn't change and I have scaled it so that larger weapons come with more power cells. It's not perfect, for sure, but I remain convinced it's the best way to handle things. (In terms of money, it is worth noting that I increased - maybe doubled - the value of UFO components like Power Cores to offset the reduction in income from weapons. I'm not going to pretend I made any actual attempt to ensure the numbers come out about the same - I didn't - but in my playtests I've never found money any more problematic than in vanilla I don't think.) re: Shields - research has told me that ballistic shields some in a range of sizes and weights. The lightest seem to come in around 7-8kg and higher protection variants come in significantly heavier (this link shows what appears to be a manually-carried ballistic shield weighing 20kg: http://www.eurokompozit.mk/product/en/ballistic-shields/). My hypothesis is that Xenonaut shields are going to be towards the higher-protection end (hello plasma guns!) and 1970s tech is probably less advanced than contemporary tech. In that context, 12kg is probably on the generous side. All that notwithstanding, part of my reasoning was to set the weight at a level that felt reasonable considering that carrying a shield is also much more cumbersome than wearing the equivalent weight on your body. Again, even an 8kg shield is probably worth more than 12kg of encumbrance when you consider that the weight is not well distributed and the size of the shield will fast movement. I also hate shields in the game. But that wasn't actually a factor. (To answer your question about carrying - I'm pretty sure heavier ballistic shields are generally carried around in two hands and are only braced in one while stationary and in combat, if at all. With that in mind, I'm not sure Xenonauts depicts that kind of shield very well. But I find the idea of someone with a giant great shield dashing down a road at the same pace as someone carrying noting but a rifle and a few hand grenades significantly more obnoxious.)

I literally don't have time to look at it for another week but will try and do something it it afterwards. As I suspect the issue is a character limit (I use lots of spaces for formatting), what are the bits of information that are most pertinent for you? The ammo row could be removed as this is clear in the UI anyway and I'm not sure the reload TU cost is very helpful either (seems improbable you will make an equipment choice based on reload speed and this should display in the GC UI so information is available where it is needed). Just removing those might do it. Probably what I will try first anyway.

I think there is a plan to remove most of the mods that carry with XCE to avoid confusion.

No, there's never been a need for it. If you're interested in helping get the mod up to scratch I can see about sorting something, though.

I doubt it is something which has been fixed in XCE (this is the first time I've ever seen someone report it). Probably worth mentioning it on the XCE bug forum. I'd fix it myself if I had the time.

May be because palm trees are collapsible (like buildings). As such, when the Hunter moved through and destroyed the base, the rest of the palm tree collapsed on it and destroyed it. Could easily be fixed by making it non-collapsible or else impassable to vehicles.

Escorts are hard-coded - the escort chance variable doesn't do anything. You can implicitly remove escorts from missions which have them by removing the escort type UFOs from the spawn list, but you can't make a UFO have escorts which isn't coded to do so. I did write code for a toggle which would make the escort chance variable work. But I can't remember if that actually got added to XCE (I think it will be in gamconfig.xml if anywhere). If it is included, then switching the toggle on will mean that the escort chance is set by the AM_* files instead of the hardcoded formula. I think this might still only work for UFOs which are coded to have escorts but I might be wrong.

It would do, yes. But I'm pretty sure there is a fix both in vanilla and XCE now, which makes this mod redundant.

Literally no idea why you might be getting crashes - works fine for me. However, I am using a (at least slightly) updated version so is plausible I corrected something in that. In any case, some more information on other mods/circumstances of the crash might help? Regarding tooltips: I did do tooltips for all/most weapons but there was an issue with the length/formatting of the strings which meant they didn't display properly or something (I don't remember the exact problem but they definitely didn't work). That's what the 'backup' strings file is - it was awaiting a revision which would make it work and I never got around to it. I'm reasonably confident most of the stats in that file are probably correct which means there is a reference for you to use. But obviously it's not in the same so not so helpful. Regarding starting loadouts: that's just because I never updated the vanilla loadouts and because of how the mod is designed the rifleman loadout gets screwed. I was deliberately leaving this until the mod was finished to avoid having to redo it; also I always make my own loadouts at the start of the game anyway so was never a priority. But it is something I intend to resolve if I ever get to the point of being able to full-release. I'd very much like to get all of this fixed - finishing this mod off has been at the back of my mind longer than I care for - but work is such that I just don't have the time to dedicate to it. In a few weeks it is plausible I will have some free time and can try and sort some of this (as well as release the slightly updated version). Bad it's sadly impossible for me to do anything sooner than that. EDIT: If you're still interested in this in a few weeks time, bother me about it here. I'm more likely to do things if people chase me for them!

They were closed after the announcement for Xeno2 to avoid any confusion between discussion of *possible* design/features with *actual* design/features.

Yeah, it's the isVaultable variable you want to change.

That is a property of the specific map prop. Don't know if it's an oversight or intended to be impassible (is one of Skitso's maps). EDIT: Sorry, to answer the question, yes. You'd need to find the appropriate prop spectre for the prop though (and I don't know exactly where that will be).