Nagho

Having been watching the X:CE project for quite a while, I have seen so many amazing changes made to Xenonauts because of it. With all the changes, though, an expansion to the ability to mod aircraft still hasn't been mentioned much. This definitely isn't the first time that I've brought up these ideas, but hopefully with its own thread people can post their opinions on it as well, and suggest improvements where they think improvements can be made. In truth, being the aircraft nut that I am I have actually not touched Xenonauts in quite a while since I couldn't quite mod it the way I want (that and because any time I tried to change a config somewhere I would end up causing the game to crash repeatedly ...) so forgive me if something I mention here isn't relevant anymore. 1. Allow modded in aircraft to be buyable. This is an issue that I noticed a long time ago, and may have been fixed since but I have not noticed if it has been. Essentially, any aircraft that are added into the game cannot be made buyable in the manner that the Condor is. The "Buyable" stat works fine with any already existing aircraft entries, and those "slots" can be used to make custom buyable aircraft by just messing with the stats, but it's a workaround that just causes a lot of headache, especially if the slot that you're using is actually an aircraft you still want to leave in the game. 2. Allow more weapon hardpoints on aircraft. At the moment, the maximum is 4, and that is only if all of them are missile type slots, so it's even less if you want a cannon. This would obviously require UI work so that the additional weapons could actually be used, but this alone would make aircraft modding so much more versatile. 3. Open up customization of weapon slot types. As it stands, there are the Light, Heavy, Cannon, and Superheavy* weapon slots. If custom weapon slot types could be added into the game, each with their own custom inheritances (e.g. the Heavy weapon slot can also carry Light-type weapons), then there is an absolutely huge amount of modding that can be done. This would probably be a pretty work-intensive task, a simpler short-term solution might be to open a config option to disable the auto-win parameter on Superheavy weapons, so at least one extra weapon slot is opened up to play with. *The superheavy slot can't really be used for custom weapons since it by default is treated as an auto-win, so it's a dead-weight slot. So, any thoughts? Does anyone think these are good ideas? Or are they terribly unfeasible to implement?

Alright, thank you very much. That's exactly what I wanted to know. Time to tinker.

So, I was scanning through gameconfig.xml when I stumbled on the parabolicPower field under Geoscape AI variables (inconveniently enough commented as "Hard to explain here."). I searched around quickly but couldn't find anywhere where this question has been asked previously. What does this config option actually do? I can guess that it somehow affects the spawning of UFO missions during a wave since it's grouped with those settings but I don't know how. I would very much appreciate any insight on it.

It would certainly make for an interesting dynamic if when aliens took hold of a continent they would start doing all kinds of new and nasty things: ground offensives, setting up bases to act as places to launch more frequent fighter and interceptor attacks from, perhaps even if the aliens got a foothold on the ground they could start bringing in some kinds of deadly alien vehicles that they would use to launch attacks on neighboring continents to try to secure more land. It would certainly make the game feel more like an alien invasion and less like the aliens just trying to harass Earth into submission.

I would love if this were a possibility, but I think this is the kind of thing that will probably require source code changes unless there's something hidden deep in the corner of an xml somewhere. I guess it all depends on whether we can find a worthy enough sacrifice to offer to Solver and Illunak.

Notepad++ has a Compare plugin that highlights all the differences between two files. I use it all the time, it's incredibly useful. I can't remember if I looked the plugin up online or if it came with Notepad++, but either way it's a great thing to have.

So, I've been having a number of things that either I feel are issues that need to be fixed with the way aircraft modding works, or are just features I would love to have implemented and this as good a time as any to post them. 1. The "Buyable" stat on aircrafts.xml does not appear to work properly. Namely, only a hardcoded selection of aircraft can actually be made buyable. Any additional aircraft can only be obtained through manufacturing. It would be great if this could be unlocked. 2. Another unlocked system I would love is if more than 4 weapons could be placed on an aircraft. Although I may have missed something, as far as I can tell trying to add more than four weapon hardpoints isn't possible. The only issue with this feature is that it'll probably require UI modifications as well as there isn't room on the Air Combat UI in its current setup to fit more than 4 weapons per aircraft. 3. It would be absolutely amazing if it were possible to have weapons categories beyond Cannon/Normal/Heavy/Superheavy, as well as to determine their inheritances. For example, in vanilla, the Heavy slot inherits the weapons of the Normal slot, so anything that can be fitted in a Normal slot can also be fitted in a Heavy one. This is more of a "Dream Come True" feature, but I decided that since I'm talking about aircraft specifically I might as well mention it. (If this is too much, perhaps it would at least be possible to add a config option to disable Superheavy weapons being always considered autovictories so that it could be used as an "extra" weapon category to fit things into?)

If it turns out that there is no better place to put the next soldier button besides right next to the end turn button, another option may be to require more than a simple click to trigger the end turn. If you're worried about accidental clicking maybe you could make it necessary to hold it for a second or so before it actually triggers? EDIT: Heck, it might be a reasonable feature regardless of whether the button placement ends up being awkward or not.

I'm not the most active here but I'll still toss in a reply so that some suggestions that I really like hopefully don't get buried. 1. As mentioned previously, more options in dealing with ranks, namely allowing them to be handled separately from skill advancement (i.e. allowing the player to manually rank up soldiers), and perhaps in tandem opening up more options in dealing with morale bonuses / penalties for certain ranks. 2. As said previously, opening up various soldier stats to tracking to give some amount of "reality" to the lives of the soldiers. I especially liked the idea of the randomized buddies that only show up on a soldier's death. 3. Also, I would like to suggest myself that the "Buyable" stat on aircrafts.xml be made properly functional. As I and some others figured out recently it apparently only works properly for aircraft that are already in the game, and doesn't work for completely new modded aircraft. I'm sure that would be much appreciated, and hopefully not the hardest thing to implement considering some other suggestions.

Another thing that has been confirmed hardcoded is that it is impossible to make new aircraft that are buyable. The only way to have aircraft buyable in the same way as the Condor is to either use airplane.human.f17 or airplane.human.mig31, it's not possible to add new ones.

To each their own I suppose, I just can't stand all those extra tags cluttering it and making the useful info harder to see. If it's no problem I would very much appreciate if you could upload the files you edited because from what I'm looking at I haven't done anything different and I'm really confused as to why it's not working.

I just took a look and from what I can tell that's pretty much exactly what I've done, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working for me. Setting other aircraft to "Yes" on Buyable seems to accomplish nothing, as they aren't added to the list once in-game. Also, from what I can tell you're using a text editor to edit the aircrafts.xml; you can edit it much more easily using Microsoft Excel (or I'm sure there's a free alternative). It will actually show up properly in cells so that you won't have to try to parse it in plain-text.

I've had an issue frustrating me for a couple of days. I can't in any way figure out how to add an aircraft and make it purchasable from the start of the game in a Condor-like way. I've added it to aircrafts.xml and ensured that I set "Buyable" to "Yes". I made sure to add it to items.xml and strings.xml as well, but it still doesn't appear as an option when I click "Buy New Plane". I feel like there might be some other file where it needs to be added to but I can't figure out what. Also, I don't know how to do the opposite, in that I want to make it so the Condor isn't purchasable from the start of the game but I will still be able to unlock it to make it purchasable later. If anyone knows what I'm doing wrong and/or how to do it properly I would very much appreciate it.

Yep, I can third that bug. All roles in the role selection screen are called "Label1" and have a wing-like icon. Trying to click on one immediately results in a game crash.

I'm going to assume that you meant to say Chris with that, but that typo is a little funny considering the circumstances. In all seriousness, though, I hope the issue can be resolved soon.

If I remember correctly, the game automatically replaces the basic medikit with an advanced version once you complete the appropriate research, so I assume something similar could be made to work with the ballistic weapons.

Doing a quick Ctrl+F I didn't notice anything mentioning this so I just wanted to throw out a quick suggestion for the mod based on a gripe (though I do see that the discussion right now is on weapon balance). That is that in the game the medical kit is essentially a two-person piece of equipment; there is no way currently in the game to do even limited healing to oneself. This is only a mod, of course, but since the goal here is for some degree of realism/believability I felt this was as good a place as any to put it. What I think would be good to see is a bandage that is a smaller piece of equipment that provides no or very limited healing but removes the bleeding effect from the soldier. The main advantage would be that a bandage can be used either by the soldier on themselves, or by another soldier (with the latter perhaps requiring less time units). After all, I would assume any soldier that is able to still be moving around and firing at the enemy can wrap a bandage around their wound to offer some temporary security against death.