Where Is That Secret Craft Thingy

[[Blehm 98]]

oikay, i remember hearing of a secret super craft thingy, but i forgot how to activate it. Can someone please tell me how?

[[NKF]]

You mean the ship with the odd name? It happens when game data gets corrupted. Such as the fantastic medic cannon that uses avalanch launchers as ammo.

 

Basically, there's no way to manually activate it. The game has to get its data corrupted in some way for it to happen.

 

- NKF

[Paladin]

*Trust in NKF*

 

[The Master Maniac]

Medic cannon? :: You've run into this?

 

*gasp* Maybe the floater medic glitch is somehow related?

 

If you're talking about that weird bug that I mentioned, that bestowed the mighty weapon-1 craft upon you, it seems to work when you follow the "steps." I had no idea that was data corruption in motion, however, as you can shoot through the trick with relative success each time, though sometimes you get wonky names like "alien corpse-1" or what have you. Creepy.

[[NKF]]

Troops that are still assigned to ships that no longer often say that they are assigned to 'Alien Corpse 1'. Really, they're no longer assigned to anything.

 

- NKF

[Paladin]

Well, I've had an alien ship size stated as "Alien corpse" in the HWD, and it zipped past at 23 000, and looked like a battleship...

Once I downed one, the game crashed when I landed on it...

Then it started crashing when one appeared on the geoscape...

Reloaded a month earlier, no problems since...

[SupSuper]

i've had a corrupt saved game have soldiers assigned to Interceptor-4, Interceptor-27 and Weapon-68 (in fact i still have it if anyone wants it).

screenies here and here.

[Paladin]

Geez, nope, I beleive you, but I don't want to touch corrupted games... Tehy sometimes propagate... :o

[The Master Maniac]

That's what the copy and paste buttons are for, Paladin. :wink:

 

But that's pretty freaky. The one time I got an "alien corpse" craft, I wasn't allowed to assign any soldiers to it. Perhaps it was one of my Interceptors or something? However, most of the time, the scrambled names appear to be more cosmetic than anything, but sometimes, albeit rarely, the craft's statistics are altered as well. Just like Paladin's encounter with the super UFO. How would I go about taking a screenshot and converting it so everyone here can see it? I've got a save game with a couple soldiers listed as "alien corpse-1." It's pretty strange.

 

One more strange oddity--last night, I decided to open up the side of Harvester with a blaster launcher. When the missile hit, I got a bunch of human screams along with the explosion sound. Now that was pretty weird.

 

edit--I forgot to ask: do you guys know if there's actually any item listing in the game by the name of "alien corpse?" Or is it just some random gibberish?

[Paladin]

Hmmm. I had garbled battlesacpes in the past...

 

But having actual soldiers a "walking alien corpses"!! That's new... :o

 

Oh, about the odity with the harvester, I got even better, there was this last muton standing in a farmhouse, I hear a civie scream, nail the bastard, end credits, but there was a "Civilian killed" score penalty :o

[Guest alex the greater]

this happend to me once

[The Master Maniac]

Now that is strange. Ah, the wonders of X-Com.

[Guest alex the greater]

on a side note maby put a secret craft in xenocide

[[NKF]]

Paladin: On a similar note, I set a muton on fire. When it started to spin around to get into the right direction for its death animation, it played the female civilian's death animation (and scream) instead and dropped a civilian corpse. At the end of the mission, because there was a civilian corpse on the battlefield, I got penalised for the death of the civilian.

 

Mutons appear to have odd moments like this more often than most other aliens.

 

Speaking of names and labels, well, a lot of things in the game, like ships and base modules all refer to a huge table with all the text used in the game. If the variable pointing to the right text lable is changed, well, you could end up with odd things like hangars that show the entire ufopaedia entry for a sectoid autopsy, or a soldier being assigned to an alien corpse, or a ship being called an alien corpse. UFOs too can get corrupted. I once owned a battleship. Literally! It had no homebase so the game crashed when I told it to return to base. Really wish I'd saved that game.

 

Seems like we can get a lot of amusing and unusual moments with data corruption.

 

- NKF

Edited September 9, 2004 by NKF

[The Master Maniac]

Yikes. I don't think I've ever played a game so... ...yikes. I suppose any kind of data could get scrambled, but with such amusing results? Hmm. I've had that "mixed animation glitch" happen to me a number of times in a couple other pixel-based games, most notably Doom. Though not as prevalent on my shiny new Doomsday engine, there were all kinds of strange oddities back in the day. So, about this Battleship--did it "spawn" in your control, or what?

 

Let's just hope the guys behind X-Com didn't write the USAF's training simulators...

 

edit--is there any way to..."alter" these tables for our own amusement, you know, for our own desired effects?

 

Oh yeah--on a similar note, whilst running the sound-patched .exe Mok provided, I once got an interesting graphical error. I shot down a small UFO with an interceptor early in the game, and when I sent my troops out to scour the wreckage, the entire ship was peeled open at the sides, with little bits of roof tiles curiously hovering in midair. I noted that the floor of the ship was dark red for some strange reason. Well, ignoring that, I decide to search for the aliens left alive, so I send one of my guys across the open remains of the shuttle--only to have his "walking" animation painted onto the floor the whole way, in an effect similar to crossing into the "void" in Half-Life or some similar game! Baffled, I continue on, only to spot a Floater that manages to get off a reflex shot at me. I bring another recruit up to return fire, but when I pull up the attack menu, the image is painted over the floor of the UFO, text and all! Odd, no?

Edited September 9, 2004 by The Master Maniac

[[NKF]]

Hall of mirror effect. Hard to explain. Has to do with the game trying to redraw a part of the image that doesn't exist over whatever was underneath it before.

 

You see, the image on the screen is all drawn in the background on a bit of memory that you could probably imagine as a drawing canvas. When completed, this image is then copied onto the screen and that is what we see. While this is happening, the computer repeats the process by drawing the next image on the old canvas.

 

The ground tiles that you see are actually transparent tiles. They let the game see through to the picture underneath them. But since there's nothing underneath them but the previous image, anything that gets drawn there will never get erased.

 

So moving the mouse cursor, moving units, bringing up the weapon menu, etc will leave afterimages behind on the transparent surfaces. With the cursor, some people even refer it to as 'mouse droppings'.

 

Different image display modes, like double buffering, triple buffering, dirty rectangles, etc might have slightly different hall-of mirror effects (flashing images, or the image just duplicates itself on the screen), but that's basically it. I don't think I explained this very well.

 

I see this happen a lot in an otherwise normal base defence mission. Sometimes the burnt floor tiles have a corner that's set to the transparency colour, leaving little holes that just repeat the picture of whatever moved over them. Not sure why this happens.

 

- NKF

Edited September 9, 2004 by NKF

[Paladin]

Yep, a simple graphics glitch, but the small UFO getting all blasted is perfectly normal, it happened to me lots of times

Just use dual avalanches and you'll see those often ::

[j'ordos]

Yep, a simple graphics glitch, but the small UFO getting all blasted is perfectly normal, it happened to me lots of times

Just use dual avalanches and you'll see those often ::

remove one of the .map files, and then play that map, you'll have one of those 'invisible' tiles with the 'hall of mirror' effect too . About the roof floating mid-air, well, not a bug, just questionable physics

I seem to recall type of air weapon did not matter for how shot up the cfaft would look.

[centurion]

In TFTD there was such a tile in the base, at least I encountered it consistenty; it got full of bounding box artifacts when I walked through it.

[The Master Maniac]

Hmm, I get it now. I never knew that the way the game drew its graphics could possibly be so complicated. Okay, at least it sounds complicated to me... At any rate, I tend to get that problem more often playing Apoc than anything else, particularly when a UFO I have to bring down traverses too far out of the map. Still strange, though.

 

I assume that, because of the merely graphical nature of the bug, I don't have to worry about any nasty, lasting effects, such as my game getting corrupted? I still use that file, as a matter of fact.

Edited September 9, 2004 by The Master Maniac

[Paladin]

In TFTD there was such a tile in the base, at least I encountered it consistenty; it got full of bounding box artifacts when I walked through it.

Yup, I remember that one too... I did'nt know if it was a bug or a feature, but it was weird as heck...

[j'ordos]

At the end of the mission, because there was a civilian corpse on the battlefield, I got penalised for the death of the civilian.

- NKF

Does this mean, that if on a terror mission I use explosives to remove every civilian corpse from the battlefield that there will be no score penalty for killed civilians??

[[NKF]]

You know what, I haven't got the faintest idea.

 

Worth investigating. If it's true, then high explosives are going to be standard issue equipment from now on.

 

Well, they already are, but I mean, more-so than usual, if that's even possible.

 

- NKF

[[[Micah]]]

You know what, I haven't got the faintest idea.

 

Worth investigating. If it's true, then high explosives are going to be standard issue equipment from now on.

 

Well, they already are, but I mean, more-so than usual, if that's even possible.

 

- NKF

 

 

?? NKF is stumped??

[Paladin]

You know what, I haven't got the faintest idea.

 

Worth investigating. If it's true, then high explosives are going to be standard issue equipment from now on.

 

Well, they already are, but I mean, more-so than usual, if that's even possible.

 

- NKF

 

 

?? NKF is stumped??

YEAH!!! :o

I CAN'T BELEIVE MY OWN MIND!!!!

 

Mighty NKF having no Idea... He must be tired, or in DIRE MORTAL PERIL!!! :crying:

 

( :: )

[The Master Maniac]

Yeah, there's one answer that he doesn't have! Ha-ha! Too bad I didn't ask the question...

 

Well, the game surely doesn't forget to register soldiers as dead, even though they've been "vaporized" by explosives, but I'm not sure about civvies at all. That's a thinker. Time to start a terror mission, eh?

[Paladin]

Hmmm, nope, having used blaster bombs in terror sites before (what can I say, Ethereal/Chrysalids rarely leave much civies after 2 turns), I can tell you that hearing the civie scream is enough for the game to register a civie death...

 

Then again, NKF will correct me if I'm wrong...

[The Master Maniac]

Hmm, the civie scream likes to spurt out on seemingly random instances for me, namely when I use said blaster bombs to smack the side of a downed UFO, though I'm (usually) not penalized for a civilian death. Strange, isn't it?

[Paladin]

Yup, weird one...

Then again, what's one MORE weird bug... O:)

[[NKF]]

You know, I keep telling people that I know some things about the game, not everything, but do they listen? Aiee... <_>

 

I guess the soldiers are remembered because they've got stats in the unit tables. The game checks through these and sees that a soldier has expired, so it tosses the soldier's value into the tally.

 

So no, destroying civilian bodies probably won't cause you to lose the points you lost from the act of killing them (either side).

 

The bodies themselves however are worth points (or negative points, if you will). Because if you were to edit a X-Com corpse into a battle where you haven't lost a single soldier, you'd get penalised for the one death. I think the bodies, by themselves, are worth points if they don't belong to anyone (crazy talk, I know, but it makes sense to me ). But if they belong to a unit, you get penalised the unique value of the unit. I guess the game designers wanted to take into account the event that some crazy player will pick up a dead comrade or dead alien (or stunned alien) and try to bring it through to the second mission on Cydonia. (In TFTD, any corpses you bring through to the next level of a multi-stage mission will count as loot, see).

 

But there's one other method you could try. You could try and stun a civilian and then blow up the body, because you don't get penalised for when your soldiers are killed that way.

 

Also, any civilian that you mind control (And end up turning rogue), will count as 0 points - no matter who killed the civilian.

 

- NKF

[The Master Maniac]

Hey, knocking them unconscious and subsequently blowing them up? Where is the morality these days?

 

And we're just messing with you--that's all. Society rules say that people always pick on those who know more about something than they do, right?

 

I've got a dozen more strange, inexplicable anomalies, but I'd likely go on forever before I got through them all. Warping alien bases, disappearing/reappearing soldiers, the lot. *sigh*--guess the glitches give X-Com its allure. Let's just hope Xenocide turns out to be a lot less...for the lack of a better word--unstable.

[[Blehm 98]]

Yeah, there's one answer that he doesn't have! Ha-ha! Too bad I didn't ask the question...

 

Well, the game surely doesn't forget to register soldiers as dead, even though they've been "vaporized" by explosives, but I'm not sure about civvies at all. That's a thinker. Time to start a terror mission, eh?

 

 

ahh, but in supsupers game, Mikah(micah, if that censor is still on) was once destroyed, and there was no soldiers lost on that mission? Maybe, you still lose points, but teh screen doens't show it(as it doesn't show most other things)

[SupSuper]

Yeah, there's one answer that he doesn't have! Ha-ha! Too bad I didn't ask the question...

 

Well, the game surely doesn't forget to register soldiers as dead, even though they've been "vaporized" by explosives, but I'm not sure about civvies at all. That's a thinker. Time to start a terror mission, eh?

 

 

ahh, but in supsupers game, Mikah(micah, if that censor is still on) was once destroyed, and there was no soldiers lost on that mission? Maybe, you still lose points, but teh screen doens't show it(as it doesn't show most other things)

i think the game doesn't account "X-Com Operatives killed by X-Com Operatives" ::

[The Master Maniac]

That'd make for an interesting debriefing, no? Sometimes, however, I'm able to abort a mission with all my squad outside the Skyranger, then still have the "lost" units at their base, only with, you guessed it, the "alien corpse-1" bug. Strangely enough, some appear to be unusable, while others can be assigned to another ship again as normal. Weird. Oh yeah--this is using XComutil, by the way. Anyway, how this is all related is the fact that, upon leaving the mission in such a manner, the stats screen doesn't show a "missing in action" tally. Wonder what causes this?

 

Like always, I use that save seperately, by putting it in "quarantine." Scrambled save files are baaad business, I've learned.

Edited September 13, 2004 by The Master Maniac

[Paladin]

You know, I keep telling people that I know some things about the game, not everything, but do they listen? Aiee... <_>

- NKF

:Blush: Don't worry, I only make fun of people I respect enough to believe they'll take the joke for what it's worth...

We have a saying here, that translates approximaetly to: "He wo is'nt worth a chuckle is'nt worth much..."

 

so, here goes

 

 

RE: Civies... I gotta try MCing them someday, but I usually don't let a single terror ship get through once I got HWD, especially not with Firestorms...

[Hoser]

Oh, about the odity with the harvester, I got even better, there was this last muton standing in a farmhouse, I hear a civie scream, nail the bastard, end credits, but there was a "Civilian killed" score penalty :o

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I had the exact same thing happen for the first time today, in 10 years of playing.

 

But it wasn't Muton, it was an Ethereal crashed Terror ship. On the first turn I heard a

civvie scream, which was wierd. When I finished the game, I lost points for a civilian death.

[Paladin]

Darn!! and here I thought I was crazy to have immagined this one ::