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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Xcom The Graphic Novel Is Here


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Well my comic has reached Frame #93 but I won't bother posting em because it's all over due to a bug.

During this game, I discovered 2 bugs that I have not seen described in the UFO Wiki page.

Remember, this intallation includes UFO ET and ET_2005 only, but I don't know what is the cause of the bugs.

 

1) Smoke grenade armed to 23 becomes an armed prox grenade.

I suspect this is related to the alien grenade improvement included in ET_2005

 

2) Overflowing general stores push out mind probes

My main base only had 2 general stores. On two occassions it was totally filled to max. Once was right after the destruction of an alien base and the other was the successful mission on a landed terror ship. Now I don't think I sold the mind probes my mistake. I think that when the general store overflows, mind probes vanish. I vaguely recall years ago while playing UFO, wondering where all my mind probes had gone. Now I know, there is some bug involved.

GAME_1.rar

Edited by Morken
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Hold on, you could put some Mind Probes in your General Stores with one of the many base editors out there. The other way is to get a Small Scout to land (either by shooting it down or letting it land on it's own). The alien on the Small Scout will always carry a Mind Probe no matter how far into the game you are. The issue is of course getting the Small Scout on the ground. They rarely land and getting them to crash requires cannons and some luck. Small Scouts are very nimble and have a greater top speed and acceleration than an Interceptor which means they will frequently flee an encounter (they don't have a weapon after all). :)

 

- Zombie

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If you don't mind several tries, the Stringray has a chance at shooting small scouts down as well. This game amazingly enough allows you to recover from quite dire situations as long as you have the money and you haven't done too badly in consecutive months.

 

Shot one small scout down recently and got the interesting early loadout where the alien ends up carrying a plasma rifle, a plasma pistol, some plasma pistol ammo and a probe.

 

Also, with regards to your overflowing store problem, I think it might be patch related. In all other instances, you don't need general stores to store equipment. The stores are only there to increase the cap of equipment that you can buy or move into the base. Captured equipment will show up just fine. Having store-less base would rarely happen, except in the scenario where you have a base without general stores and you move a Skyranger loaded up with equipment from another base (lasers, obviously!). Then go out and capture a UFO and haul the stuff back - or even if you are forced to defend the base. The game would definitely need living quarters and a hangar for this to work.

 

If you haven't been doing this already: Start research the instance it becomes available on the research list, but allocate 0 scientists to it. This makes the project available even after all samples are gone.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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YOU can continue the graphic novel.

 

There is the remainder of my story so far. I accidently deleted the pics from the last terror ship mission so you'll have to make something up.

 

I have a strange psyche and cannot go on in some circumstances. I am playing a diablo 1 mod now.

 

You guys can continue for 4 months each and then some talen scout from hollywood will cruise thru the forum, "discover" the graphic novel, develop it into a blockbuster and we will all get rich someday!

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This game amazingly enough allows you to recover from quite dire situations as long as you have the money and you haven't done too badly in consecutive months.

 

This is why it has been said of Xcom that if you haven't lost then you're winning.

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Edited your post. I don't know if that's what you wanted, the images should be five a line on a full screen.

 

To me, it doesn't matter though as the images have always been misaligned on my screen on account of having my bookmarks toolbar down the side to act as an indent. ;)

 

- NKF

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Spot on with the K though. Well, that's the shortened version, but spot on all the same!

 

Just realized, Morken you have the same type of LZs that I have. Aka LZs that are in various states of general obliteration. :D

 

- NKF

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Landing zone.

 

The area around your troop carrier is just scorched earth and/or smokey. For me, it always gets like that when I'm sending out my token Lightning and a team of grenadiers. :D

 

- NKF

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  • 1 month later...

While I'm enjoying the tale as it unfolds, I do have to say that reading each new installation does take longer and longer to load. No fault of your own - it's just that no caching of the thumbnails seems to take place for some odd reason, and they have to load every time. Rather hurts on dial-up.

 

One comment and a few ideas:

 

Most of the text that's done in very dark colour or black tend not to read very well.

 

Would it be helpful to just blank out a rectangle in a lighter shade for the black text? I was thinking of something like:

 

meanwhile.png

 

Little effort required. An outline and the yellow shade makes for that good old traditional comic-book feel to it. :)

 

Thought bubbles done with a series of overlapping white ellipses could also work.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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And red text tends to be hard to read in my comp, too. And changing britghtness/contrast is not a good idea as it then is annoying to look at my monitor.

 

Perhaps not need to bubbles if your image editor has a way to use letters that have a outline color with good contrast with the inner color.

 

And most important of all: I am enjoying it very much, thanks a lot for making it :D

Edited by Admiral Harkov
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While I'm enjoying the tale as it unfolds, I do have to say that reading each new installation does take longer and longer to load. No fault of your own - it's just that no caching of the thumbnails seems to take place for some odd reason, and they have to load every time. Rather hurts on dial-up.

 

One comment and a few ideas:

 

Most of the text that's done in very dark colour or black tend not to read very well.

 

Would it be helpful to just blank out a rectangle in a lighter shade for the black text? I was thinking of something like:

 

meanwhile.png

 

Little effort required. An outline and the yellow shade makes for that good old traditional comic-book feel to it. :)

 

Thought bubbles done with a series of overlapping white ellipses could also work.

 

- NKF

 

I think in your personal controls (My controls\board settings) you can set how many post per page per topic you would like displayed. I know your pain; a few years ago I was on dialup so I twiddled that. Maybe for this topic you can temporarily set that to a value that lets it run better.

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I think stay with it as it is - or split the installments into two posts, that would have the added benefit of halving the images you need to load on each page. Go with which ever method works best though.

 

N.F.K. you program games and are on dialup?!

 

Not quite a game programmer - yet. Attempt to program, yes, never completed anything though. Also. dial-up's good. It does well for my needs as I'm not into downloading large media files. Most of all, I'm a scrooge - and dial up was the cheapest option. ;) Seriously though I've always planned to switch over on purchase of a new desktop PC. Though, I've been saying that for past 3-4 years, not having had a need to upgrade. :D

 

I'm editing with Microsoft paint.

Its the only thing I can use!

 

Paint's awesome. The painting tools are probably not as awesome as they were back during its win 3.11 days, but it's a fun toy to play with, and you can do some great things with it.

 

- NKF

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Oh hey, just remembered something. You recall the text box suggestion I mentioned above? They're dead simple with MS-Paint.

 

Select the rectangle or rounded edge rectangle tool. Select the out-lined drawing mode. That's the second option if I'm not mistaken. Then pick your outline and fill colors by right and left clicking on the colours of your choice. Doesn't matter if you get them in the wrong order - you can swap them by drawing with the primary or secondary colour. The main colour will be the outline, while the opposite will be the fill color.

 

Drag the box out where you want it. Before you release the mouse button, hold down control and press either + or - on the numeric pad. This will thicken or thin the outline in real-time (can be done before you draw - but it's easier to set the size while you're drawing). This works on almost every other drawing tool - free yourself of paint's limited 3 to 5 brush-size selection! Set the thickness to the level desired and release the mouse button.

 

This can be used to instantly create a text box. A bit of clever use of the polygon tool and a bit of erasing can make quick speech bubbles too.

 

- NKF

 

edit: Just realised I gave a tip for a probably old-ish copy of MS-Paint (5.1). Oh well.

Edited by NKF
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Should I continue in a new post:

 

"Xcom the graphic novel is here part II" ?

 

I thought the first post would have gone to page 2 now but it hasn't.

 

 

Chapters!!!

 

If you want a moderator or at least a global moderator can help you chop up the original post into chapters if you want.

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If you want a moderator or at least a global moderator can help you chop up the original post into chapters if you want.

I'd be happy to do that for you Morken, just drop me a PM indicating where to split it up. :)

 

- Zombie

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  • 3 weeks later...

There's an extra 'the' in 540.

 

- NKF

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just for giggles, I tried loading the graphic novel on dialup and it took almost forever. So today I split the topic into 4 chapters having 5 posts each (100 thumbnails per page still took a long time but it's better than it was before). All the chapters are locked and pinned at the top of this forum listing to make it easy to navigate. ;)

 

- Zombie

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How do you defeat the bug where the game crashes when the ethereals do mass mind control on your guys, overflowing some value?

Simple, don't go up against Ethereals in the first place. JK

 

For whatever reason, the game tends to get unstable every once and a while. Most likely it's due to corruption of the save game state. We don't really know what causes it or even how to fix the problem. If you get into this situation, the usual recommendation is to reload a Geoscape save and replay the mission. If you don't want to do that, you could:

 

  1. Cheat, by editing the Ethereals dead in unitref.dat, or
  2. Abort the mission before the crash happens.

You can do the cheating aspect without even editing the file manually, Hatfarm's game editor (you can get it from StrategyCore's files section) has this convenient feature.

 

Just to verify though, is it a crash, or did the mission end with a summary report? If all your men get MC'd, the mission ends. This is very true in the Playstation version, but I don't recall what happens in the PC version since I never got into this situation. ;)

 

- Zombie

Edited by Zombie
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  • 4 weeks later...

Since the last update, I can't seem to get the images to display when clicking on the individual images. Everything else shows up - just not the main picture.

 

Hopefully it's just me and it'll clear up soon.

 

- NKF

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Haven't done anything at all. Though I suspect the vans filled with engineers (actually one van per engineer) doing some cablework around the area may be the culprit. Still strange that it's only affecting the Turbohost images but not any of the other web services I use daily. Oh well - it'll clear itself.

 

- NKF

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I see all the pictures just fine. Must have been a glitch or something. :)

 

- Zombie

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I'm really glad I wasn't drinking anything while reading though the last update! :D

 

Unfortunately more trouble in paradise. Only managed to get these to load this time around:

740

740b

741

745b

746

747

750

752

 

Others are exhibiting the same behavior as the last bundle.

 

- NKF

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http://photobucket.com

 

http://www.imageshack.us

 

http://www.freeimagehosting.com

 

I don't know about reliability though, as I don't use them much.

 

Photobucket may see problem with some of the images posted, though, like the one about lady Hills.

 

Flickr has a limit to the number of images you can upload, so that's ruled out.

 

P.S. - Now it seems every image has deleted. Don't let them be lost! Pleasepleasepleaseplease!

Edited by Admiral Harkov
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I use Photobucket for one of my other hobbies and it works all right. Its interface is danged slow and demanding on new technology for its flashier features (like the new uploader - that often locks up my browser), but access to the photos works brillaintly. Although I imagine this would cater to actual photographs rather than digital renderings.

 

I'd try Micah first, or even Pete over at Strategycore. With the amount of work put in it, on top of being an amusing work of fiction, it definitely needs to be preserved.

 

- NKF

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Did you send him an email? He's a lot more likely to answer that then to see a forum post or a PM. ;)

 

- Zombie

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  • 1 month later...
Some of the images from the last batch have already vanished from www.turboimagehost.com.

Shockingly unreliable...

 

Yeeaah, it`s also loads these ads first. Why do they force me to stare at all this *insert SWEARthere*. It happily loads turboflirt members, but it doesn`t load the novel. What a pity...

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Turbohost was causing much grief in that respect. Not sure if Morken's managed to find a new free image host that won't mess with the files. Perhaps a general file storage site would work best. At this point, just getting at the comic pages is more important than finding a host with thumbnail generation.

 

- NKF

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