9 replies to this topic

[SupSuper]

check out this screenshot of one of my units. it seems that my Lieutenant has more health, firing accuracy and throwing accuracy than his maximium
is this possible?
it's a weird but useful bug

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[j'ordos]

I've had that too sometimes, very sweet... until the next mission, suddenly my guy went from 100+ TU's to 3 (yes, three!! :o ). He couldn't even take 1 step per turn!!
On the plus side, an auto shot with the laser rifle cost 0 TU's so I kept him for base defence and hoped he spawned in a good spot

[Jenny]

Wow that never happened to me! Did you use an editor of some sort that might have caused it?

[j'ordos]

No, but it was the very first available version of xcom (we bought it the moment we saw it in store, after reading a very positive review about it), so there's probably some more bugs than in the later versions

It was the time when an alien base was so messed up it was hardly playable, with the corridors between rooms missing, so when you moved the screen over those places you got something like this:

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Edited by j'ordos, 01 November 2003 - 07:58 AM.

[Jenny]

That's some weird stuff, I never saw anything like that. But that's probably because like you pointed out, my version is more recent and therefore probably more stable.

[da g00se]

Once I had a guy get over 200TUs (I think...) before he rather suddenly slipped back to 0. It's a shame he kept running out of energy tho...

[NKF]

Some explanations:

The reason why your firing accuracy and throwing accuracy is improved is because your health is above its maximum. Amongst the various calculations to determine accuracy, both throwing and firing accuracy are influenced by a percentage of your unit's health.

Say you have 30 of 60 hit points. 30/60 = 0.5. You only get to use 50% of your accuracy.

If for some reason your health is beyond its maximum (like in the screenshot), you get a bonus to accuracy. Say you have 90 of 60. That's 150%. You get an extra 50% of your accuracy.

For some reason your unit got healed beyond the max, or your max health dropped (or your health was increased) for some very odd reason (data corruption).

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The reason for the messed up bases (called the hall of mirrors effects in some games)is because the game tried to load a base module, but could not find the file (ever get a 'Couldn't find Y-Axis' message?). As no map block was loaded, all the game has are blanks for that particular location (all the tiles and walls default to tile 0 - the blank or transparency). Also since no ground tiles are displayed, you actually see right through to the 'drawing canvas' underneath (the previous frame).

Like traditional moving pictures, the computer draws all the various game elements onto a drawing surface in the background, it makes a copy of this and places it into the foreground (the screen) for a brief moment (a single drawing 'frame' - as it were), and while it's doing this, it's preparing the next screen to be shown. Okay, so in reality all the images are prepared first and displayed sequentially, giving the illusion of motion. On the computer, the images are prepared just before they are shown. Similar idea though.

The map blocks that weren't loaded come up as transparencies. Transparent portions of the image allow you to see through to the image that was drawn underneath it. As the new image is being drawn onto the screen, it doesn't draw over the transparent tiles and walls, so what you see is what was on the previous image. Because, unlike traditional moving pictures where each image is displayed by itself, the computer draws over the previous drawing surface like an artist sometimes draws over an old painting to save time and memory (well, canvas). Now if you take this idea and draw over an old picture, but leave a few gaps in it, you'll see the picture underneath. This is what's happening on the computer - only at a really fast pace.

- NKF

Final thought: What is a Ufo thread doing in the TFTD forum? Not that it matters much as it applies to both.

[Zombie]

Final thought: What is a Ufo thread doing in the TFTD forum? Not that it matters much as it applies to both.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Check out the image attached to SupSupers first post in this topic. It is a units screenshot from TFTD. That's why.