Savedgame#2

[j'ordos]

The cropping must have corrupted the bmp files somehow, XED won't import them ('cannot open file'). Saving the bmps again didn't help. Any ideas?

[KayDat]

This is quite annoying...doing to cropping works fine by hand, but once I automate the process, something somewhere goes wrong, and XeD won't import. Sigh, this might take a while to figure...maybe something to do with file headers?

 

Edit: L0L, I know why.

 

8.3 filenames. I had this problem when I tried to export images from XeD in the first place. Just use Irfanview batch renamer to rename the files back to something shorter.

 

At least I think it is. The CRC checksum of files done by hand and automated are the same, which means the files are identical...except for the file name. Files that I did by hand were names random names such as the typical "qwe.bmp" and "asd.bmp", and they imported fine, while the automated files named "SAUCER-000.BMP" just wouldn't work. Damn stupid old 8.3 filenames.

Edited March 9, 2010 by KayDat

[j'ordos]

I renamed the files but XED still won't import them

edit: nvm, forgot to set the starting number in irfanview's batch renaming. It's working, but I guess the border does server some purpose, the retaliator is incorrectly being clipped this way: (the selection rectangle is fine though )

What's special about that border that XED can't handle?

Edited March 9, 2010 by j'ordos

[KayDat]

What I'd like to know is, what do those numbers on the bottom left/right hand corner stand for in XeD PCK viewer?

[j'ordos]

No idea unfortunately. edit: btw, do you know a way to jump to a certain frame number in xed (or speed up the scrolling)? It's an exercise in patience to get to frame #783 (retaliator) right now... Edited March 10, 2010 by j'ordos

[KayDat]

No idea unfortunately. edit: btw, do you know a way to jump to a certain frame number in xed (or speed up the scrolling)? It's an exercise in patience to get to frame #783 (retaliator) right now...

 

Ahhaha, nope I don't. Best I can recommend is pressing END to jump to the end and go backwards from there.

 

Edit: That or use PCK manipulator...but it seems to handle import/export (PCX instead of BMP) and more importantly palettes differently. It also can't seem to export past around image 270 in SAUCER.PCK...which I guess kinda defeats the purpose.

 

Edit2: Oh, something I noticed, the images exported from SAUCER.PCK seem to be one pixel wider to the right in PCK manipulator compared to XeD, but I haven't checked if it's universal between the two programs. I'll see if importing/exporting from SAUCER.PCK has the same problems with PCKman as well, when I get home.

 

Edit3: Well, while not as user friendly, I can confirm that PCK manipulator works fine with SAUCER.PCK. I exported and reimported the images, and the selection frame and shadows are fine. The way it handles palettes is strange though; using the correct palette allows you to view things in the correct colour within the program and the images exported, but the exports seem to have the palettes in reverse. The thing is though, the palette PCKman uses are "the right way round". So this is what I can gather so far:

PAL_xx.DAT			 Right way round
Photoshop .ACT files   Right way round
.PCX palettes		  Reversed
XeD exports			Right way round
PCKman exports		 Reversed
PCKman input palette   Right way round

I can't seem to get the PCKman -p parameter to work, so I simply renamed the palettes I want to use to PALETTE.PAL in the folder PCKman resides. I also noticed that PCKman has trouble viewing images in a PCK file after XeD tampers with it, not sure if it's a deficiency in PCKman or bad coding on XeD's behalf.

 

Edit 4: Oh, and I have a request: could you make a program that can reverse palette files? They're just hex files that have 256 groups of 3 bytes, resulting in a 768byte file. The palette I extracted for bigveh/smalveh from vannihi.pcx was reversed by hand, and it's a little tedious copy/pasting something 256 times.

 

Edit5: BTW, to get around PCKman's error about decoding images, you just have to export in several batches. I can't seem to get past 267 on the first export, so I'd use "PCKMANIP.EXE SAUCER.PCK -e 268-@end@+IM@rec@" for the second batch, and so on. Takes about 3-4 batches of exports to get all the images from SAUCER.PCK out. Oh, and don't put any extensions on the files; they're PCX's, but PCKman has trouble importing images if they have extensions, I've found.

 

And you know what? I think I've answered my own question. The reason why PCKman exports have reversed palettes is because they're PCX's. I guess all PCX's have reversed palettes.

Edited March 11, 2010 by KayDat

[j'ordos]

Bleh, looks like it's time to write a decent pck tool for apocalypse

edit:

Edit 4: Oh, and I have a request: could you make a program that can reverse palette files? They're just hex files that have 256 groups of 3 bytes, resulting in a 768byte file.

All .pal files I have here are 3055 bytes (created by Irfanview). Not hard to write that though. Just boring.

Edited March 11, 2010 by j'ordos

[KayDat]

No, those are probably not the right files. Photoshop can also generate ".PAL" files as well, but they're different. You have "Microsoft Palette Files", which have .PAL extension, and you have the X-Com palette files, which have a .ACT extension in Photoshop. They should be 768bytes long, consisting of 256 three byte groups (or words, dunno the proper terminology). Irfanview probably uses MS palette files. Edited March 12, 2010 by KayDat

[j'ordos]

Kay here's the program. Drag & drop the files you want reversed on it and everything should be fine. You may want to make a backup though

palrev.zip

[KayDat]

Cool, thanks a lot j'ordos! Just testing it though, the file is 772 bytes long after conversion, where as the original is 768 bytes.

[j'ordos]

That's odd, I tested it on ALIEN.PAL and it seems to be working fine. filesize stays 768 bytes and after two reversions a comparison tool reported 0 differences with the original.

send me the file in question, maybe I can spot the problem

Edited March 12, 2010 by j'ordos

[KayDat]

Ah, so very sorry, it was photoshop outputting the file as 772 bytes. It's because the four colours at the end were set as null as opposed to magenta which screwed the file up. It works 100%, thanks a lot j'ordos, sorry for the incorrect complaint.

[j'ordos]

PCKMANIP didn't import the retaliator properly, it looks skewed. No telling if this is a result of the conversion to and from bmp (for palette index shifting) because I can't make out the image with the messy palette pckmanip assigns by default. Getting pretty tired of this.

edit: looks like the problem was with the saucer.pck file I extracted the images from, going for a second attempt now

edit2: alright it's working now, finally

Edited March 14, 2010 by j'ordos

[KayDat]

Good to hear, I was about to say, PCKmanip probably won't work well with XeD exports (which I suspected, since you mentioned BMPs). So how goes the mod? I've been a little busy actually playing Apoc lately to do any Photoshop, I'll get back to it soon with the images of Police (Hover)cars.

[j'ordos]

Currently working on the UFO missions, infiltrations are done but still have to do the others. Also might have another go at some weapons modding. But most of the mod is done.

[NRN_R_Sumo1]

J'ordos, I'm just popping in after.. a long time, and find that you guys have made a fair bit of progress in the past month on this.

 

If you need any help on graphical bits I'd love to re-give a shot at it.

[j'ordos]

Hey NRN, good to see you Any extra graphics are always appreciated, not sure which I still need atm though.

By the way, there's a few manufacturing entries still available after adding all megapol equipment, is there any alien technology that should be manufacture-able so the game won't become annoying? (mainly thinking of personal disruptor shields here - only protection against dreaded entropy launcher)

[j'ordos]

Hey Kaydat, if you're still around, did you happen to take a peek at the people tube map PCK files? (35TUBES) It's an unused map that was left in for some reason but it's unusable as it's in a wrong palette. I'd like to fix it and use it as the map for the downed explorer. Doesn't make more sense than the Senate map but at least it'd be something new wish they had left in the vehicle maps instead though Edited May 19, 2010 by j'ordos

[KayDat]

Well, a quick look at the files through XeD shows only the ANIMATE.PCK file has a messed up palette...is this correct? I can't open the pck files beginning with S either.

[j'ordos]

No everything is wrong ingame, XeD displays it rather OK here too but it's not. I guess those starting with S are shadows? XeD doesn't seem to be able to open any shadow image files.

edit: the animate file looks fine in XeD as well here

Edited May 19, 2010 by j'ordos

[KayDat]

You're probably right. The fact that XeD is displaying most of the files properly means that it's probably just a misplaced palette file. To be honest, I haven't touched Apoc or any files in a long time...I played up till teleporters were out, and then got bored. It's gonna take some time for me to re familiarise myself with PCK manipulation.

[j'ordos]

I can wait

edit: anyway it's not very important, but since I don't have photoshop handy I figured you might be able to mass convert the tiles

Edited May 19, 2010 by j'ordos

[KayDat]

Just a note, my net speed is about to get capped, so I'll probably have trouble coming on the forums until the start of next month, let alone uploading any files. =[

[j'ordos]

no problem I'll be able to handle it myself once I get 'round actually finishing the mod!

[Sorrow]

A pure crimefighting mod for X3 would be cool.

[j'ordos]

There's a sandbox mode in the mod which removes the aliens from gameplay

[Sorrow]

Cool

[j'ordos]

no problem I'll be able to handle it myself once I get 'round actually finishing the mod!

 

Well I converted the tiles and they're looking fine but there seem to be more things wrong with the map:

Looks like what happens in xcom1 when there's a map file missing. Anyone with the official map editor from mythos willing to take a look at it? Then I'll upload the corrected tile gfx. (I'm on a 64bit system so I can't run the old map editor which is a 16bit proggie I'm sure)

 

edit: XME displays the maps fine, though looking at the properties it says it's got 11 levels. Might be causing problems since the maximum is 9?

Edited September 4, 2010 by j'ordos

[j'ordos]

Time to release the next installment. This no longer belongs in the savegames forum since with this release you can start a new game as normal and all changes will be there. MarSec is now no longer hostile towards the player and you can buy all their stuff. Many other changes have been made but you'll have to discover them yourself!

To do:

Get the people tubes map in the game

Paintjob on the police transporter (identical to biotrans atm)

better top down vehicle icons

X-COM set as infiltrated from the start so it'll be impossible to get them back on your side

 

Anyway, check the first post for info&downloads and have fun!

[j'ordos]

A bugfix already: Explorers didn't appear because they didn't have an engine (yes, they need one now). You can download the new archive or edit the explorer yourself in apoc'd -> edit cityscape -> vehicles. Just give it a SD special in one of it's empty equipment slots. Thanks to localhosed for the report Edited September 16, 2010 by j'ordos

[j'ordos]

So I finally decided it was time I started playing my own mod, everything seemed fine until the first UFO drop site mission. My suspicion that something was horribly wrong when I spotted a skeletoid was confirmed when I saw a gang (the mission was at an Osiron Slum) battling bravely against an Alien Queen! Moments later one of my squads was slaughtered by a megaspawn! A megaspawn coming from an Alien scout... I'm not sure how that got in there and I'm also not sure why no one reported it (guess everyone thought I was at a loss of ideas on how to increase difficulty) but I can safely tell you that was not intentional I'll release a fix once I continue playing a little longer to make sure there are no other glaring mistakes.

edit: found another bug, the advanced Alien Containment becomes buildable when you finish researching Plasma Weapons (because it replaced that tech, that'll be fixed as well.

Edited December 3, 2010 by j'ordos

[j'ordos]

OK I finally bothered to update the archive, the two bugs I mentioned above should be fixed now

[localhosed]

OK I finally bothered to update the archive, the two bugs I mentioned above should be fixed now

 

Thanks for uploading. I'm getting interested in the game again lately.

[localhosed]

SORT OF SPOILER BELOW (for first time players of Megamod 4) :

 

It's really a warzone out there. Like an introduction, xcom attacks me with 1 or 2 explorers nearly always the first time I send out the starting valkyrie interceptor.

I managed to settle my turf boundaries for a little while by destroying enough stormdogs but they and the explorers are still a constant threat. I know they'll come back forever though. Cool.

I was surprised today when orison attacked xcom, and xcom immediately launched 5 explorers, a valkyrie and a hawk from one tiny warehouse and blew up osiron's hovercars very fast.

 

xcom's explorers are destroying the city pretty well, and knocked down a huge highway in the normal cityscape map. I downed one of them. The senate map loaded correctly on each second time of 4 tries when I went to recover it. Are spitters supposed to shoot brainsuckers? This is wild, but good for now.

 

I don't know what will happen with manufacturing (or research), so I setup a second base immediately with lots of workshops and vehicle workshops, and plan to use the other for quantum research with mostly automated defenses.

 

I won't be able to shoot down ufos reliably for a while if at all, thats a good new gameplay twist.

 

NON SPOILER STUFF :

 

I changed some alien resistances. What do you think j'ordos or anybody?

 

Multiworm : resists laser, vulnerable to Armor piercing

Spitter : resists HE, vulnerable to Incendiary

Anthropod : resists Armor Piercing, vulnerable to Plasma

Micronoid : practically invulnerable to incendiary

Popper : vulnerable to laser

Psimorph : very resistant to HE

Skeletoid : slightly more vulnerable to stun and stun gas (5 points)

 

Thinking of adding :

Megaspawn : vulnerable to plasma

Anthropod : remove plasma vulnerability

So that the resistances match the description of the Plasma 'damage to large' in the research text.

Edited April 25, 2011 by localhosed