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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

stjones

Xenocide Programming Department
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About stjones

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    stjones
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    http://www.scotttjones.com
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    61520209
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    xcomutil

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  • Location
    Austin,TX
  • Interests
    XCOM/XcomUtil, Strategy Games, Board Games, Go, Anime, Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence

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  1. When I joined the company, I had to sign an agreement that gives them first rights to EVERYTHING I produce, on or off the job. I am a salaried employee, not paid by the hour. My employer owns all of the rights to all 36 US Patents that I have filed. I just get a small award for each one that I file and an even smaller award for each one of those that is eventually issued by the US Patent Office. I can not even give anything away without getting special approval from management and our Intellectual Propert Law department, as I did with XcomUtil more than 10 years ago. Yes, it is painful, but my employer pays me very well. After more than 32 years working for them, I have gotten used to it.
  2. New XcomUtil Developer I have finally decided to stop working on XcomUtil after more than 12 years. Over that time, I have done almost everything I have ever wanted to do to improve Xcom and I have not made any new improvements in almost 2 years. Rather than just let it die, I am passing the torch to David Jones (no relation to me), who many of you know as BladeFireLight ([email protected]). David has worked with me in the past on Xcom related projects and has long been a champion of XcomUtil on the XcomUfo forums. Since my employer always claims the rights to anything I create, both inside and outside of work, I will still have to retain official ownership of the XcomUtil source code. However, David will become the primary developer of XcomUtil and I will simply aid him in an advisory capacity. I know he has many changes that he has wanted to make to XcomUtil and now he will get his chance. Please support him as you have supported me over the years. I probably should have taken this step two years ago, but it is hard to let your children go. Thank you, David.
  3. I started playing World of Warcraft in February 2005 and still play it every chance I get, often with my two sons. At work, I have been busier than I have been in many years and recently achieved the title of Master Inventor at IBM because of my many patent filings. Every new version of XcomUtil has been the result of two simultaneous factors: I get ideas by playing Xcom AND I need a creative outlet that work does not provide. Neither of these things have occurred in almost two years. The last version of XcomUtil was released 30 March 2005. I have not played Xcom since I tested that version because I have been playing WoW. I have not needed a creative outlet at home since I became a member of IBM's Invention Evaluation Board in June 2004. At this point, it is fair to say that it is unlikely that there will be any new versions of XcomUtil, except to fix bugs such as the one I just saw reported here about problems using XCOPY in my .BAT files. Working on XcomUtil since its first version in March 1995 has been one of the greatest joys of my life. Through it I have met a lot of great people and I hope I have made a lot of people happy. However, all things have an end and I think it is very near the end of XcomUtil. Thank you all. Scott
  4. The problem may be that f0dder's loader is not terminating correctly. Most of the time, simply pressing Ctrl-C will cause RunComW to continue without problems.
  5. At this point, I don't plan to make any more changes to XcomUtil. I have not played a game of Xcom in over a year. However, most of what you want is already in XcomUtil. Look at the description of the TEC flag in XcomUtil.txt and you will see that TEC:HUMAN will give your engineers plenty of work to do. Most people seem to forget that XcomUtil is primarily a command line utility and XcuSetup.bat was just added to make selecting things easier.
  6. Sometimes the interface to f0dder's loader gets stuck. You can generally continue without problems after pressing Ctrl-C to break out of this state.
  7. XcomUtil does not support that kind of editing. The intent of XcomUtil is to make the game more difficult and make it more interesting. Therefore, soldier stats and base inventories can not be changed. I added the ability to change the money, activity, and funding stats with the MNY, ACT, and FND commands only to allow you to severely handicap the game or to continue to play otherwise lost games. I believe Clark Wehyr's Editor will do what you want.
  8. You have got to be kidding! I don't think I have ever been so offended. Your comments make me sorry that I ever released XcomUtil to the public.
  9. The troop placement algorithm can be changed by editing XcomUtil.cfg. See the XcomUtil.txt file for details. The workspace required for the plasma cannon is not modified by XcomUtil, UNLESS you use the New Laser Weapons feature. If you read the new UFOpedia entry for the plasma cannon, it says: "Although this weapon is extremely difficult to build, its range and power makes our interceptors more than a match for all but the largest alien ship." To make this work, I increased the space required. So, if you are seeing this, you have probably enabled this feature. If not, it is a bug and you should let me know.
  10. It has been a while since I looked at this code, so I really don't remember the details right now. If you like, you can send me your phone number via chat or in a personal message and I can call you back to talk about this. I use Lingo for my home phone service, so I can call anywhere in the US, Canada, and western Europe for free. That way I can look at the source code as we talk and hopefully I can answer all of your questions.
  11. This can probably be solved very simply, once I understand the actual problem. Please send me your phone number via chat or in a personal message and I will call you to help resolve this. I use Lingo for my home telephone service, so I can call anywhere in the US, Canada, or western Europe for free.
  12. Those were links to other sites. I really don't know if they still exist. I will have to check.
  13. This is not something I am interested in adding to XcomUtil. Instead, I would rather continue to waste all of my free time playing World of Warcraft, as I have been doing since the beginning of March. I'll continue to fix bugs, but the only new feature that interests me at the moment is the Xcom research tree, and I have never decided how to proceed with that. Sorry.
  14. I think this is just a problem using the loader. Sometimes it has trouble shutting down. The Ctrl-C kills it and lets RunXcom.bat continue. I have never figured out why this happens, but it doesn't seem to do any harm.
  15. Now I understand why people were looking for 9.2. It has been so long that I had forgotten about it. That download site was accidentally wiped out when my cable modem ISP, Time Warner Cable, was trying to resolve a connection problem. They deleted that entire ID and I never rebuilt it because I forgot what was there. Tonight, I will upload 9.2 to a different location and fix the link. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Just out of curiosity, have you tried just hitting Ctrl-C when that command prompt appears to do nothing. I encountered that a few times in my own testing, but it was always intermittent. Give it a try. You might not need version 9.2 after all.
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