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[Quintopotere]

Originally posted by the_fifth_horseman@Sep 26 2005, 12:34 PM

-Almost entire recruitment queque cleaned

I think I can unlock the android training ability, and might just do that sooner or later.

Finally :Brain:

I was just waiting for some action... and seems that i'll not be just a stupid android!

[a1s]

hate to dissapoint you but androids kick behind during the first week(s)

[The Fifth Horseman]

Do you play Realtime or turn based?

Realtime. It's much more intense that way.

Also, how do you get to any sort of manageable speed in dosbox?

Frameskip=1 helps a little, and one can get used to DB being a bit laggy.

I tried a few things in respect of the screenshots. JPEG's and resizing included. The final conclusion was that they did no good. About all I can do with the soldier/vehicle screens (they are usually double the filesize of most mission screens) is to crop them a bit, so that only stats and equipment are shown (50% decrease), or even right down to only the stats (75% decrease). Which is what I will do.

Now checking out score... 7,5 k. In under an hour of game time from start. No doubt the aliens were so pissed that they sent in their very best troops.

Vehicle upgrades: Buying three more Valkyries, two Medium Weapon Controls, two SD Special and two SD Elite engines and two Janitor arrays has costed us 257 k - more then two third of our funds. But considering the firepower boost, it's worth it. The transport Valkyrie and a second one get the Special engines, other two get Elite and the Phoenixes receive the leftover Turbos. The transport Valkyrie is renamed to Valkyrie Transporter, the two with SD Elite engines to Valkyrie Fighters. The Fighters receive fit of twin Janitor missile launchers as well as the Weapon Controls. The total accuracy is 96% - they hit with 24 of 25 shots.

As an afterthought, I'm also buying three Light Weapon Controls and selling some spare Bolter laser guns that were rusting in the magazines. The total transaction result costs us further 2,5 k.

The Phoenixes and the Interceptor Valkyrie receive the Light Weapon Controls, slightly upping their accuracy.

We're selling the Heavy Launchers. These things are damn unwieldy, and we already have the less cumbersome Mini Launchers. They don't have as much hitting power, but compensate with longer lasting ammo supply.

<X-Com base. In last 20 minutes everybody was trying to relax a bit after the last battle, even SupSuper, who despite having been chained to the bed (otherwise he'd go out to the town to drink and get into bar brawls - not recommended in his state!) is busy playing some old video game called "Duke Nukem 666: Duke takes on Hell". Suddenly everybody is startled by a warning siren.>
A voice calls from the intercomm: Attention, all teams! All capable agents report to the main briefing hall immediately! We have a situation, code red!
Code red! This means that an alien has been found!
Chaos erupts. In the middle of madness that ensued ("where is my gun? These are your pants? Turn off the damn TV! Where is my ammo?! This damn cable got stuck in my power socket!") and people running in about every direction possible (if not for the gravity, they would be running onto the walls and ceiling too), Beef calmly stands up from one of the tables. Right after returning from the mission, she took apart her guns and finished cleaning them just a minute before the alert. At the moment, she is the only person in the base who is actually ready for the mission.
Eying the chaos around her with disgust, she calmly says:
Beef: "I told you guys. Overtime. What's so damn unexpected about this?"
And then enthusiastically runs away to the briefing hall.


13:15 : Alien spotted! Seems that someone found the escapees from previous mission. If any Anthropods are there, we want to capture their shield systems intact - all teammates are equipped with two Stun Grenades each. Predjuice stays at home, since he isn't quite known for his ability to carry out missions not involving mass destruction. Besides, it seems someone with a sick sense of humour has welded a cable to his power socket while he was recharging...


Soldiers on duty (9): Bobbin, Danny, Eagle, Kearnsy, Toxik, Abi, Punch, Reamus, Beef.
They are grouped in 3 teams of 3, separated exactly in the listed order.

Our mission building is a Corporate HQ, which means that our aliens are trapped, as there is only one - front - exit from the building.


13:16:14 : Our teams enter through the front door. Team 3 will stay and guard the entrance, while 1 and 2 will check the side rooms.


13:17:36 : Just as teams 1 and 2 completed the sweep of the lower floor and were heading towards the gravlift, an alien descended down! It's an Anthropod, so he will have the shield system.

13:17:38 : Team 3 ducks into cover, but Beef with her typical stubborn attidute stops halfway through, to chuck some Stun Grenades onto the alien and immediately after that starts running towards the rest of Team 3.


13:17:40 : The alien has shot Beef, critically wounding her. He must PAY!!!
Team 2 is approaching the aliens' location to douse the creature with sleeping gas. Abi is the first one to arrive, so she prescribes two doses. The team withdraws to avoid getting a taste of their own medicine.


13:17:46 : Kearnsy is shot in the back by the monster, and unfortunately dies on the spot. Eagle, Reamus and Punch are chucking more grenades at the creature. Eagle throws hers wrong, and inhales some of the gas, but keeps standing. The alien collapses.

Mission Summary

This was a poor mission, as for defeating one alien we lost a solider. Rest in peace, Kearnsy. At least, for now...

DECEASED (1)
Kearnsy

To the base, the Valkyrie has dragged in another D-Cannon and one personal shield.

A couple hours later, Cult of Sirius came knocking at our door with a bill for 4 370$ worth of property damage. What nerve!
Our response? "Sod. Off."



22:05:00 : Five UFO's enter our airspace, three scouts and two probes. We send in our air force, and after a short battle four UFO's are down and the fifth is, well, everywhere - in little pieces. Our vehicles suffered some light damage. The Valkyrie Transporter gathers the remains of the four alien vessels and returns to base.


Day 3

The day went peacefully for most part. Almost everybody have recovered from their wounds, altough Eagle could use some more time at the medbay to get fully fixed up.

14:15:00 : And it looked like today would pass without problems... UFO incursion. Two Probes, three Scouts.

Base-wide alert. Full team must get on Valkyrie Transporter - immediately. Eagle is in relatively good shape now, so we'll let her come for the mission too.

Chosen hasn't got too much muscle, so he won't be able to carry two Autocannons. I'm giving him one, but with a decent complement of extra ammo. "Duke" Super will also be in for this mission, ready to do some serious havoc.


One scout manages to get away. Phoenix 2 destroys another. Third is getting mashed by Valkyrie Interceptor 2.

Phoenix 1 destroys one of the Probes, while Valkyrie Interceptor downs the Scout it was chasing. The second Probe falls prey to Valkyrie Fighter 1 shortly after. Valkyrie Transporter will collect the crashed Scout and then perform a pre-emptive check of the buildings around the area of UFOs' operation. After the Transporter returns to the base with UFO wreckage, we're replacing one of the Transport Modules with a Bio-Transport unit. This forces Eagle, Doubler and Toxik to switch to one of the Phoenixes for transport.

Checking the three apartment blocks at the southwest of the city yields no results. It seems that the aliens did not drop anything there.

We're checking near the other dimension gate, then...


Bingo! The first slums belonging to SELF came up with an infestation!

[The Fifth Horseman]

We're splitting in two teams of five, one of four and Duke Super will go on his own.


Codename: Debug II

Soldiers on the mission: Bobbin, Danny, Chosen, Predjuice, Eagle, Doubler, Jones, Skumpaq, Toxik, Abi, Punch, Super, Reamus, Beef, Alpha.


As you can see from the screenshot, this is one of the few types of slums that is relatively easy to clear out. Aliens won't be able to escape it either, unless over the corpses of the whole team.

Team 2 guards the gravlift, while 1 and 3 will scout the area. Super is floating near Team 2.


14:18:28 : Team 2 spots a lone Anthropod. A shootout begins, ending in the only way possible - death of the alien.

Team 1 and 3 are sweeping the territory, while Super wants to knock off the roof of the gravlift tower. Unfortunately, he forgot that he isn't carrying any explosives powerful enough for the job.


14:19:29 : Team 2 finds a number of aliens coming out of the gravlift, and promptly destroys them all. 1 and 3 finish the sweep and are coming to the gravlift area to begin clearing the building. Super decides that he will go to Predjuice and ask him to lend one of his explosives.

Then a Multiworm comes down the lift. Super assisted in the critters annihilation, but one of the Hyperworms managed to bite a chunk of him. He still managed to survive, none the less.

Mission Summary
Predjuice promoted to Sergeant, Punch to a Squaddie.

It seems that we have managed to capture some live specimens. The biochem boys (and girls) will be happy to hear that they will finally have something to cut up.

We're checking the other SELF building, just to make sure. Guess what... yup, more gribblies.


Codename: Debug III

Soldiers: Same as last mission.

We got the street-and-walkway map. An easy one, again.


14:18:36 : Super starts to increase altitude, to give use an overhead view of the area. Team 1 is going towards the walkway, while 2 and 3 are covering the sides.


Team 2 spots a Brainsucker. The thing is coming towards Team 3, who manage to take it down. A Multiworm is following in the suckers' steps, though. Super moves into a position where he could give ranged support to the third team.

As Team 1 is moving over the walkway, they spot a Multiworm Egg. Danny and Beef holster their guns and take out the stun grapples to neatly net the creature for research.

All doesn't go as planned, though. The thing extends a tube and begins to shoot Beef. She gets critically wounded. In a last ditch attempt, she pulls out the pins of the two stun grenades she was carrying, knocking out herself, Danny and the egg-creature.

Mission Summary

Toxik was promoted to Squaddie.

Beef was badly wounded, but the rest of the team were close enough to give her some first aid - she will recover. This time she has barely escaped death, half a minute longer and the team would be packing her into a bodybag.

We're fitting Super with a full Marsec suit. He's a bit too sluggish in Megapol with Marsec chestplate.

Rest of the day passes with no alerts. Seems that we managed to prevent the aliens from deploying any more of their forces.

Day 6

Beef has fully recovered.

The traning and labolatory facilities at Reloaded have been completed.

A recruit arrives at the crew quarters. His name is Kearnsy. Yup - the man is back, in flesh and blood!

At Reloaded, research begins on Alien Genetic Structure, Spitter Authopsy and Personal Shields.

Abandonia base. At 1 AM, Bobbin wakes up hungry so decides to go to the mess room and check if there is anything edible around. Suddenly, he sees someone sitting in front of a public computer terminal. Coming closer, he finds out that this person is Beef, holding a double-size mug of ultra-strong recaf (multi-purpose: drink, insecticide, paint stripper...) in one hand and furiously punching into the keyboard with other.
Bobbin: "Have you been up for the whole night?"
Beef: "Yup."
Bobbin: "What are you doing?"
Beef: "Checking the logs for abnormal corporate activity."
Bobbin: "Why? What can you learn from this?"
Beef: "Haven't you noticed, that the aliens were sitting quiet for the last few days?"
Bobbin: "Yes, I did. But what does that have to do with what are you doing?"
Beef: "I have a bad feeling about this, it's like a calm before a really big storm. I'm making sure that none of the corps got infiltrated."
Bobbin: "...And?"

Beef: "Nothing. Nada. Zilch. I triple-checked everything. Just as if they vanished."
Bobbin: "Maybe they got cold or something like that..."
Beef: "Yeah, right, and I'm Saint Sabbat. I think they're cooking up something nasty, and we better get ready for whatever it might be."
Bobbin: "Cooking? I doubt they can manage anything worse then my aunt did..."
Beef: "What are you trying to be, funny? Don't. Just don't."


06:30:00 : Beef was right, the bugs are coming back. Full base alert, everyone is to be ready in the hangars within next two minutes. Mats and Quintopotere decide to take Marsec armor (altough Quintopotere finds himself without a helmet to go with the armor, so he just grabs a Megapol one), gear up with Plasma Guns, two Explosive packages each and an ungodly number of grenades. Looks like they want to bomb the aliens from up high - not that I mind...

The incursion is again made up from two Probes and three Scouts.

A battle begins in the skies above Mega-Primus. One of the Probes is shot down by Transporter valkyrie. A scout beams stuff down to its content Sirius temple and bugs out into the dimension gate before we can reach it. Valkyrie Fighter 2 destroys the other Probe and two remaining Scouts are shot down in short order.

The Valkyrie Transporter and Interceptor (serving as a field taxi of sorts) go to the Sirius temple to clear out whatever Aliens have beamed down there.

Codename: Cleanse. Purge. KILL!

Soldiers: Bobbin, Beef, Quinto, Mats, Super.
Quinto & Mats have left their explosive packs at home and borrowed some stun grapples from other agents, so now they dual-wield these.


06:31:24 : We enter a defensive setup, waiting for the scum to come to us.

06:31:36 : And soon Beef and Super open fire at a Cultist.


06:31:45 : Mats encounters an Anthropod. He gets injured, but manages to knock the creature out. Super encounters another Cultist and begins firing. Beef runs to Mats to pick up the aliens' gear.


06:32:15 : Two Cultists fall prey to Quinto's ambush. Bobbin finishes off third one. Beef spots two Spitters, who escape from the room. The Anthropod wakes up and is put to - eternal - rest by Super.

Bobbin sees a Multiworm and Brainsucker. Super drives them away and kills the Brainsucker when it shortly decides it wants to get back to try a bite of HIS brain.
Super: "Yeah, try that. No goddamn alien will ever have MY brains for stew!"

The team assumes defensive positions again, but a little further this time. Beef pulls out her scanner and begins tracking whatever is moving around.

Beef: "Bobbin, Quinto, something's coming in your direction. Either one large critter or two smaller, not sure."


06:34:33 : A Multiworm emerges from the doorway, but Bobbin quickly sends the thing back to whatever hell it came from.
Duke begins checking out next room. Clear. He and Mats cover another door.

06:35:24 : Super starts destroying curtains to uncover another room. Clear again, the two move to guard the entrance to the last room. Bobbin spots a Sirius cultist and dispatches of him, as well as the Cultists' buddy who comes shortly after.


The team storm the last room, and encounter two spitters. Super and Bobbin start firing, while Quinto runs towards the creatures in order to capture at least one live specimen. He goes down the gravlift and sees a third Spitter, whom he follows and knocks out with Stun Grapples. Two other aliens meet their death at hands of Bobbin and Super.

Bobbin, Super and Mats descend to the underground to clear out whatever is still there.


Super finds and dispatches two Sirius cultists. With that, the mission is over.

Mission Summary

Good one. We managed rather good, and we got a live spitter for the biochem dept.


Just as we are taking off, an alert is signalled in one of the slums owned by SELF. Investigation follows.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Codename: Overkill

Soldiers: Everyone!

We really earned it this time... this mission will be fought on a two-block map. Damn. Fortunately, these are easy ones.


Super spots three Multiworm Eggs. He kills them all.


Team 1 gets fired at by an Anthropod who escapes. Team 2 and 3 begin a firefight against a Spitter and Brainsucker. When Team 5 (Quinto & Mats) approach, they find out that there is also an Anthropod there. Quinto quickly chucks out two Stun Grenades. And two more. The Anthropod is out cold.

Quintopotere spots another Spitter, while Team 1 get engaged with a Multiworm. Quinto cannot resist a sudden urge to drop an Incendiary grenade. Unfortunately, he hits the Anthropod instead. Reamus runs into the fire to grab whatever gear might have survived.

Mats and Quinto exchange fire with the Spitter for a short time, until Mats decides to drop another Incendiary, this time dead center onto the Spitter.

The Multiworm and Hyperworms are destroyed before they manage to cause any harm. The Spitter runs away, right into the waiting guns of Team 3. Team 1 kill another Spitter who came out of the gravlift.

Super, Quintopotere and Mats enter the top floor and begin sweeping the building from there. Meanwhile, more Spitters and another Multiworm come down the lift. After the Multiworm is killed, one Hyperworm lives long enough to bite a chunk out of Danny.

Mission Summary

Punch, Skumpaq & Beef get promoted to Squad Leaders. Kearnsy and Quintopotere to Squaddies.

The team is a bit worn out, so we'll get a few hours of break.


09:55:00 : Beef comes crashing into the barracks. WITH the door.
Beef: "Get your gear, people! We have alien infiltrations in Diablo and Government!"

The Diablo facilities are close to Government-owned Eden Mansions. It seems likely that this is the place of infestation. And when we come there - it really turns out to be one.


BTW, I spent some time to code a simple stat backup/restoration program. It works, at least as long as the character name is unique enough (Mats caused some trouble - there is a scientist named Matsumara). For the purpose of stat records, I have devised a simple record format I call TIS-11 (11 bytes = 10 for the stats, 1 for the face), but ATM IDK what is responsible for determining if the soldier is an android of not. Thus, when I get that figured out, I'll have to extend TIS-11 slightly into TIS-12 (with an extra byte on the end, determining the difference between machines and flesh-and-blood characters). As it is now, it looks like the offset +B3 of the record is responsible for the change, with value 02 making the character an android and anything else - flesh-and-blood person. This might come in useful at some point, since the androids' skill blockade can be removed.
Right now, the restoration is a little crude in the user-end terms, but there is nothing that a bit of coding won't fix. I'll probably just have to - once again - use a temporary storage file to ease the data transfer.

+UPDATE+ I have finished all work on the program. Indeed, Offset B3 is the right one, altough I have no goddamn idea what values other then 01 and 02 mean. I had a bit of trouble with unexpected file corruption issues, which turned out to be caused by me ovelooking one little feature of a certain command in the script language: the Call funtion remembers the position in the datafile, and when the Call is Returned, the program returns to that position. The thing is that I have used this function many times, also in this script, so I should have remembered. And yet, I somehow overlooked that fact.
Anyway, the program is ready for public use, so I've attached its ZIP to this post. It is called "Vatman", and will work in DOS, XP and DosBox. The Temp.vat file must be present for the program to work, if you accidentally delete it just create an empty TXT file and rename it to Temp.vat.
Only the first 6 characters of the name you enter actually matter when looking for soldiers. I can change that to make it shorter, sure, but I already had some bad experience with 4-byte long search string (When trying to back-up Mats), so the 6-character limit is much, much safer than that, while at the same time it doesn't force the player to enter full soldier names (which might sometimes be just ridiculously long). I _might_ add a special routine that will allow you to select short or full name search tomorrow.
I have also removed from the final version support for converting files with a .HEX extension (206-byte long complete copy of the hexadecimal string defining the soldier in a save file), since it was only useful for me when I was converting my .HEX resurrection record files to TIS format.
The manager does not allow for extracting or implanting TIS records to/from savegames made during tactical game, only to/from the ones made from the city map. This is on purpose.
Finally, my mumblings about changing the TIS-11 to TIS-12 can be considered obsolete, as the program will automatically diferentiate the androids from "normal" characters by checking the value of the record byte responsible for face information.

Allright, to finish my technical mumbling: you can download & use the damn thing right away.


Oh, and the game summary:

Soldiers</span>

ACTIVE SOLDIERS (19) (stars mean, as in Super's game, no. of resurrections)
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Reamus10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Reamus</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Punch10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Punch 999</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Predjuice10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>PredjuiceSucks</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Kearnsy10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Kearnsy *</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Toxik10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Toxik</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Chosen10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>The Chosen</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/SupSuper10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>SupSuper</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Skumpaq10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Skumpaq</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Eagle10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Eagle of Fire</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Doubler10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Doubler</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Danny10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Danny 252 </a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Bobbin10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Bobbin</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Beef10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Beef</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Abi10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Abi79</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Quintopotere10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Quintopotere</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Jones10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Fruit Pie Jones</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Alpha10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>A1s</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Aristharus10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Aristharus</a>
<a href=\'http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/AbandoniaApocalypse/Troops/Mats10.png\' target=\'_blank\'>Mats</a>

DECEASED (0)

<span style=\'color:ORANGE\'>IN QUEQUE (1)
Lonely Vazdru

Ooops, looks like I lost Danny's stat screenshot somwhere. Will fix that tomorrow.

[BeefontheBone]

Ooooh, exciting. You'd think I'd be intelligent enough not to be fooled by the initial quietness of a multiworm egg though

[The Fifth Horseman]

OK, I'm not an uber-player. I forgot that the eggs aren't as vulnerable to Stun Grapples as to the gas, if I remembered that I'd order you and Danny to gas the thing right away.

[PrejudiceSucks]

Excellent. It seems that my blow-the-crap-out-of-everything job is going quite well then.

How do you train androids?

[Danny252]

I is teh uberleetone.
Missing stats.

[PrejudiceSucks]

I think that you'll find that I'm the uber one.