X-COM II Saved Game editor, v1.5 by JL Enterprises, 1996 *********************** *** Opening Words *** *********************** If you're just dying to get started using this editor, then go ahead--you can read this file later. However, you should completely read through this file if you later have any questions. Specifically, the "Comments/Common Problems" section contains information about non-intuitive problems you might find. ********************** *** Introduction *** ********************** XCOMII is an ingenious game by Microprose that does not take much time at all to master. The game itself, however, sometimes becomes difficult because you must manage your resources carefully. This simple little program allows you to edit various items stored in the saved game files created by UFO, such as your total money, the various items in your storehouses, the types of buildings you have on your different bases, and also the statistics of any soldier that you have recruited. ******************************** *** Description of Options *** ******************************** MONEY EDITOR -- The money editing option is fairly simple and merely gives you whatever dollar amount you enter. Note that it is not really recommended that you enter a value that is too significantly higher than the "lots" button as when you get paid again in the game, your dollar amount will wrap around to 0. If this happens, you can always use the editor again. INVENTORY EDITOR -- The inventory option allows you to modify the amount of any particular item you have in the storehouses at any particular base. Be warned that the editor allows you to modify your game so that you have more items than you have space for. The only problem with this is that if you move an item from your stores into a ship, you will not be able to move it back unless you use the editor and decrease the amount of items you have so that the total space used can be stored within your storehouses. BUILDING EDITOR -- One might ask why you'd need to create buildings when you can do that in the game. Well, for one thing, it won't require any money to create buildings inside my editor. When you create a building, you are prompted for the number of days until its constuction is complete. Usually there is no reason why "0" (immediate construction) cannot be used, however at least a couple of the structures require the game to actually "see" the completion of the building for it to become functional, and so it may be necessary for "1" day of construction be specified. The "Details" button allows you to modify some of the costs and values that the game uses during play, including its construction cost, regular maintenance costs, normal construction time (if built completely within the game), the building's defense value, and the chances of the building getting hit by aliens. Note that these building details relate to ALL buildings of that TYPE in that saved game. SOLDIER EDITOR -- The soldier editor option is especially useful because you can greatly improve the accuracy of your soldiers and can even put any type of armour available in the game on your men. You can promote your soldiers to any rank, reanimate dead soldiers, and even do immediate (and free) transfers to your other bases. Version 1.1 of the editor introduced the ability to edit the names of your characters to whatever you like. Version 1.2 added the ability to do an mass editing of many soldiers at once. When you choose this option, any changes that you make at the next screen will be applied to all soldiers at all of the checked bases. Version 1.5 reimplemented the code to allow transferring of soldiers between bases. SOLDIER IMPORT -- A soldier import function allows you to bring your characters from an old XCOM I game into any XCOM II game. This feature was added in version 1.1 of the editor and allows players with well-seasoned characters to continue right where they left off! Unfortunately, since I cannot identify all aspects of the saved game file, not everything converts correctly. For instance, the image which represents your character during battle will most likely be incorrect. Most of the stats, however, should be brought over okay, though. OBJECT EDITOR -- Another function of this editor is to allow you to edit the strengths and aspects of the weapons and ammo used in the game itself. With this option, you can modify any weapon so that it does not require any ammo at all, takes no time to shoot it, has greater than 100% accuracy, and is extremely explosive, or whatever you like. Be warned that these changes do not apply specifically to any saved game, but to the entire game itself, which is why the option for this editor appears on the main editor screen. Also, be warned that the changes you make to weapons will also affect the weapons of the aliens. This can be both good and bad, so be aware of which weapons you and the aliens can possess. BACKUP/RESTORE -- One of the nicest features of this editor is that as of version 1.2, it now has options to make an emergency backup a your saved game by running PKZIP (that already must be in your DOS path statement). This allows you to easily revert back to a previous copy of the game should you make significant changes that negatively affect your saved game. Remember, this editor is not warranted to always be able to perform as expected. I have tried to throughly test it on my system with my version of the game, yet it may not work with other releases that Microprose may release. I seriously recommend that you make a backup of each game you modify when you first use this editor. INCREASED KNOWLEDGE -- Version 1.3 also adds a button which will increase your knowledge in the game by giving you credit for researching all items that you can in the game, giving you access to all entries in the game's Ufopedia, and the ability of your engineers to produce all items the game normally allows. Due to the complexity of the research trees, there is no capability in the editor to allow selective advances in knowledge, nor are there any plans to allow this. TACTICAL EDITOR -- The tactical editor can be easily argued to be one of the most powerful features of this entire editor. It allows you to modify the health, energy, time units, and several other fields for all of the soldiers and aliens while you have landed at a site. Version 1.5 of the editor greatly enhanced this editor by allowing you to affect the max values of each of the stats, as well as adding the ability to edit many other stats. This function can also be used to resurrect killed players by simply raising their health. By editing the shok value to a lower value, you can revive an unconscious character. You can also modify the armour and fatal wounds of a character to reduce a player's chances of dying. ALIEN CONTAINMENT EDITOR -- This editor was added in version 1.5 and allows you to modify the types of aliens that you have in your alien containment units at each of your bases (note that the editor allows you to have aliens in storage even though you may not have any in the game). The editor also allows you to have captured alien type/rank combinations that are impossible to actually have in the game. You should try to avoid doing this because the game does not have any database information on these aliens and researching them will not yield anything. SUBMARINE EDITOR -- Version 1.5 of the editor added the capability of modifying the weapons, fuel, and stores that you have on your submarines. As with the inventory editor, the editor does no intentional checking of whether you can actually store as many things as you specify. ********************** *** Installation *** ********************** This editor was originally written with the use of a VGA monitor in mind, however, I've taken care to write my routines so that they should run on even a monochrome monitor (although the lowest monitor that I was able to test this program on was a CGA). You will also require at least enought space on your hard drive to place the exe file of the editor in your main XCOM2 directory. Also, a mouse is absolutely required to use the editor at all and there does not seem to be any change in this requirement in any future versions. ********************************** *** Comments/Common Problems *** ********************************** ADVANCED EDITING -- The object editor and tactical editors both have an advanced editing button as of version 1.5 of the editor. This button allows you to modify/view some of the fields that have not been fully tested or verified. If you want to experiment with these values, feel free, but be cautioned that your changes may actually corrupt your game and cause XCOM2 to crash if you enter certain values. If you notice a correlation in any of the unknown fields or find something that is labelled incorrectly, then please notify me! It will help me add additional functionality to future versions of the editor. BUILDING EDITOR -- Some of the buildings in the game require completion of construction to actually be "seen" by the game. This means that if you create buildings with "0" construction time, the building may not actually have any effect in the game. Therefore, if you notice that your defences aren't working, try recreating them in the editor with "1" day of building time and TFTD should see it and make it active 24 game-hours later. BUILDING EDITOR -- The Details button in the Buildings Editor affects ALL buildings of that TYPE in that saved game, NOT just for a particular base or a structure in a base. Note also that the "Increased Knowledge" button will reset any changes you've made in the "Building Details" editor. OBJECT EDITOR -- Keep in mind that the object editor modifies the OBDATA.DAT file which is stored in the GEODATA directory where your XCOM game is located. This means that if you're playing the CD version of the game, you will not be able to use these two portions of the editor. I have been informed by a user that you can install the game completely on your hard drive and then run the editor from that directory without any problems. To do this, run the INSTALL file on the CD under the directory HARDDISK. It only takes 20 MB of hard disk space. OBJECT EDITOR -- Values for some of the weapons in the object editor are actually hard coded into the XCOM2 executables and thus cannot be changed very easily. Therefore you may notice that the game will ignore the changes you make to some of the weapons. If you discover this, your only choice is to try your changes on another weapon and use that weapon in the game. OBJECT EDITOR -- I've been told that the object editor seems to work with the original XCOM, although I haven't tried it myself. Most of the other parts of the editor probably aren't as compatible with the original, though. I've you are looking for a good XCOM/UFO editor, I actually did write one, which later evolved into XCOM2EDI. This original version can still be found on my FTP site and on my web page. TACTICAL EDITOR -- Many of the stats in the tactical editor should not be taken above 180 (the game's actual maximum) or else some of your other stats will begin to decrease very rapidly. TACTICAL EDITOR -- If any of your soldiers die while in battle, you can resurrect them in the tactical editor by raising their health. Unfortunately, the game is still able to remember the fact that your soldier died. This means that when you complete the battle, the game will remove that soldier from your roster even if he/she is still alive. The only way that I know to get around this is to go select that soldier in the tactical editor, hit the advanced button, and change the unitnum value to 255 (you can hit the max button to do this). This essentially "dissociates" the soldier and prevents the game from removing it from your roster. All record of that soldier going on that mission will not be saved (ie: # of kills, # of missions, etc). TACTICAL EDITOR -- Do not edit the strength of your soldiers so that it is over 50. Doing so will cause your soldiers to be unable to throw projectile items such as grenades. ********************** *** Revision Log *** ********************** 1.0 - initial release 1.1 - added soldier import function and the weapon and ammo editors. fixed a bug in the soldier editor that would unintentionally move many of your soldiers to other bases. added ability to edit the names of your soldiers. 1.2 - fixed a bug in the bravery editing of the soldier editor. added pkzip/pkunzip buttons to make and restore backups of your saved games. a couple of other internal memory allocation problems fixed. (this was not a widely distributed version) 1.3 - made many of the error messages more informative. revised documention significantly. made the registration procedure more tolerant of upper/lower case letters and symbols in your name and phone numbers. added button to increase your knowledge, edit multiple soldiers in the soldier editor, and shortcut to quickly finish any building with the right mouse button. 1.4 - very minor changes in this version. the maximum button has been replaced with a lots button, which defaults to 180 when editing soldier attributes. the mouse routines have been modified slightly so that if Windows is detected, the graphical mouse cursor is disabled and will instead use the mouse cursor generated by the mouse driver, which eliminates problems encountered when running the editor in a windowed DOS box. the tactical editor now puts checkmarks next to enemy units so that they may be distinguished more easily. 1.5 - Many new changes. The weapon and ammo editors have been combined and additional functionality added to create a new object editor. The soldier editor can now transfer soldiers again (this function was disabled because it wasn't working reliably). Several of the editors have been revised to eliminate the need to click an 'edit' button after selecting the item or value to change. The tactical editor has been greatly improved by adding ability to edit additional fields, making its changes affect more than one turn. A new alien containment editor has been added to allow you to add/delete aliens in your containment buildings. Documentation cleaned up significantly. Editor will now look in the directory it is located in (not the current) for its registration file. Building editor now allows creation of buildings with specific construction times. A "Details" button added to Building Editor to allow modification of construction costs, etc. ********************** *** Distribution *** ********************** First of all, this program is distributed only through Shareware means, which means that it depends upon others to upload it to any appropriate on-line service that maintains collections of similar programs. You are encouraged to do this, however this editor must be distributed without any modifications to the program itself and with all of files that you originally received with it. Furthermore, any disassembling, modification, reverse-engineering, distribution of registration key files, serial numbers, or programs that attempt to defeat the registration of this program, or any other activities that might possibly deny the author of this saved game editor of any registration fees is forbidden and strongly discouraged. Second, the usage of this program is not free. I require that if you use this program more than once, you should register. Registration only costs US $5 and will remove the 'enter the number' prompt upon startup and will also display that the program is registered to you--to give you something to be proud of. Additionally, as of version 1.3, all new functions will not be available until your register. Third, if you find a version of this editor that appears to be tampered with (virus infection, missing/corrupted documentation, etc), it is recommended that you try to obtain a version directly from me (see the bottom of this file for details). You should additionally try to contact the maintainer of the archive where you obtained it from (or contact me and I'll try to). ********************** *** Registration *** ********************** To register, simply send US $5 (preferably a personal check) along with your name, and telephone number. Note that those three things are required. The phone number is especially important because it is used in generating the serial number. Please do not forget to include it! Additionally, if you have an e-mail address, please include it, otherwise you must include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Please make sure that all personal checks are made to JEFF LAWSON. Any checks made to JL Enterprises CANNOT be accepted. Although you can send cash to me and I will accept it, I do not recommend it because of the risk of it getting intercepted by any of the many hands that mail must pass through. ********************************* *** How to reach the author *** ********************************* I can reached via Snail-mail at: Jeff Lawson 1893 Kaweah Drive Pasadena, CA 91105-2174 USA or through E-mail at: jlawson@hmc.edu or JeffLawson@aol.com also via phone at: (213) 258-4264 or (213) 258-5604 The latest version of this program should always be available from my home page at "http://members.aol.com/JeffLawson/"