Talk:Artefact Site
Locked Hallucinoid?
Hi everybody, I'm new here - and here's my new question. I have recently completed two Artefact Site missions on Superhuman difficulty. In both of these missions (in second part) there was a Hallucinoid located far outside the map. I was able to find it by using XComUtil (SWP flag).
The question is as follows: can this Hallucinoid present there knowingly (by developers) to ensure that you will manually destroy the Synomium Device instead of just kill all the aliens? Or maybe this is just a bug of the Windows version of the game, or something like alien overflow on higher difficulties?
Thanks.
Player701 08:05, 29 June 2010 (EDT)
XComUtil sometimes generated X-COM units outside the boundaries of the map (I'm not sure if this has been corrected on the latest version), so it is possible that it is simply an XComUtil generated bug. Hobbes 08:25, 29 June 2010 (EDT)
I know that, but I haven't used XComUtil before. I have installed it just to find that last alien, so this bug can't be related to XComUtil. And I have installed it in another game directory, so it couldn't corrupt my save files. Player701 10:05, 29 June 2010 (EDT)
If you upload the save file (here for eg: File:Out of bounds Hallucinoid.zip), I could take a look at it. I would guess the map ran out of spawn nodes (higher difficulty = more aliens to place on the map). - Bomb Bloke 23:24, 29 June 2010 (EDT)
There are a few maps in TFTD where large units may end up spawned in odd locations, probably due to what Bomb Bloke mentioned. Actually, in one odd example I helped troubleshoot a while back was a Xarquid that was stuck in the cargo hold shaft at the front of the boat in a shipping lane mission. Since it cannot be breached even by alien weapons, it made the first map impossible to complete without aborting. As for the aliens getting stuck in walls in the colonies, I don't know if that was deliberate or accidental on the part of the mappers.
I had a feeling Zombie had a series of map pack sets that corrected the placement problems, but currently I can only find the ones for the two small subs and the ones for UFO. -NKF 01:56, 30 June 2010 (EDT)
Uploaded the save game: File:Out of bounds Hallucinoid.zip, you can take a look. That's my fourth Artefact Site mission in this campaign, and the third case of a Hallucinoid outside of the map (There is only one alien remaining, and the SWP flag was applied using XComUtil). Player701 05:53, 1 July 2010 (EDT)
Well this is odd.
First off, he's not outside the map - he's actually just within it, albeit embedded in some black wall blocks.
Second - and rather more to the point - he's sitting on spawn node 118 (he hasn't been able to move off it). The problem is that the map module he's in (GRUNGE08) doesn't have a spawn node there (and yes, I'm checking the Windows release, of which there was one version).
In fact, both nodes 117 and 119 are placed miles away, over an entirely different map module (GRUNGE12, that large 20x20 area in the southern-center of the battlescape). That certainly shouldn't be the case - all nodes should be placed on a per-module basis (so if you suddenly jump from one module to another while placing nodes, it shouldn't be possible to jump back again).
I guess there must be something screwy in the GRUNGE12.RMP file, but I haven't yet looked to see what it might be.
- Bomb Bloke 08:02, 1 July 2010 (EDT)