Nice mod and thank you. It promotes much more comfortable and relaxed, but still engaging and challenging game-play. The Motion Tracker feels really punishing having it on a soldier backpack slot and using it for a limited period during the mission.
I have a suggestion making this mod a little bit more fair and tactical: It would be interesting if you could make new type of improved satellites, lets call them "Tracer Satellite". So whenever you doing a mission under your "Tracer Satellite"(mission in the same nation that the "Tracer Satellite" covers) you got the "Motion Scanner" active. The regular Satellite Should be available too so the player can make a choice between 2 types of satellites(regular Satellite and the "Tracer Satellite" ). Sure the "Tracer Satellite" should be more expensive than the regular Satellite(I don't know exactly how much expensive but the price also could scale with game difficulty).
Thanks Again for the mod, it really made my game-play much more pleasant.
Wow, that's actually a pretty awesome idea! Personally though I'd just rather have a foundry project that made it so all satellites functioned as Tracer Satellites.
Glad you like it, and sorry for the late reply. I have been out of the loop with EW/LW modding for a while now so I don't have any plans to add new features to this mod, especially since it's been rolled into LW. But if any other modder wants to take that on it'd be cool to see.
Thanks. Makes missions less tedious/time consuming, and aliens that are already spawned but not activated don't show up since they're out of LOS, so I can pretend it works kinda like a motion sensor.
Can this mod be added to an existing Long War campaign? Or would I be better starting over a new campaign? I am already into several missions, and I would love to add this mod to the mix...It just seems more friendly toward my playstyle.
Yes, it can safely be added or removed mid-campaign. The only issue being if you start a campaign with it on and then remove it, you might need to actually build some scanner items.
Wow, thanks for the quick reply! You are a pro. One more question since you are kicking it at 1:30 ET with me...Another person adjusted the Scanner distance in what I assume was the DefaultGameCore.ini file.
I'm looking at that now trying to do the same, and I found a line that says ; Range of Motion Tracker Item, and a line below it that says ; Base charges for Motion Tracker Item. I'm not really sure what to change to adjust the distance at this point?
Hey tracktwo, great mod. Thanks a lot for doing it man.
I have a couple questions though if you don't mind
1) I noticed in your reply to pat_sch that you said:
In LW b15e everything the same rules apply to everything the radar shows, and everything is shown with the extended range. All aliens are shown, whether they are in LOS or not, so now it just uses the normal red triangle for all aliens, active or not.
Would it be possible at all to add back in this functionality? I like the idea of a permanent motion tracker, but not so much so being able to know where every alien is without "discovering" them. Takes away some immersion/suspense for me personally.
2) If not on question one, would it be possible at all for me to remove only enemies from the motion tracker? Thus preserving my sense of suspense/immersion, but still allowing me to see other things, such as civilians, etc.
Again, thanks a lot for this mod man. Appreciate all the work you've put into it
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking for with #1 - do you mean, only show inactive pods on the radar? Or inactive pods and aliens that are within LOS of soldiers?
It'd be a relatively small change to disable aliens on the tracker altogether, if that's what you meant by #2. If you're ok with doing your own hex mods, the logic is all in UITacticalHUD_Radar.UpdateBlips. There is a particular piece of code that adds a blip for each alien on the map (according to some conditions, e.g. skips aliens that are too distant from the scanner or are dead). This code can easily be changed to just never show anything.
1) What I meant with this, is that I would like to only show aliens on the motion tracker, that my soldiers have LoS of. Instead of just them being close enough, and the aliens appearing on it automatically.
Does that make more sense?
2) Was kinda worried it was gonna involve hex editing, and since I've actually never really done any hex editing before, I wouldn't really know where to begin/feel comfortable with it. Nor do I want you to try and walk me through it lol.
I've reduced the scan range of the motion tracker to 15 in the DGC.ini, and this seems an ok compromise, since it's only like a room's worth of scan distance. Which by that point, I"m already close enough for it to not be much of an advantage.
Thanks a lot for the response/assistance regardless though man, appreciate it
i was wondering.. would it be possible to change this to so when the motion scanner is used it shows for all troops for that turn instead of just the one having the item?
It could be possible, but it'd be a fairly big change from the current model that I don't think I'd have the time to implement, test, and maintain yet another variant of this mod. If you or anyone else wants to take a stab at it, absolutely go for it.
Currently, when the scanner is used, it sets a bit on the user to record the fact that it was used, and some other code shows/hides the radar based on that bit. Probably the simplest thing to do would be to set the bit on everyone in the squad whenever anyone uses it. That's done in XGAbilityTree.ApplyEffectsToSelf, but you could probably abuse this and 'borrow' a local variable to iterate over the squad members and set it on everyone. The other option would be to try to alter the show/hide code so that it doesn't hide the radar when you switch soldiers, but I have to warn that getting that show/hide code working correctly was a *huge* pain and tweaking it might be difficult to get right.
Love this mod, I really enjoy setting up ambushes and this mod is great for this purpose. A little help though, could someone help me figure out how to change the colors of the blips? I can't figure out where I would go to edit the colors.
There is no simple way to do it, unfortunately. The blip color change I put into the first version was for one blip type - and one that isn't even used in the latest version, which is why there is no alias to modify there anymore. Changing all of the blip colors requires hex editing the tactical UI package to modify the embedded flash file that contains the sprite information for the blips. If that sounds like something you'd like to tackle doing I can give you the pointers to how I did the one blip type I did.
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I like!
The Motion Tracker feels really punishing having it on a soldier backpack slot and using it for a limited period during the mission.
I have a suggestion making this mod a little bit more fair and tactical:
It would be interesting if you could make new type of improved satellites, lets call them "Tracer Satellite".
So whenever you doing a mission under your "Tracer Satellite"(mission in the same nation that the "Tracer Satellite" covers) you got the "Motion Scanner" active.
The regular Satellite Should be available too so the player can make a choice between 2 types of satellites(regular Satellite and the "Tracer Satellite" ).
Sure the "Tracer Satellite" should be more expensive than the regular Satellite(I don't know exactly how much expensive but the price also could scale with game difficulty).
Thanks Again for the mod, it really made my game-play much more pleasant.
Thanks. Makes missions less tedious/time consuming, and aliens that are already spawned but not activated don't show up since they're out of LOS, so I can pretend it works kinda like a motion sensor.
I'm looking at that now trying to do the same, and I found a line that says ; Range of Motion Tracker Item, and a line below it that says ; Base charges for Motion Tracker Item. I'm not really sure what to change to adjust the distance at this point?
I have a couple questions though if you don't mind
1) I noticed in your reply to pat_sch that you said:
Would it be possible at all to add back in this functionality? I like the idea of a permanent motion tracker, but not so much so being able to know where every alien is without "discovering" them. Takes away some immersion/suspense for me personally.
2) If not on question one, would it be possible at all for me to remove only enemies from the motion tracker? Thus preserving my sense of suspense/immersion, but still allowing me to see other things, such as civilians, etc.
Again, thanks a lot for this mod man. Appreciate all the work you've put into it
It'd be a relatively small change to disable aliens on the tracker altogether, if that's what you meant by #2. If you're ok with doing your own hex mods, the logic is all in UITacticalHUD_Radar.UpdateBlips. There is a particular piece of code that adds a blip for each alien on the map (according to some conditions, e.g. skips aliens that are too distant from the scanner or are dead). This code can easily be changed to just never show anything.
1) What I meant with this, is that I would like to only show aliens on the motion tracker, that my soldiers have LoS of. Instead of just them being close enough, and the aliens appearing on it automatically.
Does that make more sense?
2) Was kinda worried it was gonna involve hex editing, and since I've actually never really done any hex editing before, I wouldn't really know where to begin/feel comfortable with it. Nor do I want you to try and walk me through it lol.
I've reduced the scan range of the motion tracker to 15 in the DGC.ini, and this seems an ok compromise, since it's only like a room's worth of scan distance. Which by that point, I"m already close enough for it to not be much of an advantage.
Thanks a lot for the response/assistance regardless though man, appreciate it
Currently, when the scanner is used, it sets a bit on the user to record the fact that it was used, and some other code shows/hides the radar based on that bit. Probably the simplest thing to do would be to set the bit on everyone in the squad whenever anyone uses it. That's done in XGAbilityTree.ApplyEffectsToSelf, but you could probably abuse this and 'borrow' a local variable to iterate over the squad members and set it on everyone. The other option would be to try to alter the show/hide code so that it doesn't hide the radar when you switch soldiers, but I have to warn that getting that show/hide code working correctly was a *huge* pain and tweaking it might be difficult to get right.
A little help though, could someone help me figure out how to change the colors of the blips? I can't figure out where I would go to edit the colors.
Thanks!