Hybrid Game Generator




Hybrid Game Generator

For UFO/TFTD, DOS or CE versions.

X-Com has been around for over a decade now, and the same is true of XcomUtil - It's most extensive mod. Eventually XcomUtil's author (Scott T. Jones) retired, passing the development onto BladeFireLight (who'd developed XCU related patches in the past, amongst other things). Shortly after Blade put up public wishlists for what people would like to see added.

One of the things I saw mentioned was that it would be nice if the "hybrid game" feature (where UFO maps are playable under TFTD and vice versa) was coloured correctly. I'd heard of this function many years ago, and always assumed it just "worked" without actually trying it. It had never occured to me, even when I later discovered how the games used seperate palettes, that colours would've been an issue.

Having a good understanding of the way the two games dealt with their graphical files I felt this was my sort of project. After about a day of coding I slapped together a quick app that would sort out the terrain images, but thought, why stop there? The end result does all the units as well (cropping, merging, and re-ordering sprites as required), along with all the equipment and a small handful of other things. The converted graphics don't always look nice (for eg, TFTD's turquoise tends to come out as either light blue or dark green in UFO) but I believe they're the best that can be achieved without manually redrawing everything.

Usage

Run the program (Hybrid.Bat, found in the "BB_Tact" folder) using the path to the donor game as a parameter (For example, if you've installed the program into UFO, you'd provide the path to TFTD). One way to do this (for people unfamiliar with the DOS prompt) is to bring up the Start menu and select Run; Use the Browse button to hunt down "Hybrid.bat" then add the path behind the resulting command line. An example might be:

"C:\Games\UFO\bb_tact\Hybrid.bat" "C:\Games\TFTD"

Once done you might like to configure XcomUtil to use the new terrain graphics (at time of writing it doesn't import units or equipment on it's own). If you have it installed, there should be a "XCUSetup.bat" file in your game folder - Run this with "Hybrid" as a parameter. For eg:

"C:\Games\UFO\XCUSetup.bat" Hybrid

Importing units and equipment between games consists of manually overwriting their respective PCK/TAB files (stored in the "Units" folder) with the new versions this generator creates (stored in the "Hybrid" folder). Note that without further coding they won't always function exactly as their original versions do.

Note that UFO's graphics are (for the most part) best used at the TFTD's "surface" depth.

UFO To TFTD Unit / Equipment Transfer Guide
TFTD To UFO Unit / Equipment Transfer Guide

Update History

v1.0 - 12/01/2008
Initial release.

One of the few things I like about TFTD - The Heavy Thermic Lance.