Is it possible, through editing, to research both laputa range AND speed? I've fiddled around with preq.txt and research.txt, but nothing I do seems to make them both researchable. I know if you use the research cheat, it gives you both...

Yes. Patch 1.1 fixed things so that you could no longer do both, and it's a simple matter to undo that change. In file preq.txt you need to search for "Greater". You should (eventually) find three SubPreq RECORDs that contain the searched-for string. Two of those records are what you're looking for, specifically the ones containing a line with "type STR "Neg"".




Delete the two records (all 7 lines of each one), and then at the top of the file adjust ListOfPreq ARRAY to a value 2 smaller than whatever it says. Voila!

or you could change both "Neg" entries into "Hlp"

Awesome, I figured it would deal with those two sections! Setting them both to Hlp didn't do anything...I just removed them, and it worked.

Next question, and I don't even know which file to start this one in

Mission types. Escort, capture, kill all, etc...is there a way I can make it so I only have the "eliminate sufficient enemies" quests and none of the quests involving capturing things or friendly NPCs?

Ok...Objectives.txt lists all the objectives for the game. I know, for end-game purposes, there are a couple objectives that obviously shouldn't be touched. In order, the objectives are: Eliminate, Activate, Spot, Capture, Destroy, Rescue, Recover, Protect, Aid, Steal, Base, Kill, and Reach. I'm assuming Eliminate is the objective I'm looking at keeping. Can anyone (SW?) tell me which of these are not REQUIRED to complete the game? I'm betting I can get rid of Capture (aliens/mutants/etc), Rescue(One guy joins your party), Protect(Escort the civilians?), and probably Aid(Help NPCs defend against attackers). Spot, Recover, Steal, Base, Kill, and Reach I don't know about. I'll probably won't touch them at all anyway. Also, besides this file, are there any others I need to edit to remove these from the game?

From the looks of it some of those are features that never made it into the release version of the game. Someone raised the issue of features in the FAQ that aren't in the game, but they appear on that list.

Eliminate - kill everything - you'll need that one
Activate - was intended to activate factories or start power stations I think, but never made it into the final game
Spot - This was in AM, where you had to spot new transgenants, but I don't recall having any Spot missions in AS. Some research requires you to have spotted certain aliens, but this was always just a side effect of fighting them.
Capture - get the guy with the big red arrow above his head
Destroy - I think this may only occur on plot based missions
Rescue - help the human/cyborg/psionic that got captured
Recover - Can only think of plot specific missions for this one
Protect - help the group of friendly units across the map (also 1 plot specific mission)
Aid - help defend against attackers
Steal - not sure if its in the game
Base - Assault the base to capture it
Reach - Get to the green marker zone to proceed to the second part of the mission

From that I would guess the ones you could remove are: Activate, Spot, Capture, Rescue.

Given the amount of hard-coding in the game I think it would be very unwise to try to do so. Especially for mission types that do exist. If the game has code attached to a mission and the database entries for that mission are missing when the game attempts to access them then the game will likely crash (or worse) when the randomizer spits out that mission type. I may be wrong, but I am reasonably confident that the randomizer determines missions based on internal game code, and not based upon what the data tables say.

The upshot? Proceed with extreme caution. Do not try this with a game that you care about, or at the very least make sure you have plenty of backups and can undo anything/everything that you do.

Ok. I removed all the types I figured I could safely remove, and it didn't do spit. I started a new game, and just kept the time going so I could get a bunch of missions. I still had capture; I still had escort. So if what shadow says is true, that it's hard-coded, then why the hell would they make a txt file with that info in it if you can't do anything to it? Sigh.

Grrrr. There are several replies I could make to your rhetorical question, none of which would be considered polite or in keeping with the forum rules. Suffice to say that I have never been overly fond of the way that Altar designed the code (or failed to). My feelings about hard-coding things are fairly well known on these forums.

Altar did a reasonably good job with the GUI, great work with the art, nice design overall with the game, but when it comes down to implementing their ideas in actual code, they need both better coders and much more importantly, a project manager that understands modern software design techniques. Oh, and while I'm on the subject of modern coding, they need to bring the game into the 21st century and use Python and XML rather than continue to reuse 20+ year old C++ programming styles. The chances of this happening while Cenega is paying the bills? Zilch. 'Nuff said.