Talk:Research
I'd like to see 'optimal research trees' being discussed, with the obvious endpoints of 1) Avenger (which includes Firestorm), 2) Flying Suit, 3) Heavy Plasma/Clip, 4) Plasma Beam, 5) Psi Lab/Psi-Amp. Working in the advancing profitability of Motion Scanner, etc., ultimately to Laser Cannon. Surely there are opportunities for overlap and optimization, depending on one's goals (quick victory, best Avenger/Psi fighting force)... discussion / new wiki topic? I'm new to wikis - pardons if questions aren't usually asked this way?
Good job on the re-write, Ethereal. It was another eclectic collection page that you've made much more neat and informative.
I see you hacked RESEARCH.DAT - excellent work! We really needed those. Was there only the project name and research times in RESEARCH?
Now that I know all the projects are there, maybe I'll revisit those total research time findings. If you want the spreadsheet I used, you're welcome to it. Ultimately though it's more a factoid than anything important.
Were those Notes in the Research Trees fixed correctly? (Notes 1 & 2 were incorrect and meant the same thing?) Also the current lone note is slightly hard to find... Maybe the "notes" should simply be noted in italic, right at the point where they apply?
FWIW the Discussion note (above this) is one of the very first things I ever put on the wiki. I didn't know how to sign then.
---MikeTheRed 18:17, 22 May 2006 (PDT)
Thanks. No project names in research.dat -- but the order of projects on the Research screen matches the order in research.dat. Combined with the known values (mostly derived from the .cfg file included with xcomutil, I think), it wasn't that hard to figure out what everything was. The missing stuff was mostly research times for individual aliens, and I was able to run filecompare (fc.exe) before and after starting research projects on them to see which entries they corresponded to. Bytes 0x01 and 0x02 (zero-indexed) seem to match the values in astore.dat: 01 01 is a Sectoid Commander, 01 02 Sectoid Leader, etc.
I didn't try to figure out what all the bytes are, but if I remember correctly, some corresponded to whether the topic was available to study, whether the item/alien was in Stores... I seem to remember research time left (in hours) was stored in projects.dat.
The number of aliens you need to research to fill out the entire UFOPaedia is a little variable -- you can study aliens that give nothing, and early on, some will give two entries. I believe 11 corpses (180 ea.) + 9 live aliens (192 ea) (2 of which are Medics for live Sectopod and Cyberdisc) + 8 Navigators (192) + 8 Engineers (192) is a good approximation. This assumes none of the "9 live" are engineers or navigators, but also that there's a leader and commander in there: no efficiencies, but no redundancies either.
Your total time graph is useful (and it'd be nice to see it for w/ and w/o all the alien projects) -- the efficiencies part is esoteric, especially taken out to 10 labs, but to see 12 mos vs. 6 vs. 4 for 1 / 2 / 3 labs is quite informative.
Hmm, I should fix the note on the hovertanks a little, just got lazy on that point.
I'm still not sure how best to structure the Popular Sequences section.
--Ethereal Cereal 19:58, 22 May 2006 (PDT)