                       X-COM II Saved Game editor, v1.4
                             by JL Enterprises, 1995


Introduction
------------
XCOMII is an ingenious game by Microprose that does not take much time at
all to master.  The game itself, however, sometimes becomes difficult
because you must manage your resources carefully.  This simple little
program allows you to edit various items stored in the saved game files
created by UFO, such as your total money, the various items in your
storehouses, the types of buildings you have on your different bases,
and also the statistics of any soldier that you have recruited.


Description of Options
----------------------
The money editing option is fairly simple and merely gives you whatever
dollar amount you enter.  Note that it is not really recommended that you
enter a value that is too significantly higher than the "lots" button as
when you get paid again in the game, your dollar amount will wrap around
to 0.  If this happens, you can always use the editor again.

The inventory option allows you to modify the amount of any particular
item you have in the storehouses at any particular base.  Be warned that
the editor allows you to modify your game so that you have more items
than you have space for.  The only problem with this is that if you move
an item from your stores into a ship, you will not be able to move it back
unless you use the editor and decrease the amount of items you have so that
the total space used can be stored within your storehouses.

One might ask why you'd need to create buildings when you can do that in
the game. Well, for one thing, it won't require any money to create
buildings inside my editor, and also, the construction is instantaneous.
If you just want to quickly finish a building that you have already started
construction on in the game, you and right-click on the building itself
and the editor will quickly finish constuction of the building.

The soldier editor option is especially useful because you can greatly
improve the accuracy of your soldiers and can even put any type of armour
available in the game on your men.  You can promote your soldiers to any
rank, reanimate dead soldiers, and even do immediate (and free) transfers
to your other bases.  Version 1.1 of the editor introduced the ability
to edit the names of your characters to whatever you like.  Version 1.2
added the ability to do an mass editing of many soldiers at once.  When
you chose this option, any changes that you make at the next screen will
be applied to all soldiers at all of the checked bases.

One thing that is good to note about this editor is that it allows the
importing of your characters from an old XCOM I game into an XCOM II game.
This feature was added in version 1.1 of the editor and allows players
with well-seasoned characters to continue right where they left off!
Unfortunately, since I cannot identify all aspects of the saved game file,
not everything converts correctly.  For instance, the image which
represents your character when you're doing a personal view in the combat
screen is not correctly converted (and probably gender).  If anyone can
send me details on how the game records this information in both of two
games, I can probably try to fix this.

Another function of this editor is to allow you to edit the strengths and
aspects of the weapons and ammo used in the game itself.  With these two
options, you can modify any weapon so that it does not require any ammo
at all, takes no time to shoot it, has greater than 100% accuracy, and
is extremely explosive, or whatever you like.  Be warned that these changes
do not apply specifically to any saved game, but to the entire game itself.
Also, be careful about editing a weapon into a superweapon, especially if
you know that the aliens that you are fighting against possess this super
weapon too.

One of the nicest features of this editor is that as of version 1.2, it
now has options to make an emergency backup a your saved game by running
PKZIP (that already must be in your DOS path statement).  This allows you
to easily revert back to a previous copy of the game should you make
significant changes that negatively affect your saved game.  Remember,
this editor is not warranted to always be able to perform as expected.
I have tried to throughly test it on my system with my version of the
game, yet it may not work with other releases that Microprose may release.
I seriously recommend that you make a backup of each game you modify when
you first use this editor.

Version 1.3 also adds a button which will increase your knowledge in the
game by giving you credit for researching all items that you can in the
game, giving you access to all entries in the game's Ufopedia, and the
ability of your engineers to produce all items the game allows.

The tactical editor allows you to modify the health, energy, time units,
and several other fields for all of the soldiers and aliens while you have
landed at a site.  Note that these values reflect the current values and
not the maximums, which means if you edit the time units for one of your
soldiers, at the beginning of the next turn, it will be reset back to the
value it would normally be set to.  The same applies to the other values
which slowly recover at the end of each turn.  This function is still useful
as you can use it to seriously disadvantage aliens by reducing their health
or armour.


Installation
------------
This editor was originally written with the use of a VGA monitor in mind,
however, I've taken care to write my routines so that they should run on
even a monochrome monitor (although the lowest monitor that I was able to
test this program on was a CGA).  This editor also requires a mouse to run
(basically a requirement for the game anyways).  You will also require at
least enought space on your hard drive to place the exe file of the editor
in your main XCOM2 directory.  Also, a mouse is absolutely required to use
the editor at all and there does not seem to be any change in this
requirement in any future versions.


Comments/Common Problems
------------------------
Keep in mind that the weapons and ammo editors modify the file OBDATA.DAT
which is stored in the GEODATA directory where your XCOM game is located.
This means that if you're playing the CD version of the game, you will
not be able to use these two portions of the editor.  I have been informed
by a user that you can install the game completely on your hard drive and
then run the editor from that directory without any problems.  To do this,
run the INSTALL file on the cd uder the directory HARDDISK.  It only takes
20 MB of hard disk.  I am working on a TSR which may be able to override
files that are present on the CD-ROM and redirect accesses to them to the
hard drive (I actually already wrote it, but for a different purpose and
I need to do some customization to it).  Once this is complete, complete
installation of the game on your hard drive should become unnecessary.

Due to the fact that I realized that some versions of the game seem to use
a different encoding to store which base a soldier is located at and I have
not yet found an easy way to determine which soldier is at which base, I
have temporarily removed the functions which relate to base location in the
soldier editor and importing functions.  Instead, a single list of all
soldiers will be presented instead of a divided list of soldiers located
at each base.  This should hopefully be fixed in the next version of the
editor.

Also forthcoming is a new function to allow you to be able to see everywhere
around you at a site without having to explore everything first.  I will also
be adding the capability of editing all aspects of your soldiers while you're
using the tactical soldier editor (there are a couple of fields that I left
out, including all of the ones which store how much ammo and which weapons
you're currently carrrying).

Also I've heard that some people encounter a problem which makes the stats
of your soldiers decrease very rapidly (more than normal) when some of your
fields are greater than a certain value.  For this reason, I have made the
"Lots" button default to the value of 180.  This seems to be a bug in the
way in which the game calculates the amount to decrease your energy after
each move.

            
Revision Log
------------
1.0 - initial release
1.1 - added soldier import function and the weapon and ammo editors.
      fixed a bug in the soldier editor that would unintentionally move
      many of your soldiers to other bases.  added ability to edit the
      names of your soldiers.
1.2 - fixed a bug in the bravery editing of the soldier editor.  added
      pkzip/pkunzip buttons to make and restore backups of your saved
      games.  a couple of other internal memory allocation problems fixed.
      (this was not a widely distributed version)
1.3 - made many of the error messages more informative.  revised documention
      significantly.  made the registration procedure more tolerant of
      upper/lower case letters and symbols in your name and phone numbers.
      added button to increase your knowledge, edit multiple soldiers in
      the soldier editor, and shortcut to quickly finish any building with
      the right mouse button.
1.4 - very minor changes in this version.  the maximum button has been
      replaced with a lots button, which defaults to 180 when editing
      soldier attributes.  the mouse routines have been modified slightly
      so that if Windows is detected, the graphical mouse cursor is disabled
      and will instead use the mouse cursor generated by the mouse driver,
      which eliminates problems encountered when running the editor in a
      windowed DOS box.  the tactical editor now puts checkmarks next to
      enemy units so that they may be distinguished more easily.


Distribution/Registration
-------------------------
First of all, this program is distributed only through Shareware means,
which means that it depends upon others to upload it to any appropriate
on-line service that maintains collections of similar programs.  You are
encouraged to do this, however this editor must be distributed without
any modifications to the program itself and with all of files that you
originally received with it.  Furthermore, any disassembling, modification,
reverse-engineering, distribution of registration key files, serial numbers,
or programs that attempt to defeat the registration of this program, or any
other activities that might possibly deny the author of this saved game
editor of any registration fees is forbidden and strongly discouraged.

Second, the usage of this program is not free.  I require that if you use
this program more than once, you should register.  Registration only costs
US $5 and will remove the 'enter the number' prompt upon startup and will
also display that the program is registered to you--to give you something
to be proud of.  Additionally, as of version 1.3, all new functions will
not be available until your register.

To register, simply send US $5 along with your name, telephone number,
and a self-addressed stamped envelope (so I can mail your registration
number to you without having to figure out the correct postage) to the
below address (note somewhere that you are registering XCOM2EDIT).  If you
have an e-mail address, feel free to enclose it instead of the envelope
(saves you a couple stamps) and I will send your code to you that way.

Please make sure that all personal checks are made to Jeff Lawson.  Any
checks made to JL Enterprises cannot be accepted and will be returned.


How to reach the author
-----------------------
I can reached via Snail-mail at:

        Jeff Lawson
        340 E. Foothill Blvd.
        Claremont, CA 91711-5990
        USA

or through E-mail at:

        JLawson@Hmc.Edu    or    JeffLawson@Aol.Com

also via phone at:

        (909) 607-2073    or    (213) 258-5604

and also on the John Muir High School BBS:

        (818) 791-4064

The latest version of this program should always be available from my home
page at "http://bovine.st.hmc.edu"