Long War: Community Edition, or LWCE, is a community effort with four main goals:
Each of these is explored individually in more depth below.
Due to this mod's extensive overriding of base game classes, it is unlikely to be compatible with other mods that perform significant modifications. This limitation is why part of the goal of LWCE is to expose new modding APIs, allowing fully-featured mods to be built on top of LWCE without conflicting.
Want to know more? Check out the project wiki for developers, or some screenshots to get a glimpse of what we're all about.
:warning: Long War: Community Edition is a work in progress. Any release not marked as Stable is likely to be full of bugs, and you will probably not be able to play an entire campaign.
If you're planning to work on LWCE, or write mods for LWCE, see building locally. If you just want to install LWCE to check it out, head over to Releases, download the latest, and run the installer.
As LWCE modifies game binaries directly, there is no easy way to revert back to Long War 1.0. You can use Steam to validate game files and restore those binaries, then reinstall Long War 1.0 on top of that.
There are a number of bugs in Long War 1.0, which were either introduced by Long War, or existed in vanilla Enemy Within. They can be broadly classed into two categories:
An example of the first category is that when purchasing Interceptors in XCOM HQ, after submitting the order, the amount of money you have doesn't visibly update right away. It does update behind the scenes, so this doesn't cause any problems, but it is a small bug that can be annoying.
In the second category, we have bugs such as the smoke defense bonus not applying to overwatch shots. Fixing this does impact the game balance, because now you can make it significantly safer for your units to run overwatch.
When there are bug fixes in the second category, LWCE does not enable those fixes right away. Instead, the bug fix can be enabled using an ini variable, and the normal Long War 1.0 behavior is used otherwise. This allows LWCE to be used by anyone who wants its quality of life improvements, while not differing from the Long War 1.0 experience.
For a list of Long War bugs tracked and/or fixed by LWCE, see here.
While many quality-of-life changes are still pending, we do have a few in place already:
There's much more to come! If you're the author of a QoL mod that you think should be integrated in LWCE, feel free to reach out.
Long War has sophisticated logic throughout its various systems, but due to the limited modding techniques available at the time it was written, the authors were unable to add new ini files and variables. This meant they could only make functionality configurable by hijacking a configuration variable that existed in Enemy Within. Thanks to newer modding techniques, we can now get around this and offer additional ini files to make the Long War experience far more personalizable.
For an example of the types of configuration now possible, take a look at DefaultLWCEStrategyAI.ini.
Documentation for mod hooks is not yet completed, but will use a similar system as XCOM 2: data templates and events. As much as possible has been made to match the equivalent system in XCOM 2, so that modders who are familiar with those will be more comforatble with LWCE mods.
Mutator-based mods, which were widely used for Enemy Within and Long War 1.0, are not supported in LWCE. The sheer scale of how much has been rewritten to make LWCE work means that old mods are very unlikely to be compatible.
In addition to making mods easier to create, they're also much, much easier to install with LWCE. We've managed to make them simply drag-and-drop into a pre-created Mods folder! Someday, we'd even like to extend this to a one-click-install experience similar to XCOM 2's Steam Workshop integration.
:warning: These steps are only tested on Windows systems. For other OS's you may need to modify these extensively.
These steps will get you able to build and run LWCE on your own machine. We make extensive use of symbolic links, or symlinks, so make sure you know how to create them on your system.
If you have written and built mods for XCOM: Enemy Within before, you may be able to skip most of this section. However, some steps are unique to LWCE's environment, so still read through to see if you need to make any changes!
XCOM: Enemy Within was built using the 2011-09 version of the UDK, so we use the same one. You can download it from the Nexus. Make sure to note the installation path, as you will refer back to it frequently. Throughout this README we will refer to the installation path as UDK_PATH.
:warning: The UDK installer doesn't create a subfolder at the given path. For example, if you install at
D:\, it will happily extract the UDK's contents directly intoD:\and make things difficult to navigate. Make sure you create a subfolder yourself and install it there.
After installing the UDK, navigate to UDK_PATH and check that you have the folders Binaries, Development, Engine, and UDKGame. To check that you are set up properly, execute UDK_PATH/Binaries/Win32/UDK.exe make to build the sample game that comes with the installer.
To proceed, you'll need to have LWCE itself installed. We're going to use the same installation process that players use. This will apply binary patches to XComEW.exe that are annoying to apply by hand, as well as a few other necessary changes. Head over to Releases and grab the most recent release, then install it.
With the UDK and LWCE both installed, we still need to configure the dev environment. If you're on Windows, there's a PowerShell script to do this for you. Navigate to Scripts/setup_lwce_dev.ps1 and run it as administrator. Follow the steps of the script to set up your environment.
If for some reason you can't use the setup script, or don't want to, expand the section below to see manual setup steps.
You can edit UnrealScript files any way you like, including a basic notepad editor if you want. One setup which works well is using Visual Studio Code, which is free and relatively lightweight. You can install the UnrealScript extension to get language support, though many of the features may only work sporadically. It still provides syntax highlighting at minimum, which is well worth having.
If you're using VS Code, you can also create a custom build task which executes UDK_PATH/Binaries/Win32/UDK.exe make, so that you can build by simply pressing Ctrl + Shift + B. Here's an example of the task JSON, which you can adjust for your own UDK_PATH:
{
"version": "2.0.0",
"tasks": [
{
"label": "UDK Build (Debug)",
"type": "shell",
"command": "C:\\UDK\\UDK-2011-09\\Binaries\\Win32\\UDK.exe make",
"group": "build"
}
]
}These steps assume you're playing through Steam. If not, they should still be applicable; you just need to apply the launch options to your own launcher method.
--noRedScreens -noStartUpMovies -log -allowConsoleAfter the game starts, a separate window should open which contains log output. These logs are also written to a file which is overwritten every time the game launches. For me, the file is at Documents/my games/XCOM - Enemy Within/XComGame/Logs/Launch.log. Note that the log window is unbuffered, while the file is buffered, so you may not see the latest output in the file unless you close the game.
LWCE begins logging even at the main menu, without loading a game. To verify that LWCE is running properly, open the log file and search for XComLongWarCommunityEdition, which all LWCE log lines begin with. If you find it, congratulations - you're all set up to build and run Long War: Community Edition!