Professor Sparks

The soldier is 1 square away from the corner, unless it's Inspector Gadget with his extensible neck, he can't "peek around the corner" from there. And I never said that I expected the game to "precisely calculate the geometry of every single object". All the lines and marks on the images are based on the tile grid, not on "the geometry of every single object". I can see the standard response in this forum is "go fix it yourself". I won't bother to post any more. Sorry for having polluted your bug report forum with bug reports.

They're not, actually. The shields are 5x3 squares (you can see when they're on the floor). The backpack is 5x5, so they should fit. There's code in the game specifically to prevent them from fitting (no idea why - it's perfectly possible to carry another shield on your back, if you can handle its weight). I could understand maybe 5% chance of being "blocked"; even that isn't realistic for a wooden fence vs. a bullet, but I suppose it could alter the trajectory of the bullet slightly and make it miss (and since the game doesn't support that, "blocking" would be a substitute). But a 24% chance to stop a bullet fired by a rifle, that isn't even travelling through it (it's travelling above it) ? That's a bug. It might be a design bug (not a typo in the code), but it's still a bug, and should be treated as such. You can clearly see the bullet travelling above the fence and disappearing. If a piece of thin air above a crate blocked bullets in CoD or some other shooter, no one would call it "a design decision", they'd call it a bug. It gets worse, BTW - bullets also get blocked by 10 cm tall flowerbeds. Gives "flower power" a whole new meaning. And if shield users have never been able to climb over fences, that makes it even stranger that so many maps have areas fully enclosed by fences (and at least two of them start with all your xenonauts inside such areas). Again, having maps that make one of the game's classes impossible to use definitely fits my definition of a bug (unless it was deliberate, in which case it feels like the map is trolling you: "haha, you brought shields, sucker!" but I doubt any serious mapper would do that, as mentioned in my first post). The simplest solution is probably to make all fences destructible with a single melee attack, but I have no idea if this can be done globally or if it means going through every map and changing it individually.

Here is another image showing the LOS bug (or possibly a slightly different bug). I suspect this might be related to the "lean around corners" thing being incorrectly applied when the soldier is not near any corners. Notice how not only is the LOS incorrect when looking east, but when the soldier is rotated to look NE (which shouldn't change the visibility of any tiles, it should just rotate the cone of view 45 degrees), the error gets even worse. This bug also affects line of fire, BTW, so it's not merely a way to see enemies that should be invisible, you can also shoot them, in some circumstances. In the image above, I am able to shoot the andron, and the bullets travel through the brick wall without any problems (they are, ironically, partially blocked by the low wooden fence after the brick wall, but that's a different issue). And the aliens benefit from this bug, too. For example, aliens standing 2 squares away from a corner can face into the wall and shoot someone on the other side of the corner. So the supposed advantage of standing at corners to be able to shoot enemies on the side without being visible to them (as mentioned in one of the loading screen tips) doesn't actually work - you are visible to them, and they can hit you as if you had no cover at all, even though you are on the corner tile and they are 2 or 3 tiles away from the corner, and supposedly have no LOS to you (let alone an unobstructed line of fire). All they need to do is turn 45 degrees, to gain X-ray vision.

The details aren't little; the forum resized the image. I actually used a font larger than the Xenonauts UI font, so if the forum shrinks every image, it's going to be a problem for the game text as well. There should be a setting in the forum configuration to prevent resizing; I post on several other vBulletin forums and they keep the original images (at least up to 1920x1080) just fine.

It might be "a 5 minute bug fix" for people who know which parts of which files to edit. And that's why I reported it in the bug report forum - so that the people who develop the game (and presumably can fix it in 5 minutes) may do so. If players just edit their local files and don't report things, they never get fixed in the game. Anyway, I find it very hard to believe that no one has ever tried moving across a fence with a shield carrier, or that no one has noticed that picket fences block >20% of bullets, so I assume(d) that these problems were due to some recent change (ex., loading the properties for the wrong type of wall).

This is a combination of four problems, nicely illustrated by one image (attached). 1. For some inexplicable reason, and despite being able to hold their shield about 30 cm off the ground at all times, xenonauts can't lift it over a simple fence (or, in fact, even a flowerbed), nor can they throw it over the fence and then climb after it. 2. Shields can't be placed inside or attached to backpacks. 3. Fences in XCE seem to be made of the hardest substance in the universe, and able to project a force field across their gaps and above them. They block bullets (23% chance!), resist C4, and their gates are so tightly locked that not even a full squad of elite troopers can open them. 4. Some maps start with all the xenonauts completely enclosed by a fence. Coupled with the above, makes players feel like the mapper is trolling you (although it's probably just a case of poor testing - or making the logical assumption that all xenonauts will be able to climb over or destroy the fences). The result is that any shield users that happen to be in one such mission have to either remain inside their little "pen" or ditch the shield, and go cowboy for the rest of the mission. Yes, I know I can bring extra guns, but that doesn't change how ridiculous all of the above are, nor does it make possible to use shields outside the fenced area. Shield users should be able to climb over fences, they should be able to hang the shield on their back, the fences should be (very easily) destructible, shouldn't offer any protection from bullets, and no areas should be completely enclosed by fences (though that wouldn't really matter if the other issues were fixed).

What's the point of having an image upload feature in this forum, then?

Sometimes looking directly at something makes it disappear, whereas looking 45 degrees to the side reveals it. I've attached an annotated screenshot. It's as if the view cone is being calculated based on the tile in front of the xenonaut, instead of the tile (s)he is actually standing on. Edit - I've just noticed the forum decided to resize and recompress the image without even warning me about it. If anyone knows a way to prevent this, let me know. The original is around 1800x700 / 400kB.