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  1. Hi guys, I thought it was time to give everyone an update from behind the scenes, rather than just on the topics that are hot at the moment (ie. the things going into Build V8 etc). This is just a random collection of thoughts that I thought I'd put down rather than a comprehensive list, but I wanted everyone to be aware of what we were doing behind the scenes... Aircraft weapons - some good news, we've had an old team member returning from about a year of medical absence. Kris was the artist who did all the weapon tiles in the game, so he's very talented, and he's generally was a useful part of the team anyway. He was initially responsible for the upgrade to the forum pre-order badge graphics, but now he's started work on the aircraft weapons. These were originally going to be shared with the vehicles, but we decided to stop cutting corners and just do them all seperately. We've come up with some quite cool designs and we're expecting to have all the aircraft weapon art done by next weekend probably. As you may have seen in the recent build, we've also tweaked the setup a bit. There's now three distinct types of weapon - the cannons, the light missiles and the heavy missiles. The idea is that cannons are short range but excellent at chewing up enemy fighters but weak against armoured targets, light missiles are good general purpose weapons, and heavy missiles cannot hit the agile UFOs but are very effective against large targets. Previously weapons were going to straddle some of those categories, but in fact I think it's a better idea to have the weapons stick in their categories. If we want to mix things up, we'll change the mix of slots on the aircraft rather than changing the weapons themselves. We've got the art to do for the vehicle weapons after that. Again, shouldn't take too long - particularly as in this case everything is already modelled in 3D so we have references. We've also got the corpse tiles for the aliens coming in the next two weeks - once those are done, that's all the 2D art done for the game (until we redo the GUI at least). Animation - Animation, another big issue for us in the past, has been ticking over nicely for a few months now. Some of you would have met Dan on the forums - he's basically been doing all our animation work for quite a while now and is full-time on the project. We've modelled up the vast majority of the human weapons with the 'core' Xenonaut armour types, and although we might need to come up with some new animations for the other armour type we're not too far away from completing the Xenonaut unit animations. We've got some of the animations done for the aliens, but only about half of them are rigged and those that are have only been animated with the basic weapons. We'll start animating them with the more exotic weapons after the humans are done. Then there's the vehicles, which are at the bottom of our priority list at the moment. In short, though, animation is coming along well and isn't really a concern for me any more. Providing we keep the current pace of work up, we should have most of the animations in place for the beta. The big roadblock right now is the rendering times, but I'm rendering 2/3 weapon/armour combinations a day so these are also ticking over. It'll take some time for the animations to all get into the game in spritesheet form but the process is in place now. This is why it's important to report the missing sprites in our builds from V8 onwards, as the new animations from then on will become the animations in the final game too. Tiles - As before, the tilesets are probably the biggest hurdle between where we are now and where we want to be. There's two issues; the lack of tilesets full stop and then the lack of UFO tilesets specifically. Concentrating on the first one for now, we've only got the Industrial tileset in the game and I'm sure everyone is getting bloody sick of looking at it by now (I know I am). It also makes our screenshots look REALLY repetitive. Well the good news is we're working on other ones too. One of our artists is working on the Western Town tileset, which we've got one building done of four and are working on the props for it now. It's looking good, but progress is kinda slow because he doesn't have that much time to spare per week. I'm confident he'll have the one tileset done for some point in the beta, but there's not too much I can show off for that now. The other tilesets are in varying states of completion. We actually have a Desert (ie. Arab) tileset mostly complete at the moment, which was done by the artist who did the Industrial tileset several months back. The tiles are in the current build actually (/tiles/desert) and we've started work on painting them over with the 2D artist to get them to game standard (not in the build yet) but I'm a bit unconvinced by the tileset as a whole. There just seems something missing in it. I might sit down and make some proper maps with it and see how it looks, but I get the impression it'll need some more additions before we can call it finished. Quite what, I don't know exactly... The Farmyard tileset we had done waaay back hasn't been converted to the new system, but it shouldn't be that hard to do given that there's guide tiles right there. Maybe I'll recruit an artist to get that done. We've also got the wall tiles done for the human / Xenonaut base tileset, but we've not begun to populate the rooms yet because the supporting code isn't in place yet and also the look will probably be somewhat defined by the new UI style. The biggest issue is the UFO tiles, though. We all know it's a bit annoying attacking the Evil Alien Shed instead of an actual UFO, but it also means we can't really send the build to journalists in the current form. Thankfully, we've started actively taking steps to rectify this. Kris has been helping me with 3D modelling of the Alien Scout against a tile grid. We've finished the basic geometry for this now, and we're going to carve it up into tiles. The basic plan is that there'll be a 'damaged' and 'destroyed' variant of each UFO exterior, and all the tiles involved will be indestructible. The inside of each UFO will vary based on map randomisation but the exterior tiles will remain the same. The UFO tiles are out priority so hopefully we'll have a painted UFO hull available to recover in the next 2-3 weeks. Xenopedia art - Now I think about it, it's not true we'll have all the 2D art done when the vehicle weapons are done. Most of the Xenopedia art isn't done either, but I'm not willing to start on that until the beta as the research tree needs to be tested before we do. I don't want to do art for something and then have it cut out of the game. Unit Armour - We've done a bit of work on this too. We've now implemented jetpacks and the related pathfinding (although sprites aren't in yet), and armours now have visual cones and sight ranges that can be individually customised in armours_gc.xml so the lighter armours can be given bigger sight cones now. Money - Things have gone pretty well in the 10 days or so since we launched. We've recieved just under 450 pre-orders since we launched on Desura, which is great and has helped make up for the lost revenue from the six weeks prior. Of course our net income per sale has roughly halved since we moved from Paypal to Desura due to the price drop, the Desura fees and the sales tax they are obliged to collect (we were too small to have to do that before), but it's still helped us out financially. Interestingly, about 45% of our sales through Desura to date have been Premium orders so I'm really glad we added that option - and really grateful to all the people who chose to support us that way! Overall, things are going quite well. We're all pretty busy at this end, particularly on the coding side, but things are still progressing even if not quite as fast as I'd have hoped. V8.1 may slip back to next week as I'm away all weekend at a wedding in Northern Ireland, or alternatively it may be downgraded to a bugfix and we'll do the full ground combat save / load and Research tree thing next week. I'm yet to decide - it depends how tomorrow goes really. Happy to take questions if people have any specific enquiries.
  2. Hi guys - been a few weeks since I posted an update (though the V17.5 changelog gives you an idea of what we've been working on recently). I'm just going to make a quick post on what we're working on at the moment: Firstly, we're working on stability. As always, releasing a build ends up in us getting sidetracked for ages trying to get it stable again, and sure enough that has happened with V17.5(1). V17.52 will come out in the near future and should fix up the crash bugs, so the game will be stable enough to play again. Once that is done, we'll be working towards beta again. This involves a few key things: The Geoscape is basically done. The remaining work is largely implementing the new UI, which we've now started work on, but that's on a branch on the code so you won't see the results of the work until it is done. Perhaps we'll drip-feed the new screens into the beta as they are done, or perhaps we'll release them all at once, we'll see. The other thing we may do is add in an autoresolve for the air combat. If we do so, it'll be during the beta. Other than those two things, I think the strategic stuff is largely complete where functionality is concerned. For the ground combat, we're working on a few things: GJ is working on the AI We're generating new maps; in the final game we plan to have six maps per tileset (two for small UFOs, two for medium UFOs and two for large UFOs), giving us a total of over fifty. Hopefully they'll be done for the beta. We can see how it affects replayability at that point. We need to add some code to specify "command rooms" where the elite aliens spawn; once that's complete all the code should be in place for big UFOs and alien bases. We're rendering out the last 5-6 alien weapon / armour combinations, so the aliens are nearly all done (it'll be done this week). I've just realised we don't have enough female civilians in the game so we're getting some of them modelled up too, but they're the last thing we need done (though I'm considering re-rendering the Caesans due to inconsistent lighting for the existing ones). Giovanni is working on our new launcher, which uses a library that can be ported to Mac. When we have our stability fix up, I'll release some new test levels for the Scout and Corvette UFOs. I'd like to start locking down some of the layouts so we can get the final art in place for them. I did a runthrough of the game before Christmas to check the tech tree is working properly and you can correctly unlock all of the research items and workshop projects. I'm going to try and repeat that this week - it's a big prerequisite for getting the game balanced up! So that's what we'll be working on in the next couple of weeks. I hope in about two weeks we'll be able to give you an ETA on the beta.
  3. OK - we're still busy at work. I was going to try and release a new build today which fixed all the major crashes in the last one but some of the upgrades to the ground combat have introduced a new bug that is causing issues with the aliens spawning. So that's not going to happen until that is fixed. We are planning to release a new build on Friday too, or perhaps over this weekend. It's the continuation of our last build, hopefully having all of the aliens in it by then and having a few extra maps. It will also have quite a lot more of the research tree in it (with research descriptions, but probably not much game balance), and hopefully an AI update. If we don't have a major update for the AI this week, I'll ask GJ to write a post explaining what's going on on that front and explain why it's taking so long (I imagine the post would involve the word "engine" followed by a lot of rude words). Over the past few days I've been working on the Research tree, writing research descriptions. This takes a LONG time; each one is 3-5 paragraphs of semi-plausible technobabble and it takes me up to two hours to get it right. There's a lot of them too, sadly. I think I've done about a third of them so far. I'll be working on this for the next few days too and hopefully can make good progress on it. It's one of the last missing things in the game. Today I was working on the new UI Stores screen - this screen is now about 75% finished, and looks very much like the concept. It's rather cool seeing the first of the new UI screens nearing completion, as I think they'll add a lot to the game. This is in a separate branch of the code, though, so you won't see any new screens for a while yet. But work is moving ahead on that. Same with the new launcher too, which should be done in the next couple of weeks. Aaron's been busy working on the Middle East tileset, and we're doing a few more ground tiles for that. It turned out that it wasn't that interesting with the existing tiles but we've got a few new props for it too now, so it should have a proper map in the update this weekend. We're now turning our attention to the Alien Base tileset, and once we have a stable enough build to test the UFO layouts in, we'll finalise them and start work on the final art for those too. So, should be an interesting week. Sorry for the ongoing stability issues, hopefully there'll be a big payoff this Friday / weekend.
  4. Welcome to the new development update forum. I've decided to split this forum off from the Announcements forum, which is talking about actual build releases, so I can use this one to talk about development progress on the project that is not always strictly relevant to the next update. So, development. My main concern right now is getting to a basic beta. I think we're in range of a quick sprint there, but if we're going to do that it's more than likely we're going to be spending three or four weeks with the current public build with no updates before we reach beta. This is why I'm finding the Farm crash bug so annoying; we can't leave the game unplayable for three or four weeks at a time. We've also taken quite a bit of money in recent weeks thanks to the Firaxis X-Com raising interest in the genre and not quite nailing the job of following up the original X-Com, at least in the eyes of the hardcore fans. I find it a bit concerning that their first experience of the game is probably massive Desura issues and then a game full of crash bugs. People have suggested I talk more on the News page about what's going on, but I'm loathe to do it until we've got the crash bug fixed. I don't want to attract a load of people, only for them to have a crap first experience of the game. V17 is released today and hopefully should be stable. If so it means we can gear up for the sprint to beta (I'll post a separate thread for our beta plans shortly) and it means I can start to talk a bit more, maybe do some PR work too. But really, stability is my priority. Incidentally, the Desura issues are being caused by the massive number of files in the game (the dev version has close to 120,000 now). This also causes ludicrous install times and the like. Happily, it would appear we've found a solution to the issue despite not having access to the source code of the engine. We can pack the files into an archive and the game can read them from there. We're still assessing how this will affect our workflow and limit the ability of modders to change the game, but at the very least we're going to archive the /units/ and the ground tile folders. This should reduce the file quantity in the game by about 2/3 and should fix the Desura issues and generally make the game more manageable. If it is problematic for our workflow, it may be that this has to be a gradual process (the first batch should reduce the file quantity by 50% or so, then we'll archive assets after we've stopped actively developing that area). I really hope this improves the quality of the experience for our players, and gets people of Desura's back a bit too. They're not perfect, but they do try their best and they are helpful guys - the standalone download feature was implemented specifically for us, for instance. The next biggest game on their servers in terms of file quantity was 10,000 apparently, compared to our massive 60-70k files. I'm not entirely surprised their systems broke - but hopefully we can put all that behind us soon! In wider development terms, the biggest change in the last few weeks is that we've moved into this new office. This took the best part of a week to get set up and working but it's been an amazing boost to my productivity (and sanity). Development is really rattling along these days, to the point I can barely keep up. I foolishly decided to not work for one of the days this weekend and my inbox was stuffed full on Monday. It's been a while since development was going at this pace and it's a good place to be, though it does mean I've got even less time for PR than usual. The chief reason for this massive speed boost is we've taken on our first full-time employee, Aaron. He's been working with us for about a year as our 3d tile artist, so he produces the basic 3D models for all the buildings and props that you see in the game (they are then painted over by a 2D artist before they are "finished"). He's now joined us in a full-time role and will be helping out on the design work going forward too. He'll be posting up something himself shortly, but basically he's been working on finishing the remaining buildings for all the tilesets in the game and is now starting on the props for all the tilesets so our missions are less open. This has led to us being able to put our new tilesets in the game - we've put our Arctic, Middle East and Desert tilesets in the game over the past month and we're adding cover and unique civilians to them at the moment to make them more playable. We've also got working concepts for the Alien Base going, and we'll be getting the Xenonaut base set up properly in the near future too. We've also done a bunch of the ground tiles and all the building tiles for the Soviet Town tileset, but I've not been able to test them all out yet. Basically, the lack of map variation in the game will cease to be a problem soon. The sprite rendering is going OK too - we're working on getting all the civvies and friendly AI units in the game, then we'll be rendering all the aliens out. Again, I think having the local unit variations has really added a lot to the game and once all the enemies are in the game it'll feel that much more complete for it. Finally, I guess I should quickly chat about coding. We've got a few odds-and-ends going on, such as adding base breaches so aliens no longer attack Xenonaut bases through the hangars all the time, but the biggest things are the file archiving mentioned above and the AI. GJ is busy with exams this week but in general progress is good. I'll get him to post some updates here so you lot stay in the loop, but I'm sure you can see that we're moving in the right direction there. The final piece of the puzzle is the new UI - that'll appear in the early beta I think. Oh, and we should have a Steam page up shortly too. That'll be nice to raise project awareness (though it won't support pre-ordering yet). Right, time to write up the beta plans..
  5. With the news that the forums and sites are back up, and I've fixed Desura Connect etc, we are back to where we were 7-8 days ago. Yay! Thankfully, though, the entire project hasn't been caught in a massive time warp so it's probably worth mentioning what we've been working on recently. Our current plans are to release a build next weekend, though I'll give more details on what will be in it (and in future builds) in a seperate post. The first thing to mention is hiring. We've chosen our new level designer, a fellow called Adam, and yesterday I got him set up on the SVN and on our baug tracking software. His role on the team will be to be in charge of the tiles and maps. It'll be useful to have one person setting up all the tiles and tile properties, and dealing with mis-set tiles when reported in the bug forums. This will no longer be me (it was a big timesink) and it should lead to more consistency across the tilesets. Also, it means that shortly he will start generating new maps for everyone to play - so we won't be stuck on the same maps over and over again as we are now. It may take a good few weeks for him to settle into a routine of making maps that fit with the ones I've already made, but he's got some good ideas and I'm sure he'll learn quickly. Secondly, our hunt for a new AI coder is progressing well. We've had a lot of people apply, generally of a good standard, and we've narrowed the search down to a couple of people. We're currently just musing on who represents the best combination of value and expertise. It's just a shame some of these people didn't apply last time we were looking for an AI coder really. Hopefully we'll have a decision on who we're going with in the next few days. Onto development itself. We've implemented a bunch of new features in the game - the soldier medal system, the bleeding wounds system, collapsible buildings, customisable soldier advancement values, delays before equipment arrives etc. There'll be more details on this in the other post. We've not made as much progress as we were hoping on this front due to not having the SVN available last week, but we're doing OK. The rendering is progressing well. I'm currently rendering the last non-combat shield weapon for the normal Xenonaut armours. After this I need to render out the combat shield with the various associated weapons and then render out the weapons for the power armour (there's a lot less of those). Hopefully for the build after next, all the rendering for all the Xenonaut armour types and all the civilians and perhaps even all the vehicles will be done. This in itself will be a big step towards beta. The tile work is continuing to progress. We've nearly finished the 3D buildings for the Middle East tileset and have some of them done for the US Desert tileset too. In terms of 2D paintovers, we're working on the second dropship at the moment and once that is finished all the required dropship tiles for all three dropships will be in the game (this should only take another couple of days). Then we'll do the ground tiles for the Arctic and Soviet Town tilesets, which are the last two outdoor tilesets that need any ground tiles done on them. Naturally the buildings and props will appear much faster once our tile artist joins full time in a couple of months, but things are going at a reasonable rate at the moment anyway. Mac / Linux ports will hopefully be available the build after next. Mac ports may be available for the next build, but we're not sure. All in all, things are good. Provided everything works out with the AI coder we select, we're in a good place.
  6. So it's been a while since I posted up a major status update, beyond the changelog with each new build. Here's what's been going on a Goldhawk recently. The elephant in the room over the past few months was the Kickstarter - and to an extent, it still is. Has it been a success? We raised a lot of money. But it took us a good 6 weeks of planning, of which I think probably three weeks was time spent on other things than development, and then I probably lost a good two weeks during the Kickstarter itself to PR work, and it'll probably be another two weeks after the Kickstarter to deal with all the rewards. Was it worth the stress and diverted effort? I'd say it has been. It raised a lot of money, put us in touch with a new audience that would not otherwise have seen the game, and it's expanded the scope of the game a bit in several good ways (female soldiers, linux / mac ports that will allow us to do the Humble Bundle in future, adding a variety of in-game systems like suppression etc). There's also a lot to be said for milestones - they're hell at the time, but they're a great motivator. In a wider business context, it's also forced the issue of how the business is run. Previously I was operating as a sole trader but with the Kickstarter money arriving I've now formally transferred all the assets to Goldhawk Interactive Ltd. This means lots of admin, like opening a whole new set of bank accounts. Two bits of good news - this will let us back onto Paypal, and also we've now got a dollar denominated UK account too. This should save us a bit of money as lots of US people buy our game and we pay a lot of contractors in USD, but previously it always needed to go via GBP first. Foreign exchange fees can account for up to 5% of the value of the transaction every time you do a cross-currency trade, but that should be costing us far less in future. So that'll be nice. But needless to say, all the accounting admin associated with that has been a complete nightmare...but is now finished and is a load off my shoulders. I'm pleased to announce we're also hiring our first physical employee - our tile artist (he produces the 3D building / prop models that are painted over by the 2D artists). He'll be joining the team on a full-time basis once he's worked his three month notice period at his current job. His role on the team will obviously initially be to get the tilesets finished and populated with a good number of props, but in the long term he'll be taking some of the production and low-level design responsibilities off me. We're looking at the level designer vacancy at the moment, too. We have two people currently doing test maps for the role, and we'll make a decision as to which one to hire at the end of the week. Once they're hired they'll be in charge of generating new maps and getting the tile sprites etc set up properly and consistently. That's a big drain on my time, so generally I just don't do it. With someone else handling it, it should add a lot more variation to the game and get everything working much better. On the code front, the game is progressing well - you've probably seen we've added a lot of features to the game in the past two builds, which is always nice. We're currently in the middle of testing the medal system and the bleeding wounds system should be in the next build too. Looking beyond that, there's not a lot more work to do until we're feature complete. I'll post up a full list so people can point out where I've not included things I've promised I would, just so I don't miss anything! The rendering of the animated sprites is also going well. We've tweaked our render process and this ended up with a 300% render speed increase, so things are rattling along at quite a rate. There are 5 human armour suits that can use all the weapons, and we've done all the rendering for the first three tiers of normal weapons. We're in the middle of rendering out the final tier of guns, and then we'll be onto the more specialist weapons. The only issue here is the sheer size of the weapon sprites. Each weapon / armour combination is about 10 - 15mb, and the folder with the Xenonaut units in it is already over 1gb in size. I'm currently considering whether we'll want to cut out the Combat Shield and the Assault Shield, as each one of those needs to be rendered with 7 different weapons in the other hand for 5 different armour types, giving a total of 70 extra weapon / armour sets and nearly a 1gb increase to the size of the game to add effectively one item type. Particularly when we can add flashbangs instead. It'd save a bit of time on the coding front too. That'd mean we'd hopefully have all the Xenonaut units rendered and in the game by the end of the month. In the tile front we've started work on a couple of new tilesets. We started working on the Middle Eastern desert tilesets and then I figured it might be easier just to recolour some of the ground tiles into two desert sets. So we're going to have a Middle Eastern desert tileset (example) and a US / Africa style desert tileset (example). They will have some overlap but should look different enough for it to work. We've also been working on the UFO tiles, so now all the vital components of the UFOs that need to be captured have their tiles done. A lot of them are animated too. I'll be putting all them in the game for testing purposes shortly. There are two major things that may delay the game - the first are the tilesets, and the sheer scale of them. Our full-time tile artist will solve a lot of these problems when he joins up, but that's still three months away yet. My biggest concern, however, is the AI. Sadly we've just lost another AI coder, this one just disappearing off the face of the Earth entirely. This happened about five weeks ago now, but one of the difficulties with remote teams is it takes a while to work through. He reported in weekly anyway, so it took about two weeks for me to realise that there was a problem, then another week of enquiry emails asking what was going on before a final week of waiting to see if they respond to your ultimatum. Then there was an extra week of me being in denial, as AI's been such a thorn in our side recently. Anyway, I'm going to post the job up today along with our other vacancies and will also announce it on Kickstarter and Twitter in the hope of finding a new AI coder promptly. In our favour, I think we'll be able to build on the work done by the last guy rather then starting from scratch, and we can afford a good guy too. But still, it's something I could have done without... But overall, it's been a good few months. Posting up milestones should make things a bit clearer for everyone where we are too!
  7. So, the Kickstarter has been going for just over a couple of weeks and is going rather well. Obviously managing the Kickstarter has taken up quite a lot of my time (especially at first), but we’ve still been working on development. So, what’s the plan and how are things progressing development wise? The plan is to release a build about a week after the Kickstarter closes, which will give us enough time to pass around all of the Desura codes etc that we need, and also to collect details from the people who have pledged to put their names in the game. In development terms, progress has been slow relative to normal but we’re still getting stuff done. First thing that’s happened is we’ve implemented female soldiers. These operate in the same way to male soldiers, except they drawn from an entirely separate pool of names, faces and armour graphics. We’ve finished the updated Basic Armour (all other armour is the same) and we’re working on the portraits now. They should be done for the next build. Preview is here: www.xenonauts.com/devimages/female_basic.png www.xenonauts.com/devimages/female_jackal.png Next up, the pre-generated soldiers. We’ve implemented the code for this, so it’ll just be a question of adding a line of code and a portrait / hands image for each pre-generated soldier in the game. We’ve also implemented the Force Soldier box, which is at the bottom of the options screen. You can put up to 12 codes in this box, and each one overwrites one of the starting soldiers in every new game you create. If your name is in the game, you’ll receive a number to go in this box. That way, you can ensure that you appear in every single game you play – and you can share it with other people when they do Let’s Plays etc. I’ll probably put mine (1) in my forum signature so everyone can march me to their doom in their games if they feel the need; hopefully other people will do something similar. If you respond to the Kickstarter stuff quickly once it closes, we’ll put you in the next build. On another note, we’ll probably allow people to pay $100 to put their names in the game after the Kickstarter ends - all the way up to release. The code is already in place so there’s not really any extra cost for us to do it, and it’s the sort of thing that people seem pretty keen on. In the ground combat we’ve spent quite a while working on the multi-tile rendering. This involves getting the game to render sprites properly when they fill more than one tile. This has been a massive pain that took nearly two weeks, but we’ve got it solved now (or we certainly hope so). We’re now working on adding the accuracy reduction of smoke, and we’ve fixed up the issue with the Xenonaut soldiers not being able to reaction fire. We’ve also added in the alien racial abilities, although we’re still testing them and the AI isn’t bright enough to use them yet. Passive abilities like Sebillian regeneration and Andron wall-breaching will hopefully make an appearance in the next build. As should Androns themselves, once I’ve worked out why they’re not spawning at the moment. We’ve fixed a truckload of bugs on the Geoscape, as well as the female soldier and pre-generated soldier stuff. We’ve also done the Geoscape part of systems like the soldier medals, the research-linked damage bonus against specific alien species and we’ve laid the groundwork on the base defence batteries too. The defence batteries are basically functional, but need some more work on how they display the information when a UFO attacks the base. They are more streamlined than in X-Com. Essentially now you just build a defence battery (initially a Missile Battery) and then when you research more advanced weapons, they are automatically and instantly upgraded to more powerful defence batteries. For instance, researching Heavy Lasers instantly upgrades all Batteries to Laser Batteries. Also, partial damage to an attacking UFO will kill some of the invaders before they land. Each alien on a damaged UFO has a % chance to be killed by defensive fire that is = UFO % damage taken / 4. So there’s an incentive to have turrets even if they don’t quite manage to shoot down the attacking UFOs. We’ve also done some tweaks to the invasion AI that allow us finer control over the pace at which it advances. That means we should be able to make the game a bit more fun – we can have more UFOs earlier on, and stop them appearing in such overwhelmingly large numbers later on. As far as the Geoscape goes, it’s really only finishing the defence battery code and then adding the Final Mission stuff until it is feature complete (plus any new features from the Kickstarter). Then we’ll set about implementing the new UI. Once that is in, that part of the game is ready for beta. There’s still more to do on the ground combat and we’re tidying up a few odds and ends for the next few days, but we’ll be starting on the height level stuff soon. That should let us put hills in the game, which means we can get cracking on the Desert and the icy Tundra tilesets. Finally, I’m also doing a bit more rendering. Hopefully we’ll have all the animations for the third-tier weapons for the first three armours in the dev build shortly, as well as a few new alien types. There’s a couple of persistent rigging issues that have prevented us from adding the jetpack-enabled armours so far, and once they’re fixed we can put those two in too. I thought I had someone working on it, but they seem to have vanished without a trace. Such is indie development, though. We’ll find a replacement. I’ve not been that active on the forums lately for obvious reasons. I’ll try to get back into the swing of things with the next build release. In the meantime, just talk amongst yourselves…
  8. I've posted a news update on the Xenonauts site, which can be found here: http://www.xenonauts.com/category/news/ Not that much there that's not covered in the thread I posted on this forum a day or two ago, but there is an image of the first crashed UFO there.
  9. OK, I figured I'd better post one of these up because it's coming to the end of February and there's been some radio silence over the past week or so. First thing to say, I hope we'll have a new build out in the next couple of weeks. This will have AI in it again, the new Ground Combat UI and some significant UI upgrades to the Air Combat, amongst other things. We've also added a new UFO to the game and are working on the ground tiles for that at the moment. They should be in there too, along with the new tiles for the crashed alien Scout which include crash damage to the craft and the ground around it. Rendering has also continued, but I don't think we're ready to add any new alien races quite yet. We've also been adding quite a few functions to the game in terms of customisation - the points at which certain missions become available to alien UFOs and the points at which more powerful UFOs (and what type of UFO) are all completely moddable now. We've also made the base building maintenance and construction times moddable, so essentially we should have all the tools to properly start balancing the game shortly. Major developments this month have been: 1) We've parted company with our previous AI coder due to a lack of results achieved since when we picked him up at the end of December. We've got someone else taking over at least temporarily so we have some basic AI in place for the upcoming build - aliens will look around, shoot and move at the very least. Then we'll do the advanced AI in a less rushed manner once the game is at least playable. My apologies for the delays on this; it's been a bit of a problem area for us. 2) We're still looking at the Kickstarter fundraising thing with a mind to do it sooner rather than later, but it's just a question of finding the time really. Just keeping on top of all the work coming in can be difficult by itself! 3) Finally, our website was hacked repeatedly last week. There was a vulnerability in one of our Wordpress plugins that allowed hackers to place redirection code on our front page. I think it's fixed now, but basically it took up quite a lot of my time getting that done. Could have done without that. I'm hoping that the next release will work as a press release once the bugs in it are sorted out. The UI updates we have planned are pretty cool and also include tooltips, so should make the game a bit easier to understand. The crash site tiles will make the maps a lot more impressive, and having the aliens actually respond to your presence will make the game a bit more enjoyable too - there will actually be a challenge! Also, I think we've actually done a lot more this month than I've listed up there, but it's just temporarily slipped my mind...
  10. The text of the latest update on the Xenonauts website. Nothing too interesting, just need to keep the news blog there updated at least once a month! ---------------------------------------------------------- This site launched just over a month ago, and we've had a very busy month! Our launch on Desura was successful and so we are taking pre-orders for the game again, and progress has been good. You can read more about the wider business elements of our work on the Goldhawk news blog, as this entry will focus predominantly on Xenonauts itself. Firstly, the annual IndieDB Indie of the Year competition has opened - so if you're a fan of Xenonauts, please vote for us on the Indie DB site. This only takes a few seconds and helps raise the profile of the game, so your support in this would be appreciated. Onto the game itself - last weekend we released Build V8.2 to the pre-order community. This represents another milestone for us, as it contains a functional Research tree including the first tier of researchable weapons (lasers) and body armour, as well as the first iteration of an in-game UFO model. Up until this point players had been attacking what has been jokingly referred to as an Evil Alien Shed, which was basically a recoloured factory that acted as a spawn point for the aliens. Needless to say, the addition of the UFO makes the missions much more atmospheric, even if it's not yet complete. The tiles currently in the game are the 3D rendered tiles, and they are now being painted over by our 2D artist to create a finished appearence for the UFO. We're also working on the interior prop tiles, which are also looking very cool. Expect the finished Scout UFO to be in the game in V8.3 or V8.4 - basically within a couple of weeks. Then we'll start rolling out the remaining UFOs. Another major feature of build V8.x is the Main Menu screen, which is indicative of the immersive direction we want to take our GUI screens. Essentially the screen is a painted background that we will animate, and the text and options are contained on a clipboard at the bottom of the screen. Click on the clipboard heading and the camera 'looks' down at the clipboard, which contains all of the required information. It looks great, and I think it works really well. It's certainly worth trying out yourself if you've pre-ordered the game! We've also added Saving / Loading functionality to the game, although currently this only works on the strategic map rather than in the ground combat. If you don't know much about software development, you may well not know how major an issue Save / Load can be codewise, but it's a pretty major undertaking. As a result it's taking some time to complete and is not fully stable yet, but we're ironing out the bugs reasonably quickly. V8.3 is due out this weekend and that should have most of the bugs in the save functionality fixed up. There are also LOTS of small changes and fixes that can be found in the update notes for builds V8.0, V8.1 and V8.2 on our community forums. This will give anyone who is interested full details of what's changed since V7.5 (our Expo build). In closing, I'll just mention that V8.x will become our press preview build when it is finished - we're expecting this is around two weeks. We're not adding that many major new features over the next two weeks, but instead we're working on fixing bugs and polishing the existing experience. There will be further posts when V8.x is finished, so expect to see more then - but it should be the most complete and most polished version of Xenonauts we've yet developed. If you want to experience the game so far, that'll be the time to do it!
  11. Merry Christmas, everybody, and a happy New Year! 2011 has come to a close, and 2012 is just beginning. We’re currently winding down for the festive break, but we’ll be back in less than a week! It’s been a long year, and I thought the best way to open this article would be to show everyone just how far we’ve come! You can download a build of the game from the 6th of January this year here – it’s only about 25 mb. This is the earliest build of the game that’s ever been released, as even Build V1 (the very first pre-order build released) came out a month later on February 6th. Have a play for a few minutes, and hopefully it’ll illustrate the progress we’ve made. Yes, that’s right – there’s no air combat or ground combat in the game. Hell, the Aircraft Equip screen hadn’t even been coded then! So even if progress can seem glacial at times, Xenonauts has actually been rattling along at a rapid rate of knots and we will continue to do so. It is worth remembering the rest of the team here at Goldhawk at this point – while I’m the most visible part of the company, there are numerous team members who have been working just as tirelessly on this game, often for minimal pay. The game wouldn’t have come this far if it wasn’t for them, so I want to thank them for their efforts. Thanks, guys. We are hoping to release the game in 2012. The release date of the game has been continually slipping since the project was announced, but given the progress made in 2011 then I think a 2012 release is perfectly realistic. There’s a few things we are working on right now that should kick in in January that will substantially improve the game, which are: 1) Animation / Rendering: Thanks to Dan, our resident animator, we have animated up all of the Xenonaut soldiers with all of the in-game weapons, and about half the alien races too. We’ll probably have all the animations done in the next two months. However, the problem with all this is the sheer number of frames of animation that need to be rendered (over a million). We were looking at render farms who could do this for us, but they’re quite pricey – I actually think the easiest and most cost effective solution would be to buy 2-3 refurbished ex-corporate servers and rig them together to form a render farm that will blow through the renders in a couple of months. We can do this for less than $500 and I plan to start as soon as the New Year comes. Animation shouldn’t be an issue for us in 2012, unlike in 2011. 2) Alien AI: The last untamed frontier in programming terms is the alien AI – everything else is on someone’s “to-code” list. Xenonauts calls for an AI model where the aliens make intelligent use of the battlefield, fulfil mission objectives and use different tactics depending on what alien race is taking part in the battle. We started looking for an AI coder about a week ago and we have some promising leads which we’re following up. Coupled with the render farm mentioned above, we’re hoping to see a dramatic increase in the number of alien races in the current build of the game in the next couple of months. It should also allow us to put the long-awaited friendly NPC soldiers in the game too (also already animated). 3) Terrain Tiles: The biggest barrier to finishing Xenonauts remains the terrain tiles, which are the unfortunate combination of being technically demanding, visually challenging and hideously expensive. Nevertheless, we are pushing forwards. One of the major issues we’ve experienced so far is that the ground tiles in the game don’t look very nice – they’re single repeating tiles, so they can’t have much detail on them. We’ve just hired an artist to try doing the tiles in larger numbers, like 10×10 blocks, which should vastly increase the quality of the in-game terrain and let us finish it faster. We’ll keep you posted on how it goes, but we’re working actively to get more tilesets into the game. We’ve been staring at the Industrial one too long! These are the three main roadblocks to progress on the game, we’re doing our best to bulldoze through them. Over the past month or so, we’ve been spending a lot of time on bugfixes and the like, culminating in the release of Build V8.5, which has proved pretty stable. It’s still got bugs in it, of course, but we’ll be fixing the critical ones and it’s more playable than anything before it. However, our focus is now moving onto adding new features again. We’re currently working on the (eternally-terrifying) night combat, and we’ll be looking at adding some newer weapons into the game for the next build. The gas grenades (smokes, nerve gas) and C4 explosive charges are pencilled in on the list, and we’ll also be looking at the combat shield and possibly a jet-pack equipped suit of armour. So, yes – you should have some new toys to play with in V9. So as we head into 2012, I’m pretty confident that things are on track for us to both hit beta and release the game this year. Let’s hope I’m right, eh?
  12. It’s been about six weeks since our launch on Desura and I last posted here. In general, things have been positive at this end. We’ve sold about 750 units since we went live on Desura, so we’re sitting at 2,650 pre-orders or so at the moment. However, the amount we receive per copy sold has fallen drastically since we moved to Desura for several reasons – firstly, we’ve dropped the price $10 with a corresponding fall in revenue. We also only receive 70% or 85% of the revenue of our sales (depending on whether we drive the sales from our site or whether Desura makes the sale themselves) and we’re now obliged to pay VAT. All this has created a situation where we make roughly half as much per copy as we used to, but I think we’ve made the right choice. Though initially more lucrative, Paypal was never going to be the final solution for us. The big news with Xenonauts is the release of build V8, which is currently on iteration V8.2 (the third iteration). The idea here is that Build V8 will become our long-awaited press preview build when complete, so we’ve been working hard to polish the game up in a similar manner to how we did with Build V7 for the Eurogamer Expo. These little bursts of work are useful because they force us to stop the background system development work and concentrate on improving the actual playability and polish of the game, which is important for the people who have actually paid to pre-order the game and want to play it (which in turn helps us because it encourages community feedback). We’re currently working on fixing the bugs and improving the stability of the build, which has suffered a little since we implemented Save / Load. V8.3 is due out this weekend and will include fixes for most of the bugs and usability problems reported so far. The major improvements are the addition of the early stages of the research tree, including laser weapons, and the first appearance of a UFO on the battlefield. There are also a LOT of other improvements over V7.5 (the Expo build), but if you want full details it’s best to check the release threads on the forum which are available here for V8.0, V8.1 and V8.2. Build V8.3 is due out this weekend and contains fixes for a lot of the bugs reported, as well as a few smaller updates. As the name implies, the press preview build will be sent to everyone on our press list as a sort of ‘first preview’ of the game, a proof of concept build to show everybody that we’re a serious project that has all the foundations in place to make something really good. We’ve been doing it with a select few sympathetic magazines already – PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun etc – but this will be the first time we’ll let journalists have a free play of the game. It’s a bit scary, but as long as we’re clear that this is just a proof of concept I think a lot of people will be impressed! Hopefully it’ll translate into a lot more traffic and interest in the game. We should also mention here the IndieDB have started their annual Indie of The Year competition, and you can vote for Xenonauts here. While there’s no concrete reward for winning the competition given we’re already on Desura, it’s always good to put in a strong showing as it helps raise the profile of the project and doing well in a category increases the likelihood that people who aren’t normally that interested in this particular genre might take a second look at us. It doesn’t take long to vote (just a couple of clicks), so if you guys could help us out with your votes then that would be appreciated. In terms of the background progress on the game and how the team is faring, there’s a long forum post from a few weeks back that is available here which should fill you in on most of the happenings behind the scenes. In short, things are going rather well. We’ve got a complete list of all work that needs to be done coding wise until the game is feature complete, and I’m working that into milestone builds at the moment to give us a bit more structure. The terrain tiles still remain our biggest timesink but we’re starting to get somewhere with them now. Finally, the other thing I want to highlight is the Xenonauts Wiki. We implemented this when we launched, but the takeup in it has been pretty poor. This is mostly my fault because I’ve written all of about two articles in it, but I’m going to update it a lot more regularly over the next couple of weeks to make sure that it has most of the core mechanics on it so people can understand how things in the game should be behaving. Because the wiki had been colonised by spambots, I had to spend a few hours exterminating them and now only accounts over 24 hours old can edit or create pages in the wiki. This is a pain, but it’s stopped the spam dead so I’m afraid you’ll just have to live with it. Still, I hope this will turn into a really useful resource for the game so if people think they have time to contribute to the wiki in any way, please do so. That’s it for now. I imagine you’ll hear more once we get Build V8.x finished and start sending it out to all of the journalists on our press list!
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