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Xenonauts 2 - Feedback & Priorities


Chris

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'll move this thread to the Xenonauts 2 discussion area once we open up those subforums, but I'll stick it here for now. This is the thread where I outline the issues that are on our radar right now and how we're intending to prioritise them, and also where the community can give their own feedback (which might make us aware of additional issues or make us rethink our priorities).

At the moment I think we should be concentrating on getting the game stable and the fundamental combat systems solid. It's easy enough to imagine extra content being added to a game that is in development, but when the core game systems are not functioning correctly it can give a pretty bad impression of the game. Therefore the feedback we're looking for from you guys would cover these areas:

  • Did you encounter any critical bugs that ended the playthrough?
  • How did the game perform on your machine? Were you getting noticeable slowdown in any areas, or did you experience bad framerate or bad loading times?
  • What issues (gameplay or graphical) did you encounter, and which ones had the strongest negative effect on your play experience?
  • Is there anywhere that the game balance seems so glaringly bad that it is ruining your play experience?

Other feedback is welcome too, but it'd be good if you could cover the points above. We've made a LOT of improvements to the game over the past couple of weeks but now we need to know where to focus our efforts in the coming weeks to make this mission as polished as possible for our "proper" free launch (the one where we promote it through every channel we can). We're expecting that to happen in two or three weeks.

Once we've fixed these key gameplay errors, we'll be adding new content like new enemies and randomised maps and suchlike. This means you'll probably have a pretty repetitive testing experience for the first few builds - for which I apologise - but it should lay good foundations for the rest of the project.

FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES (short-term focus):

  • Missing Animations - at the moment, units don't play an animation in response to being shot and they play their vault animation when climbing / jumping up or down the 1m terrain sections. This breaks the immersion pretty heavily so we'll be fixing both of these as a priority (we already have the animations, we've just not had a chance to set them up in the code yet).
  • Terrain & Elevation LOS / LOF - in X1 each level was 2m tall, and there was no other types of elevation - e.g. you could either be on the ground at 0m or on a roof or raised area of terrain at 2m or 4m and so on. In X2 each level is 3m tall but the ground of each level can be raised or lowered by 1m ... so even a map built entirely in level 1 can contain both 1m sunken river beds and 1m raised areas, both of which offer half cover along the edge. This will be great when it works correctly but we only implemented it last week and we're still suffering issues with the line of sight and line of fire as a result.
  • General Line of Fire Issues - there's a bunch of issues with the fire calculation and line of fire stuff that we need to fix up as a priority, including:
    • Line of fire seems overly permissive and is including quite a bit of cover that doesn't actually appear to be in the shot path
    • Cover only adjacent to the shooter is correctly being disregarded, but "miss" shots can still hit it
    • However this adjacent cover is not being disregarded for the target; i.e. if the shooter and target are standing on either side of a rock, the rock should not offer cover to the target ... looks like it currently is, though.
  • Crosshair - I'm aware that the crosshair is a bit jumpy when you are targeting aliens; it has multiple allowable positions and none are quite right. We need to rewrite the input system a bit and that should allow us to fix this.
  • Camera - the game camera is not working as intended yet. There's several areas we're specifically targeting:
    • If you target an alien and the selected Xenon is not visible, the camera should snap back to show the Xenonaut doing the shooting.
    • During the alien turn, the line of sight of your Xenonauts is not being shown.
    • When the aliens are shooting at your Xenonauts, the camera often doesn't seem to focus on the correct location.
  • Corpses - corpses are not being handled correctly; dead units still block the tile they were standing in when killed and they can still be targetted through the standard fire crosshair.

 

CONTENT IMPROVEMENT (medium-term focus):

  • Suppression / Morale - this is an important mechanic, as burst fire and the LMG are significantly less effective if they do not have a suppressive effect. Apparently the code for this has been implemented and should theoretically work, but I'm taking that with a pinch of salt and I'd expect it to take a number of days to get up to the standard needed for a public release. The nice thing about suppression in a 3D engine is we can model suppression in a more realistic way based on how close missed shots actually passed to the target, which means that suppression is more reflective of the action happening on your screen and also generates an effect where long-range fire tends to be less suppressive than the same burst at close range.
  • Secondary Equipment - at the moment we only have the weapons and armour in the game; we need to add in secondary equipment like grenades and medikits. Pistols are already in the game but aren't being used in this build.
  • Map Randomisation - anyone who played X1 on release can tell you that playing the same maps over and over quickly loses its appeal, and it was far worse during the development cycle as we only added the majority of the maps in the final six months. Randomised maps will help keep the experience fresh for playtesters, and we plan to do it by slicing up the map into standalone "sub-maps" that are 10x10 or 20x20 tiles and then assembling them randomly. I'm not sure this is a viable approach for our urban maps but it should be totally fine for our wilderness maps (hence why we're starting with them).
  • UFO Crash Site - deathmatch missions are fine, but sweeping a map and then clearing a UFO is trademark X-Com and tends to pace the mission quite nicely. We've actually got a small UFO modelled up and theoretically ready to go (concept / model), but we've not tested it in a level yet and I'll be amazed if adding it to the game as a playable environment is not a massive amount of work. These UFOs will still have indestructible hulls, but they have pre-defined "weak spots" which can either be undamaged or destroyed depending on how much damage the UFO took when being shot down, with destroyed weak spots providing alternative entry points (on the Probe they are the weapon pods on either side).
  • Soldier Loadout - you have a pre-set team in the current mission and that's not very exciting. In the strategy layer we'll be implementing a squad equipment limit, where you get a set number of equipment points per soldier on the mission and each item of equipment has a specific cost. Heavy armour costs more than light armour, powerful weapons like the sniper rifle or the LMG cost more than the basic rifle, and grenades and extra ammo also cost extra. However this is a collective squad limit, so you could tool up a couple of soldiers but then the rest would have to be more lightly equipped. Can your sniper get by without his pistol? Then you can give your shotgun guy an extra flashbang (/ heavier armour / whatever).
  • More Aliens - the Sebillians (concept 1 / concept 2) are being modeled up as we speak, so hopefully we can have them in the game in a few weeks. As you can probably tell we've tried to make the aliens a bit less generic this time round; they've got more variation in terms of proportions and design now.
  • Editors - we're not releasing the game editor or map editor etc right now (we're focused on fixing up the ground combat right now), but they are in decent shape and we'll be doing that sooner rather than later.

So that's our roadmap. It's notoriously difficult to estimate how long things will take, but a rough guess might be that the fundamental fixes are another couple of weeks of work and the content improvement stuff would be for the couple of months after that.

Please give your feedback on the current build and your thoughts on our plans in this thread. We may revise our plans based on what issues appear in the first build and what the community reaction is to it (no promises though!)

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I played the mission and it has the xenonauts feel there.. Let me say my toughts..

-Xenonauts are more cool but they looks like more same.. like 8 clone.. i think there should be some differences even they are minor..

-You totally can't see aliens behind something.. there should be some system to notice them. A border or some transparent map.

-You really need to make crouch manual. Even add a lying stance.

- Covers show 4 direction but not other 4..  Shield icons are very big and their color is bad for that map type.

-They are standing when firing. Not logical, looks wrong. 

-I did not like the UI. I need to look everywhere to get info.. Squad is left, choosen soldier is middle, aliens right.. The UI is so huge compared to the playground. This fits to fraxis xcom because the camera is near and battlezone is not so big. But here you fight in a large battlezone, camera is more far, everything is so little the you got a huge UI things around.

-The target icon is huge too, but the info is little..

- Aliens color blends so much to the background, i can see them so hard..

-  I liked the caesan design. 

- Very fast heavy weapon burst is good but rifle burst with same speed is not so good. If you will use this, you should not use bullet projectile i think. This kind of fast fire fits more many bullet firing. Like if your rifle shoots about 10 and heavy about 20 it could fit but not for only 3 bullet.

-Liked new scoped fire with snipers..

-Animations are nice. 

-Having 2D visuals for weapons is good for modding. So as the units are still so small, you can use same visuals for more weapons if you dont think about zooming..

- Xenonauts don't run to places when they dont have enough TU, i think you will handle it.

-I liked the alien guns lights..

----------------------------

So i liked the alien designs. Xenonauts looks like more guerrillas rather then a military with those hats mostly. It has the original xenonauts feeling. I would like to see that new caesans at xenonauts 1 :)..

I don't have any doupt for ground combat, i would like to see geosphere too.. :)

As an extra:

The non-colored enemy turn is not so good.. i mean why would it so? I can understand something when goes out of LOS, or something killed your soldier or anything special encounter to give some atmosphere but it's not good to use it at whole enemy turn.

- Everything is so shiny. Xenonauts are shiny, leafs are shiny, aliens are shiny.. you need to look closely or you just can't see there is a rock, a road or a plant.. There is shadows missing..

- I got a high end computer with 980gtx, i played the game at highest and 1920-1080. I saw some jumps when something happened, like an alien dies or get hit. Normal gameplay was smooth.

More EXtra Ideas for the roadmap:

1- You should add something additions and mods to weapon, armours and item types. Armours should able to get some updates, weapons too.. at least as code wise, so we could update the weapons or armours, not creating new ones from zero. Like adding a jet pack to a default armor. Giving it a night vision. 

2- Extra item types to use rather then weapon and armour.. to give some buffs, to give some psi defense, to give a FORCE FIELD like X-Com apocalypse. Force fields would be a so cool addition to this game. Don't miss this..

3- having more enemy types is very good. Make as much as type as you can. ADD MELEE ONES as damaging not only zombify. ADD big bossy ones.. ADD something cool and deadly which bring fear to our hearts..

4- Don't forget to make all little tiles destroyable by heavy units. This helps greatly to vehicle and alien drone gameplay!

5-Add a hitchange/dodge and invisibility/detection by range or movement aspects to the game. This will open many creative ways for enemies and aliens.

------------------------------

Chris, X-2 will be a remake of the Xenonauts as story and game wise? As i see the main menu and all the concepts, it looks like a big remake and i liked that. Just that ufo design is a bit strange which there is no front? it looks like a part of a wessel or building rather then something flying..

I am waiting news about geosphere too. I am looking for the new games air combat and base building, zone control... I am happy with xenonauts all geosphere aspects. Just i think this kind of games needs sure an air phase but not as a playable air game. Xenonauts airgame is one of the best as a mini game, but even biggest fans of it (like me) goes for auto combat after a while..i think it's because of the number.. you fight 5-8 ufos per wave and playing a minigame at every one is boring after a while. So you can make some very nice visuals like After***** series 1. game... i always liked to watch that dog fights.. maybe you can improve this style too with some Manuel control but limited.

 

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Ok, here is my impression:

-Environment is great, seriously it is. Being able to cross the river, lean, jump over the obstacles and all other kind of stuff, which Unity allows is awesome. Also, it looks "alive" and just breath with atmosphere and could definitely bring more rewarding and interesting maps to the table, which leads to new ways of handling missions and ... yeah, a lot of potential there.

- Aliens, design wise they are for the most part good looking but I would prefer Psyons, to be a little larger and I really hope that "grey" or whatever the "neutral" color is, is just a placeholder because my addled mind had hard time spotting them, since they blend with environment (unless, they are meant to have that kind of camouflage).Officer look good so far, i like them. Drones, I didn't get to see because ... well I ran into critical bug, which prevented me to finish the mission, I will get to that.

- I am against, auto-crouching mechanic. I understand that introducing this mechanic may streamline a "cover" mechanic; but what happens when your soldier ends up in the open , without any kind of shelter ? Crouch may not necessary save him, or provide good protection but it is the safeguard in that kind of situation,nevertheless. Besides there could be other uses for crouch mechanic, I just named one scenario.

-Another thing that bothered me is a cross-hair. It should be stationary as it is in X1, unless you plan to introduce a system like in Jagged Alliance where aiming at different parts of enemy  results, in different amount of damage.

- New cover indicators are excellent. It's a good way to notify player, from which side soldiers are exposed and the small yellow circle which warns you about your soldier being flanked is welcome feature.

-Uniforms and models of soldiers are obviously something bundled up in last moment, so I won't criticize, but keep that direction, with a more diversity and variety, you are on good track.

I can see that you kept LoS from X1 and it works well with X2, overall it feels and plays as X1 with improvements the original game could've never received! Oh and for bare bones AI, it put better fight than AI of XCOM:EU (or even XCOM2), I am not kidding.

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Bugs and performance:

At one point, when I killed all Officers and Psyons, the UI glitched. All elements disappeared and I couldn't continue the mission, unless I actually killed also droids but couldn't make the difference between them and Psyons and it wasn't a bug at all? In second case, I apologize  for a false alarm.

I understand that this is alpha but the game ran terribly on my PC, I am not even sure, it used my dedicated GPU (GT 750M DDR5) at all, even though I forced the game to do so (because, activity of dedicated GPU was barely visible ). Also, CPU and RAM weren't stressed much either ( As, I said game could have been using  Intel GPU instead).

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I'll respond in more detail to everyone tomorrow, but as a request please give as much info as possible on performance issues if you're experiencing them - we know there's optimisation to be done, but we're not yet sure which areas are best to do it in.

If it's just outright bad performance everywhere it might be the antialiasing, which works by rendering the image out at 1.3x size and then scaling it down to hide jagged edges. That can be very demanding for low end cards and we should probably expose the settings in the options menu so people can test it out. Switching it off or turning it down might help.

There's also event driven performance issues, sometimes when a unit moves or when a weapon like an LMG is fired and lots of projectiles are generated. That's usually because the code is waiting for something for a few frames, which is not noticeable on fast machines but is on slower ones. If specific actions are triggering slowdown then please let us know and we'll have a look at them.

Thanks guys!

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I guess there are a lot of "draw calls " when LMG fires projectiles and yes I get a lot shutter, each time  I do for a brief second. Also, all other "event" driven action, like jumping over the edge of obstacle, cause micro shutter.

Anyway, the most notable performance drop is when post-processing is present and I dislike how blurry and colorful game looks like with them on. If AA was on, then that definitely has tremendous impact and should be left exposed for a player to disable / enable.

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Huh, I'm not experiencing major performance issues (aside from everything feeling unsmooth in general which is expected at this point) but I haven't been able to complete the mission after 3 attempts, it always freezes sooner or later during the alien turn.

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12 minutes ago, Solver said:

Huh, I'm not experiencing major performance issues (aside from everything feeling unsmooth in general which is expected at this point) but I haven't been able to complete the mission after 3 attempts, it always freezes sooner or later during the alien turn.

I suspect the freeze will be solved in the next minor build (tomorrow or so). There's an issue with the animation system in Unity that doesn't play nice with repeated calls per frame (AI work). 

There's a tonne of things to improve in the performance section of the game. I've mostly ensured that we didn't make any irreparable choices there and setup everything such that we could easily deal with it later on. (I expect that we'll have a performance fix for level load times in the next major build) 

With unsmooth I expect you mean the overall animations? 

 

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4 minutes ago, Gijs-Jan said:

With unsmooth I expect you mean the overall animations? 

Yes, with the soldiers/aliens running there's a general feeling like the framerate isn't very high but I don't think it's any worse than should be expected from such an early build. Oh, there's also a slight visible delay when updating the FOW status of tiles, which also feels unsurprising given that it was one of the hot points of X1 ground combat performance.

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Something I noticed was that the sound clips for automatic weapon fire seemed to not line up with the bullets being fired (the sound clips went off super fast and sounding very clippy, while the guns didn't seem to fire nearly that fast). Also, when I beat the deathmatch, the UI just disappeared, and I couldn't exit out except with a force-quit - this is more a quality of life thing for a early demo, but it would be nice to have an end screen.

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CPU:Intel Core I3-4150 @ 3.50 GHz Windows10

GeForce GTX 750 RAM: 8 GB

- Game stops at enemy turn. First time I played after finishing my first turn. I restarted the mission and this time game stopped after finishing my 5th or 6th turn

- Sometimes is difficult to see where the alien is, due to walls or trees.

- Crouched soldiers, anytime your turn them to see another angle, they automatically stand up and then crouch again

- Sometimes I try to move a soldier to one square clicking on that square but I can't (the number of remaining action points doesn't appear in the square)

- High-low level terrain is a bit confusing. Sometimes I don't know if my soldiers or aliens are at higher of lower positions.

- I don't like auto-crouching. I don't like either to see lots of cover shields when I move the cursor through the map.

- Please, remove yellow alien icons from X1. It's not realistic that a soldier, due to distance, who doesn't see directly an enemy (yellow icon) can perform aimed shots. In that case, a good sollution should be to restrict shots to snap or burst only. Snippers could perform aimed shots because they have rifle scopes.

 

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I'm not going to criticize graphics or design, we all know what an alpha is, but I agree with the general feeling that it's difficult to see the enemies. Soldiers are easier because the blue color contrasts better in this environment, and the gray psyons blend in with the rocks and trees. Another issue is the kind of 3D engine used, depending on the environment, it's very difficult to see certain spots. For example, in the beginning, before moving, it's very difficult to consider the exact spot you want your soldier to position in the river, at the center, the wall just right of the leftmost bridge. That's because the good angle to watch this zone is from the right down (down is your side, where your soldiers start), that is, one E keystroke, but a tree is impending sight from that angle. Some kind of transparency is to be considered.

Gameplay was alright, some frame jumps but everything OK, considering the phase. I suppose there's not much strategy involved, with only weapons and armor available, but I thought it was very easy, aliens were fairly straightforward. Sure, I got some lucky shots, but it felt easy. Maybe I'm used to covers and long range combat which is favored in this scenario (open spaces) but still. I only lost my sniper because, not seeing well were the last officer came from, I positioned him in the wrong spot. Again, sighting issue.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHz

8 Gb RAM (DDR2 if I recall it correctly)

2xGTX560 SLI

W7, 5,7 score in Windows Experience (due to old HD, updating to SSD in a few days)

 

Forgot to say, after killing the last alien, UI disappears and there's no way to exit except Alt+Tab and close it from Windows, is that intended?

After tinkering a bit to see the rest of the scenario and hitting all keys one by one to see if I could end turn or exit, graphics changed, highliting allowed movements in green, impassable in red, is this a feature or a graphic failure?

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First things first, I'm incredibly glad to see this come out, and having played it a few times, I'm excited to keep up with it. I've played an ungodly amount of X1, so this couldn't come soon enough.

On my desktop, I'm running windows 10 with an R9 390, i5 4690k, and 16 gigs of ram. On the highest setting, 1080p, it was averaging between 35-45 fps, with no noticeable drops. Certainly playable, but not what one expects. I did get one freeze during the alien turn. I was able to move the cursor and see the cover icons on terrain, but the game was otherwise locked. I'll test the game out on my laptop as soon as I get the chance.

I took notes during my first playthrough, so I'll copy them here, and editorialise a bit more later.

-very difficult to see the soldier selection circles through tall grass. Could these be layered on top of the terrain?

-We're wearing berets. Berets look cool. Uniforms as a whole look better than previous mechanic jumpsuits 

-WASD controls for the camera are great. Is there no edge scrolling? That would be appreciated

-Difficult to see through trees. Could the trees in the foreground fade out for visibility?

-Aliens are difficult to see. they need berets too

-misses destroy my own cover A LOT

-can't click past my movement range. In x1, you could do this and the soldier would run as far as they could along that path

-camera transition between soldiers seems slow/unresponsive

-animations running at a lower framerate than the game?

-can't chose to fire weapons on any space? not necessary in this map, but was great for taking out walls in X1

-machine gun capacity improved. good

- can't change aim type by right clicking. cycling soldiers seems to fix

-camera zoom would be great. both further in and out. default position seems reasonable

-sometimes difficult to tell where terrain height changes, especially hard to see vertical corners 

As a whole, I think the game looks great. The gully near CT spawn stuck out as a cool feature that wasn't possible in the previous game. As a whole, I think the art direction is a lot more interesting than the previous game, especially the berets, nothing says '70s paramilitary like aviators, a beret, and an FN FAL. 

Gameplay seemed reasonably balanced. I finished the game with 4 soldiers left, but all deaths were easily forseeable following poor placement. Each kill, human and alien, took at least two shots to accomplish, which seems like a good baseline. The range on the shotgun was probably too low given how much movement costs. It was very rare to move a shotgun trooper and make a kill in the same turn.

In X1, a soldier could fire over half cover in the spaces right next to them, but that doesnt seem to be the case in this build. All too often, my machine gunner would pump 5 rounds into the rock he was hiding behind and destroy his own cover. Aliens weren't immune to this either, they destroyed the fences they were covered behind at least twice.

Maybe I'm just stupid, but I didn't notice an option to fire a weapon freely. This was a great feature in X1, since it allowed machine gunners to be used to take down cover, or suppress multiple enemies. Hope this gets added back in.

I think the camera controls were pretty snappy, but edge scrolling should probably make a comeback. I found it a little frustrating to try and find units through foliage. Something like making the trees on the bottom third of the screen transparent would probably help with this. When tabbing between units, the automatic camera movement felt pretty sluggish. Speeding it up would make it feel snappier and more responsive.

As a wishlist item, I noticed that 'scoped' was an aiming option. I would love to see a basic weapon modding system, such that we could add scopes to assault rifles, perhaps at the cost of weight, or negating the short range accuracy bonus. 

Hope my rambling was at least a little helpful. Thanks for getting this out to us so early, I find it fascinating to see a game in such an early state.

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There's a lot of good feedback in this thread already, exactly the sort of stuff we were looking for. Thanks everyone that has commented so far, and keep it coming!

I suspect we'll push an update on Wednesday or Thursday with some fixes in response to the feedback. Things I'm seeing come up a lot are:

  • AI hang needs to be fixed; GJ is aware of that and should be able to fix it up
  • Winning the game hides the UI, so we should put in a quick victory / loss screen that allows the player to quit to the main menu. Not sure if we have one and it is bugged or the coder just didn't bother, but we'll sort it out today.
  • Trees - pretty much everyone has complained about not being able to see behind them. We'll have a chat about how we can implement transparency as it seems to be one of the most obvious issues.
  • Psyon drone is very hard to see against the background. The drone is an older model so it should be easy enough to tweak the textures so it is the same colour as the new officer, which should make it more visible. In the longer term we might redo the model so it's not just a nekkid sectoid, as it's the armour that makes the officer visible.
  • Clicking beyond the move path beyond range should move as far as possible. I'd actually forgotten it did that in X1 so thanks for the reminder, shouldn't be too hard to implement.

We'll also pick things from individual posts and look into the performance, and I'll answer specific questions from your posts later today.

Overall people seem to be digging the move to 3D, which I'm happy about. It's all still a bit rough right now but I'm glad people like the direction we're taking ... bit of a relief after working in secret for so long!

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A few very first impressions:

Specs:
Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 @3.4GHz
32GB DDR3-1600
Geforce GTX970
SSD
Win7

- Overall performance seems fine. Didn't notice anything major.
- graphics look pretty neat

- The quotes on the loading screen are hard to read (too small, bit blurry) (1920x1080, 24' monitor)

- camera: please implement edge scrolling
- camera: Is there a way to zoom out? As it is, the camera is way too near the ground for my taste

- The cover icons are very prominent - maybe make them a bit smaller or slightly more transparent or both.
- Trees are a huge problem in terms of visibility.
- The automatic kneeling gives me an instant feel of XCOM 2012. It's convenient, yes, but personally I'd prefer to be able to also kneel manually.
- The crosshair always seems to be off target.
- Aliens are hard to discern from the background. Maybe highlight them if they're seen.

- alien turn: when reaction shots are available, center the map on the soldier who's reacting
- alien turn: if aliens do something while inside the visual range of a soldier, center the map on that
- alien turn: game freezes

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18 hours ago, huhn said:

i excepted way worse with "place holder textures".

it worked pretty well and feeling like an old XCOM. i was missing stuff like crouch, walk and run.

BTW. i was hitting a 0% shot.

We'll look into the 0% shot issue and see if we can find why that's happening. I do think that shots are hitting more often than they should right now.

 

17 hours ago, drages said:

Chris, X-2 will be a remake of the Xenonauts as story and game wise? As i see the main menu and all the concepts, it looks like a big remake and i liked that. Just that ufo design is a bit strange which there is no front? it looks like a part of a wessel or building rather then something flying..

I am waiting news about geosphere too. I am looking for the new games air combat and base building, zone control... I am happy with xenonauts all geosphere aspects. Just i think this kind of games needs sure an air phase but not as a playable air game. Xenonauts airgame is one of the best as a mini game, but even biggest fans of it (like me) goes for auto combat after a while..i think it's because of the number.. you fight 5-8 ufos per wave and playing a minigame at every one is boring after a while. So you can make some very nice visuals like After***** series 1. game... i always liked to watch that dog fights.. maybe you can improve this style too with some Manuel control but limited.

 

I'll release more details of the Geoscape this week. X2 is not a remake, no, but it does cover some of the same stuff as the first game. Right now we're intentionally reproducing the first game where possible because I want to be able to test the new X2 mechanics within a working game.

 

16 hours ago, Sentelin said:

-I am against, auto-crouching mechanic. I understand that introducing this mechanic may streamline a "cover" mechanic; but what happens when your soldier ends up in the open , without any kind of shelter ? Crouch may not necessary save him, or provide good protection but it is the safeguard in that kind of situation,nevertheless. Besides there could be other uses for crouch mechanic, I just named one scenario.

-Another thing that bothered me is a cross-hair. It should be stationary as it is in X1, unless you plan to introduce a system like in Jagged Alliance where aiming at different parts of enemy  results, in different amount of damage.

The auto-crouching mechanic is not something I'm going to change until we've got the other stuff working, but we might revert it once we've had a chance to test it properly. The crosshair positioning issue is mentioned in the original post and is going to be fixed in the next couple of weeks.

 

11 hours ago, meerkatking said:

In X1, a soldier could fire over half cover in the spaces right next to them, but that doesnt seem to be the case in this build. All too often, my machine gunner would pump 5 rounds into the rock he was hiding behind and destroy his own cover. Aliens weren't immune to this either, they destroyed the fences they were covered behind at least twice.

Maybe I'm just stupid, but I didn't notice an option to fire a weapon freely. This was a great feature in X1, since it allowed machine gunners to be used to take down cover, or suppress multiple enemies. Hope this gets added back in.

I think the camera controls were pretty snappy, but edge scrolling should probably make a comeback. I found it a little frustrating to try and find units through foliage. Something like making the trees on the bottom third of the screen transparent would probably help with this. When tabbing between units, the automatic camera movement felt pretty sluggish. Speeding it up would make it feel snappier and more responsive.

Yup, we'll implement edge scrolling this week. For the cover destruction stuff, it's correctly being discounted from the cover calculation but the miss shots are hitting it anyway and we need to fix that. You also can force-fire your weapons by pressing Ctrl, but we should update the UI so you can access this mode by clicking the weapon image like you used to be able to.

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I made a video with my feedback. I can upload it unlisted to Youtube if you don't want any footage of this out, or I can publish it publically to give you some exposure. It's up to you.

As far as general performance, it ran buttery smooth for the most part. Took forever (45+ seconds) to load the map, but once it was loaded it was great.

Win 7

Core i7-3820 @3.6 GHz

ASUS GeForce 970 STRiX

16 GB RAM.

Game running off of an SSD.

Edited by Moonshine Fox
Forgot performance feedback.
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So my first impressions are overall good, it definitely feels like Xenonauts, which is the main thing at this point. The quality is obviously very much pre-alpha, but that is to be expected.

The biggest issue is how difficult the aliens are to spot. They're pretty much invisible if behind trees, and also blend into the background. I think you need highlighting, and also transparency. And camera rotation. I think inspiration can be drawn quite directly from the Firaxis take on X-Com, they handled clarity in a 3D environment very, very well.

I got the manual overwatch a couple of times. Not sure yet why it's supposed to be an improvement.

Even at this early stage, I like the effects when the aliens shoot.

I know there are no UFOs yet, which is why I'd like to say now that I am hoping to see some big ones as well. I think Xenonauts did almost everything better than the original X-Com, UFO assaults being one of the few exceptions. I hope to see some bigger ones this time, where you're actually fighting in the UFO, and not just at the very end of the game.

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@Moonshine Fox - I'd prefer if you kept the video private for now, we're not really trying to actively promote these builds until we've had a bit more chance to fix them up. Also it'd be great if you could give us a summary of your thoughts via text as it's much faster to read than watch videos, especially when we're checking back over all the feedback in the thread. I know video is kinda your thing, sorry to rain on your parade :)

We're gonna be releasing a patch tomorrow most likely that fix some of these things, including a retexture of the small alien so he matches the larger one and is not literally the same colour as the ground (which was an unfortunate coincidence).

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3 minutes ago, Chris said:

@Moonshine Fox - I'd prefer if you kept the video private for now, we're not really trying to actively promote these builds until we've had a bit more chance to fix them up. Also it'd be great if you could give us a summary of your thoughts via text as it's much faster to read than watch videos, especially when we're checking back over all the feedback in the thread. I know video is kinda your thing, sorry to rain on your parade :)

We're gonna be releasing a patch tomorrow most likely that fix some of these things, including a retexture of the small alien so he matches the larger one and is not literally the same colour as the ground (which was an unfortunate coincidence).

No problems! I'm here to help, after all! ;) Will get that text together when I have the time.

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