flyingdisc

I like it. Beautiful graphic style and I like the sounds. Not often you see something new, and not a rehash of something old (but with better 3D effects and a slightly different lead character).

Frekky! The hair is definitely the same. Man, but the card game is nuts. I see your moster but my monster is bigger. You thought your new monster was big, now look at my new monster. Call that a monster, this is the real monster. You thought that was a monster, but it was just a pussy cat compared to my new monster. I was actually sacrificing my monster so that I could steal the bastard offspring from all your monsters with combine to make an even bigger monster. English language manga version of Yu-Gi-Oh seems to have been released prior to Hikaru No-Go, but I can't figure out which was first in Japanese (i.e. which is borrowing hair colour and spiritual possession from the other)

Like the links Trashman. Agree that Anime is a very broad church, but one I'd happily visit every sunday. I see you've got Bebop Cowboy down for your highest rating - I am with you on that. My God figure is Miyasaki (Porco Rosso, Castle in the Sky, Princesss Minanoki) but he exists in a sub-genre of his own. Within Anime, I have come across some complete trash but the gems approach the sublime. One of my favourites is Hikaru No-Go. It is about a teenage kid, possessed by the spirit of a Go master who died 800 years earlier. Slow paced, but the character development is incredible. I find I care. They can create tension out of playing a black and white board game, and how characters bounce off each other. I used to live in Australia in the late 1990s - which (because of its location, I guess) got a lot of the top notch Japanese anime on TV. I saw bits of stuff (one about a new airforce recruit in a post apocalyptic world, into an airforce which no longer knew how to fly) which I've never managed to track down since. As an antidote for your AMVs - I'd recommend checking out Interseller 555. Its guarenteed to leave me with a smile on my face.

Great idea Thothkins. Really useful resource - not least as it shows at a glance what has been done before. I am imagining with the new update 17.5, with the new map structure, that pre-existing sub-maps (though not any underlying new tiles that they may use) are likely to become obsolete. Does anyone know if that is right?

I agree with you. I had taken that as given. The point I was trying to make is that balancing these regions can be done without breaking immersion. Have a look at the map in the first post - not knowing other factors like income etc, does this break any of the criteria you raise? Does the number/size/distance in that particular map look very different from UFO:EU, ET, etc? Personally speaking, immersion is an important factor for me. I don't need many details to imagine a 1970s alien invasion, but just a few aspects that jar can break this immersion. Xenonauts has worked very hard (soviet architecture, regionally specific NPCs, etc) to build this setting. Choices like amalgmating western and warsaw pact countries into one block, as is done in the alpha build, mean that you need an elaborate backstory to maintain the players (my) sense of the period. This kind of backstory is not needed when map blocks are less inconsistent with the period. The point I hope to get across is that I think this is possible, making only a small number of compromises.

BTW how do I make the attached map bigger?

We've discussed this in the ages past, but seeing how the new Geoscape is being previewed, perhaps now is a good time to raise it again. I imagine that Goldhawk are not far away now from returning to the country block question. Previously we discussed 1970s cold war country blocks. Most of the discussion in that previous thread focused on whether it was advisable or not to have blocks made up of countries in different locations. There was a strong steer from Chris that geographically dispersed countries would not play well as unified blocks. I do not want to re-open that discussion. Instead I want to illustrate that maps can work with both (a) geographically located countries and (b) maintain consistency with 1970 era political boundaries. I have included an example map below: This contains contains 11 blocks (could easily be reduced to fewer by combining say Warsaw Pack with USSR, South Asia with Pacific Rim, etc). These blocks maintain both (a) and (b) above. The only tensions that exist at all are some small stretching to geographical blocks for Nato (wraps around Warsaw Pact) and how to handle Africa. Nato: European Nato countries. Includes Turkey, Greece (very prominent Nato countries). Also includes many "neutral"/non-Nato European countries (e.g. Swiss, Sweden, etc) that would otherwise have been isolated islands of neutral states Warsaw Pact: Historic Warsaw Pact countries plus Yugoslavia (which was really one of the founding 4 of the non-Aligned movement). This maintains political leanings at least. USSR: This one is easy. Nice contiguous block. North America: USA+Canada Socialist East Asia: China, N. Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. Nice geo-located block. Could be combined with another (USSR?) if fewer blocks were desired. South American Dictatorships: Most of S. America was (or would shortly fall under) rule by military dictators. The exceptions are the 2 Guyanas and Surinam (which are grouped in the above map with Central American non-aligned countries, but could be included here if simpler blocks were prioritised) Central American Non-Aligned countries: While Cuba and, say, Mexico might have had very different political outlooks - most countries in this region had some connection with the non-align movement. I think we can therefore group them together (to satisfy criteria (a) without doing too much damage to criteria (b)). Pacific Rim: Free market orientated. S. Korea, Japan, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand and Australian leaning Papa New Guinea: Spread out but still maintaining geographical connection. South Asian Non-Aligned movement. Contains prominent countries in the non-aligned movement (e.g. India). Works both as a political grouping and as a geographical one. Non-Aligned Africa: North and West. Different politics and sympathies. Most countries in this block had (tenuous) connections to the Non-Aligned movement (most of them attended). Not too contentious as a block. Southern/Eastern Africa+Middle East: This is the only block where any significant compromise needs to happen. Most of these countries (S. Africa , Rhodesia, Uganda, Kenya, Saudia Arabia) were either Western leaning or prominent in the fighting soviet influence in the African Cold War Proxy conflict. The problems are places like Angola (east-west sponsored civil war), Mozambique and Madagascar (both Soviet leaning and supporting Zimbabwean and S. African rebels). Given Chris has already indicated that we need to maintain geographical cohesive blocks (criteria (b)) I guess these can all be grouped into a single block. The people who would most object to this are people from this block, but I imagine that they are likely to make up very little of the xenonauts playing public. This is not done in the above map, but you can see how this is could be done. What I wanted to highlight, is I think country groupings can be come up with which both (b) create geographically connected blocks and (a) maintain groups consistent with 1970s outlook that xenonauts is set in. What do you think? How would your groupings differ from the above?

Thanks Thothkins for the map reports. I've sworn off xenonauts now, until release, as I want to save the surprises. I'm really impressed with zzz1010's visuals, so it is great to read a write up of how they play. zzz1010, I am curious about your avatar image. Who is she?

I like. Great to see all the larger islands back in (Philipines, cyprus, etc). I like what you are doing with the control desks at the bottom corners. I am guessing that they wont be just mirrorred images in the final version?

Liked the RPS article - and great that you generated the comments you did. Quality information. One of the few places to get a clear picture.

The most common mod is Bman's. The USF:ET already has a large fraction of this as part of the release - but it is worth downloading and installing the fall version. The more impressive mod is Greyfriend's UNIMOD. This is still being developed (last release in November): http://ufo-scene.com/plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?9832.0 This gives you the options of playing the original to Greyfriends re-imagining (and everything in between). Worth exploring - he has interesting ideas about training and experience.

I feel like I am late to most conversations. If this conversation hasn't yet moved on ... Looks interesting. I have questions. how would Fog of war work in these interior maps? As soon as you are in, do you see the whole layout or is only the visible bit visible and the rest just black? Not so much of an issue this is on light scout, but as they get larger .. . How would hiding work? Once this floor layout it visiable, are aliens not in immediate sight still hidden/not shown? I think ankle high would help me a lot. It gives a sense that the walls still exist/are physically in not visibly present, but are cut away. I appreciate that this would be extra work though.

I like the design philosophy. These are the questions that really influence how we experience the game. One idea I like, and we've mentioned it on another thread, is distinguishing between soviet and western town tilesets in Terror missions. Soviet townscapes often featured wide boulevards (open spaces, good for sniping, armoured vehicals, easy movement) and dense housing (house to house street fighting, alleyways, assault), which contrasts well with the western town layout of clearly separated buildings more evenly interspersing otherwise open vistas (which may promote island hoping, from house to house to move up the map). I wonder if these potential differences in character could be worked on to bring out play differences between the two? I think this would be fun, as well helping get the character of the period.

Thanks Xcorps and zzz1010 both. I will try this when I have time next weekend. It also sounds like you think it is worth adding a note to this effect in the wiki.

Ok I have a question about the basics. I've been playing with farm maps (because, perhaps unlike industrial/town maps, I think there is something in the regularity of fields that means I could write code to procedually generate farm maps). As a first step, I've made my own farm map. I wanted to try it out in quick battle - so I edited the levelsetup_quickbattle.xml This is where I fall down. I can get quick battle to now give me farm maps - but I don't seem to be able to specify the mapname. What ever I put here, I always get farm_lightscout1 !?!! Is this a bug I should report in the bug thread, or am I doing something obviously wrong? My levelsetup_quickbattle.xml is as follows (I here tried using a standard map name that everyone would have, as I thought this was a cleaner test, but it still gives me farm_lightscout1 rather than farm_corvette1 that I specify here) <?xml version="1.0" ?><LevelSetup> <Map tileset="farm" mapname="farm_corvette1" /> <!--<Map tileset="alienbase" mapname="test_small_sebillian" />--> <!--<SpawnTarget dropshipType="airplane.human.chinook" ufoType="airplane.alien.lightscout" />--> <Aliens> <Alien name="AI 1" race="Caesan" rank="Guard" script="offensive" isKilled="0" /> <Alien name="AI 2" race="Caesan" rank="Soldier" script="offensive" isKilled="0" /> <Alien name="AI 3" race="Caesan" rank="Soldier" script="offensive" /> <Alien name="Civilian 1" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="civilian" /> <Alien name="Civilian 2" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="civilian" /> <Alien name="Civilian 3" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="civilian" /> <Alien name="Civilian 4" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="civilian" /> <Alien name="Friendly AI 4" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="friendlyai" /> </Aliens></LevelSetup>