Closed captioning

Hello there,

I picked up Xenonauts a few weeks ago and have been greatly enjoying it, thank you for making the game!

One comment, however. Would it be possible to patch in closed captioning for the various audio cues (Shots being fired, reaper attacks, etc)? I have some friends who have some hearing loss, and I don't feel able to share the game with them as it stands since they'd miss many important cues. Additionally, it would really help for those late-night playing sessions when I want to keep the audio off so as to not disturb anyone.

That's interesting. There are quite a lot of audio cues, though (that is to say, there are a lot of audio files, which fit into a smaller subset of audio classes). If you wanted this done, I think you'd have to be more specific about how you'd like the close captioning to work, as there's no speech in the game.

You'd basically have descriptions of the sound--so if during Hidden Movement some androns stomp around there would be a note like "[Metallic walking noises]". Perhaps after you've researched (autopsy) the alien in question it would be specified (the above comment could become "[Andron walking on metal floor]").

There's two areas where having the sounds would be very important--during tactical combat (particularly during hidden movement) and in the aircraft minigame (cues of "[Alien missile launched]" and "[Aircraft destroyed]" come to mind).

So a sample Hidden Movement would have the following lines of text

[Walking through grass]

[shotgun blast]

[shotgun blast]

[Plasma burst]

[Civilian cries out in death]

I think that is a good idea on its own.

I think it would greatly add to the atmospherics. It would require an option to slow it down slightly or make it real time with a brief pause between 'scenes'.

Xenonauts / xcom always reminds me of a slightly less stat heavy Football Manager. I use this analogy to describe the game to my friends. FM has running commentary as well as real time at the same time. I love it.

It's probably too late to add it at this stage, particularly with such a clumsy GUI editor in the engine. It's bad of us but it's something we'd never even considered, tbh - but perhaps we'll bear it in mind for future titles, as I can see why it would be extremely useful for those who are hard of hearing.

It's handy even for people that can hear fine, specially if you can view it in a log format so you can scroll back and re-read the message. Like in JA2 - "so and so hears footsteps coming from the NE", etc...

It's probably too late to add it at this stage, particularly with such a clumsy GUI editor in the engine. It's bad of us but it's something we'd never even considered, tbh - but perhaps we'll bear it in mind for future titles, as I can see why it would be extremely useful for those who are hard of hearing.

That's a pity, though I understand technical limitations can be what they are. Please do consider it for future titles.

it really is a shame that this isn't in, however from what i've seen the game has an active and skilled modding community, i'm sure someone out there will be able to find a way to slip it in