Let's talk about Xenonauts, shall we?

dear America...

Read enough.

Read enough.

Know your (un)friendly NPC characters!

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Artillery support was brought up on the old forums and shot down. Mostly because its really hard to balance (Its basically free attacks) and soldier-carried artillery like mortars takes over what grenades, though grenades are more interesting to use since they are short ranged.

You can only bring on vehicle to any combat though, so most of the fighting will be done by your soldiers. I don't even bring Hunters as of now, and finding it easier in some places, harder in others.

I demand artillery support!

Read "EVERYONE GETS ROCKET LAUNCHERS".

Flat maps. Seriously, you really shouldn't do a remake that's actualy worse than the original!

Oh yeah, look at all them hills.

Lack of cover on the maps - the maps are flat AND empty.

Some maps are like that. Basically, when you shoot down a small alien vessel they have about 1-4 guys. Spending 30 minutes runnnig through a maze searching for 1 last alien is just aggrovating. The open maps are designed for that purpouse. They are meant to show a quick sweep mission, which essentially what those kind of missions are. Larger UFOs should have more packed maps.

Make ingame vehicles manned

They are manned.

You could always just treat it like an armour suit (Panzerkleins! YES! )

You caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan't. Machines can't possibly increase their performance by being more "experienced".

Speed is determined by engines. Resistance to damage is armor. Accuracy depends on the aiming systems installed. The only way to improve that is by installing new parts. Sure the driver can get a little bit better at molesting the transmission lever. But the change to the AP would realistically be very incremental.

An experienced driver can't change the physical properties of matter. Mechanical parts can't become stronger over use like muscles can, they can only wear off. The stats gain would be too incremental to even bother implementing.(wasting development time and resources)

I demand artillery support!

You have rocket launchers.

With unmanned vehicles it basicly boils down to throwing money at aliens until they die...

Nope you can't win with just vehicles.

Again - it's only a matter of coded coefficients, as it can be avoided by adding a chance to destroy/penetrate cover.

We have that.

why use it to kill enemies with no experience gain, while your troops can kill any foe a map away with their blaster launchers and gain exp/accuracy or just use mind control and let aliens kill themselvs?

Do you have soldiers that have a rocket launcher with a magazine of six missiles? Or soldiers that can carry a dual 50 cal machine gun turret? Didn't think so.

Oh and you don't have blaster launchers and PSI powers.

Hmm, most of my soldiers DO carry a rocket launcher with... lets see, loaded 1, plus what is it, 4 or 5 for the backpack, plus two for the belt... gotta be at least 6.

That bug with the smoke? Yeah.... that owned me pretty fast

Hmm, most of my soldiers DO carry a rocket launcher with... lets see, loaded 1, plus what is it, 4 or 5 for the backpack, plus two for the belt... gotta be at least 6.

But are they all in a SINGLE magazine already loaded into the launcher? Nope.

Fishman, the answer to your questions about the engine lies in the AMA Chris held last year. There's a lot of stuff in it that should satify your curiosity.

Fishman, the answer to your questions about the engine lies in the AMA Chris held last year. There's a lot of stuff in it that should satify your curiosity.

THX for the info.

Fishman, the answer to your questions about the engine lies in the AMA Chris held last year. There's a lot of stuff in it that should satify your curiosity.

And lots of guys named Chris in game development it seems

Slopes on the map isn't going to happen. Variety of reasons, the biggest one being you can't do hand-painted ground tiles if you have them. Plenty of the maps have plenty of cover, too, but some tilesets are pretty sparse. You need the variety - it's not a straightforward cover shooter like the new XCOM. You may just have been unlucky.

There already is a transparency aura, which we may extend to large props. Re: crouching, as Sathra said it's not always the best thing to do in every situation so it's not something that happens automatically. It used to be, but we canned that idea because the current system is better.

Running / Shooting - I find it quite interesting that you want a simplified shooting system because the current one is too much hassle, but also want to complicate running more. In both cases I think I'm happy with the fundamentals of the current systems so I'm not going to change them, but I do find your suggestions a little contradictory there.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts up!

Ohh... do I get a special badge by being answered by Project Leader?

I've played it some more in the weekend and actually yes, there are better and more diversified maps that the desert ones that I encountered before. Yet still, they look incredibly flat. I guess that's where the engine limitations comes into play.

After a few battles the shooting system seems better than at the first sight. After a few rounds I started having some recollections from Jagged Alliance 2 And the aiming level is remembered between shots, so it's not that much of a hassle. Yet there are still some projectile path problems that need to be solved - it seems that whole tiles where there's even a piece of alien ship are treated as solid cover. There was an alien standing with a plain line of sight between him and my soldier near the entry of alien ship but they couldn't see or shoot at each other.

The alien ships are made as large sections rather than individual tile sized sections.

I would assume that means the whole section has to share a spectre and therefore has the same stopping chance at every point.

The game engine doesn't know where the image displayed is a full height section or a tiny wing tip so it has to treat all parts the same.

That also means the tiny wing tip that maybe covers your soldiers boots would block line of sight in the same way as the full sized armoured wall.

No idea if there is a workaround for this in the pipeline though.

You have rocket launchers.

Nope you can't win with just vehicles.

We have that.

Do you have soldiers that have a rocket launcher with a magazine of six missiles? Or soldiers that can carry a dual 50 cal machine gun turret? Didn't think so.

Oh and you don't have blaster launchers and PSI powers.

.30 cal actually...

The things I didn't like and should be reworked/changed in the final release:

• Flat maps. Seriously, you really shouldn't do a remake that's actualy worse than the original!

Heck, this is one thing that really sucks in the original. Earth is actually quite flat, except for mountains (but then again, there wouldn't be much to scoop from a UFO crashed into the side of a mountain). The hilly terrain in X-COM featured ridiculous grades. The basic box around a soldier was about 1×1×2 meters (the proportions are the important bit here). There, for a three meter run, you have a 2 meter rise (66% grade, ~34° incline) -- running around in that kind of terrain would quickly cause your soldiers to drop of exhaustion. 10% grade is already considered steep and that's below 6°.

There can be a lot of variety in flat maps, too, so I wouldn't hold this against Xenonauts.

And one thing I remember from X-COM is that the absolute majority of missions were on flat terrain. The only hilly terrain types were deserts, mountains and forests, and aside from Russia and Canada, there weren't that many forests around (at least when compared to farmland).

It's nevertheless surprising that Xenonauts engine doesn't support slopes. Does this affect stairs in any way? Is all vertical movement done through elevators? I didn't play the game yet, so I'm not sure what to think of that.

There are stairs but they are slightly...off in some way I'm not quite sure how to explain. They work though. There are also teleporters.

.30 cal actually...

Well every single point in my life is invalid now!