Entering "Polishing" phase!

Today Giovanni put in the updated victory / loss screens, and the artist is working on the final artwork for these (they currently use draft versions of it). Aaron and I also finished designing the unique tiles and the layout work on the final mission; this is just awaiting final balance and the 2D paintovers of the existing art / floor. Xenonauts is now nearly complete, and theoretically at that point we could kick it out of the door whenever we wanted.

However, "complete" is not the same as "finished". I'm aware there is still work to be done on usability, balance, optimisation and stability. That will all take place during the polishing phase, which will last until we're happy with the final quality of the game.

V21 Stable will mark us entering the polishing phase, and we'll be changing our development methodology a little:

• We will completely reset our bug trackers, and ask people to report any issue they experience with the game no matter how small or how many times it may have been reported in the past.
  
• We will be setting up a public issue tracker, which will list and prioritise all bugs / issues that are on our radar (only we will be able to add issues to this).
  
• The Beta Discussion, Community Involvement and Suggestions forums will be merged into a Balance Discussion forum, as they'll overlap quite heavily.
  
• We will remove the Experimental bug reporting forums.
  
• We'll also be starting to get the Kickstarter rewards printed up!
  

We're hoping that these changes will make everything a bit more efficient, removing some of the repetition from bug reporting and stopping important / annoying issues from falling between the cracks. We're almost certainly not going to be able to fix all of the issues on our public tracker, but the added visibility should help the feedback process greatly.

I may start doing the forum changes shortly, so don't be too alarmed when sub-forums start vanishing!

Congratulations!

Do spelling/grammar mistakes count towards the bug reset? The sticky thread for the Xenopedia correction thread's not in the bug forum at the moment, which is why I'm unsure. Are you going to unsticky that one?

Yes, they will. It'll be literally anything...although I won't be changing any of the Xenopedia technobabble, just accepting corrections on grammar and spelling etc.

Nice! Good work Chris & co.

Great work Chris & co. Its been a great ride!

Awesome, and congratulations!

It was one hell of a ride. Congratulations to the whole team and the dedicated members of this community who made it possible.

Yay! Really great to see it so close now. Looking forward to v21

I really hope Desura users will be able to participate in the polishing phase.

Please remember that not all of us use Steam - yet we still want to contribute to the game before it is released.

Any guesses on when v21 stable will be available? *wants*

Yay! good job Goldhawk!

I could give you a hug!

However, "complete" is not the same as "finished". I'm aware there is still work to be done on usability, balance, optimisation and stability. That will all take place during the polishing phase, which will last until we're happy with the final quality of the game.

I love this, I really wish the big developers could grasp such a simple concept. Thank you!

I love this, I really wish the big developers could grasp such a simple concept. Thank you!

To be fair, sometimes they have twitchy Publishers breathing down their necks. I've been going through the Alice: Madness Returns artbook as of late and have seen so much stuff that would have been added if not for time constraints.

bout time

To be fair, sometimes they have twitchy Publishers breathing down their necks. I've been going through the Alice: Madness Returns artbook as of late and have seen so much stuff that would have been added if not for time constraints.

Tell me about it . As a software developer I would like to state in our defence that we would love to deliver stuff with much love and quality. It is humane thing to take proud from ones work. However, guys holding the money have very different view of the world with a food chain that looks more or less like this:

From personal experience the budget discussion looks like this:

- How long will it take?

- 4 years.

- Unacceptable!!!

- Ehmm, 2 years?

- That's the spirit!

I am utmost happy that GH philosophy is different .

Love the picture, just wish I wasn't Andre so often...

Is there an in-engine error log that gets filled when a crash occurs? That could help pinpoint it for the dev into a specific module in engine at least.

I got a few of those apparently completely random crashes in 21e.5 while doing literally nothing, just browsing some screens in base, or playing GC; which were also non-reproducable through loading, which makes them impossible to report effectively. Are errors only manually reportable?

Not to say that they are game breaking in any way, I generally found 21e.5 to be more stable than 20s. Godspeed for the final phase.

Is there an in-engine error log that gets filled when a crash occurs? That could help pinpoint it for the dev into a specific module in engine at least.

There is always Application Log in System Event Viewer (edit: on Windows), that should keep logs of all crashes. On most of systems you can enable automatic memory dump collection on application's crash, so that the final moment before the death is preserved. Not easiest beast to analyse, though ...

There's functionality in our debug builds of the game that gives us information on the crash when it occurs, but then debug mode runs at about 20% of the speed of the normal game...so it's not something we can include in the standard game, unfortunately. We'll have more robust crash reporting in future games though.

So, what will happen after the release? Are you planning on adding more things to the game, or will you focus on another project?

After following this game since it was but a few-paged website, I'm so happy to hear that it's approaching the end point.

I'm proud to have backed the kickstarter and gotten my name in game (soldier 22 ). Congrats on you and the team getting this far and doing one helluva job at it. I've enjoyed this game since getting the beta (or was it Alpha?) on Desura.

If you guys ever pop down to Australia for PAX, I'd be honoured to buy you all a round.

After following this game since it was but a few-paged website, I'm so happy to hear that it's approaching the end point.

I'm proud to have backed the kickstarter and gotten my name in game (soldier 22 ). Congrats on you and the team getting this far and doing one helluva job at it. I've enjoyed this game since getting the beta (or was it Alpha?) on Desura.

If you guys ever pop down to Australia for PAX, I'd be honoured to buy you all a round.

that's what I hate about living in Adelaide, NO PAX!!!!!.............................. we still got AVCON[Anime and Video game CONvention thought

I'm in Sydney so I still have to travel to Melbourne for it. Rather expensive what with the hotels and stuff. Still, it's worth it.

I cant even go to melboure!b

Whoo-hoo! Says the Melbournite....