Gauddlike

Making it more difficult to get them killed would be fine though for people who may not have much experience of this type of game. No matter how much damage they take they always stop at 0 health and tick down to -5 or so before finally dying. That gives a new player 5 turns to try and save their trooper or to finish the map. If base hospital speed is also increased the new players would still be penalised for letting them get shot to bits but not end up with 50 troops all sat in hospital beds. Of course getting hit again or caught in an explosion while down would still finish them off, even in the hospital (I'm looking at you Sathra).

The ships may not be ideal for atmospheric flight at all. If you have good and reliable EVA suits a simple walk along the hull looking at the stars can get you to any part of the ship. It also allows you to use a large part of the ship as shielding in case anything goes wrong in the engine compartment. Things that could kill the engineer could also include radiation leaks, EM spikes, Hull breaches, broken steam pipes (every space ship should have a steam pipe for when things get damaged) etc that would not destroy the engine and could be easily fixed by anyone who could work the controls or stick a patch over a hole.

It does make more sense that the less heavily armoured sleeker looking craft could be the faster one. It doesn't necessarily follow that because it needs to get in close it should also have better armour though. Using its extra speed to avoid the firing arcs of alien ships would be its primary defence. Then once it gets in behind them matching speed and keeping the cannon on target would be game over for the early aliens. The current balancing doesn't allow this to work as well as it could but that's why there are forums

It looks interesting but makes no real improvements over the old design for me. Wonder how it would work in a base assault as well? It doesn't give an idea of where the facilities lie in relation to others unless they really are built in lines on top of each other. A 3D base would have made more sense but would definitely have brought more problems.

Maybe the research lab should have its own stores type section then? Or it could be an entry in the Xenopedia. Just a simple little section that gives a list of recovered artefacts with basic info and any pre requisite research. I am thinking along the lines of: "Appears to be a heavy plasma type weapon, attempts to disassemble should be discouraged until more is known about plasma containment". Or "A powerful alien grenade-like device, further investigation into alien explosives should be undertaken before examining more closely (or letting Sathra near it)".

Bah I was away for a bit and I missed all the good arguing.

Sounds good. Always worried when they cross platform a strategy game though! A second good X-Com style game is always welcome so I will have to keep an eye on that one.

Desura is nice and easy for a small indie developer to use. It leaves the dev team free to concentrate on making the game. If anyone who really can't face installing Desura can knock up a simple and secure delivery method for Xenonauts that shares its advantages and has no significant disadvantages I am sure they would be interested to hear about it.

Especially if it is one built by a local council, you can do significant damage to them by putting up a picture in the wrong place.

I like the way Chris looks at the alien ranks and difficulty. Your first few missions might see you running into mainly non-coms protected by a guard while later ones might be mainly guards with a couple of soldiers in command. When you are coming up against lots of soldiers you should be thinking about upgrading your weaponry or using better tactics to concentrate your available firepower. At this stage you would also be coming across another alien species which may be as tough as the ceasan guards but have different tactics. As for the weapon balance it also sounds good to me. More shots for slightly lowered damage gives you more to do in a turn and makes you think about your tactics more. If you only have the option of either moving and firing a single shot or standing still and firing two shots it limits your choice of tactics.

Looks like a nice piece of work there. Can you import and export to different files with it? As Chris says it would be useful to be able to open up the normal weapon files but save to your own separate file. Also is it possible to add a whole new weapon to the files using this? A "New Weapon" button to add a weapon.newpistol entry, for example, for you to then alter into whatever you wanted.

Someone knows, they bottled it. http://www.rubiconexotic.com/

In answer to anotherdevil the reason for some randomness is because a completely predictable effect is not as interesting. Sure in RL the collapse of a building can be predicted with fair certainty by demolitions experts with precisely placed explosives but that isn't what we are talking about here. Even then they sometimes fall in the wrong direction, fail to fall at all, or the collapse is bigger than expected. I think being able to hit a building that you have troops inside with a rocket launcher, safe in the knowledge that they are stood 2 squares outside any possible harm, is less interesting than having to take the risk of not killing your target or accidentally taking out your own troops as well. The last couple of ideas don't sound much different to mine except rather than a simple fall/stand mine had a chance of collapse that got higher depending on damage to the area. Would be nice to be able to alter the chance based on material types etc.

Rather than the heavy plasma covering practically all roles each of the weapons will have their own strengths. Each of the weapon types will also have an improved version in the later tiers. With proper balancing these weapons should continue to be useful in varying roles all the way through the game.

The machine gun is not really designed with a breaching role in mind. That's why the game has shotguns, pistols, combat shields etc. The issue with the machine gun was that it has not yet been finished off and balanced rather than it needing some kind of nerf. Don't worry there will be enough lead flying around for you

It is easy to say that now. If Chris had known in advance how many people would pre order and how much cash would be available for animators etc then we would probably be looking at a very different game. Not many indie devs can add every feature they would like to while still having enough cash for the little things like mortgages and food.

It is not just redoing existing animations and sprite sheets. The current game engine simply does not support that kind of on the fly recolouring. To add it in would require changing the game to a new engine.

I gave up on making a recoloured basic armour set after the first 8 hours or so of work. In that time I had changed the sleeve colour on 3 of the starting weapon animations. That was approximately 500 files recoloured, some of which contained up to 10 separate frames. Assuming I could have kept up the same pace of work that would have only left me with around 30 more weapons to alter. That is maybe 80 hours of work for a fairly minor (and fast) recolour of a single armour type. Imagine making major changes to, or adding in female variants for, each of those weapon animations and also for each existing armour type on top. There is probably an easier way of doing it though if you have access to the original 3D models, the right software, and the game engine.

Shouldn't be too hard to do for someone with coding experience. Once the final file layouts are set it will just be a matter of a program that opens the correct xml files for a specific item type, adds or alters the correct bit of text then saves it.

The old versions didn't have a weapons_.xml file so its probably a leftover from Chris sanitising the build. Chris is the number of shots per burst set in an xml somewhere and if so can it be set for individual weapons?

I am assuming on weapons.xml and weapons_.xml (not sure what the difference is) you altered the description text to show the change you had made in weapons_gc.xml?

You can change the portraits if you want to, they are located in assets/soldierimages. I haven't looked to see if there is a file to allow adding new ones though. I don't believe there is a way to specify a combination of name/face either so you might struggle to get female names to tie in with female portraits. Unless you rename them manually of course.

Can I suggest adding your post to the wiki? It looks like it would fit into http://xenowiki.goldhawkinteractive.com/index.php?title=Altering_the_properties_of_an_in-game_item_or_unit It gives a nice overview of the basic editing required to alter an item.

Offered him first go at the buffet table after the next mission.

Well it has been said that Sathra can be rather inhuman, should work out for him nicely.