Sheepy

I think Jagged Alliance has a different appeal to X-COM. The personality of the mercs and their interactions is I think the most unique selling point. But I have always wondered how far X-COM can introduce soldier personality without becoming JA. May be a pool of elite soldiers that you can hire only once per month or by special condition unlocks (e.g. starting region)? P.S. I just remember that Valkyria Chronicle (1) has 50+ unique soldiers, each with their own different head, voices, and lines, including special dialogs for interactions with a small list of friends (and a few un-friends). When they are mostly dead, you can still enlist generic soldiers. Even for save scummers who lost no one, this give them a reason to replace soldiers as friends and elites are made available.

So I took some time off when my baby is sleeping to bake a little log viewer. https://sheep-y.github.io/xenonauts-mods/X2 Log Viewer/index.html Usage: Click the Browse button to select your log, or drop a log file on the button. FAQ: If you don't see what you want, it's probably not in the log. Browser Support: Chrome 57, Firefox 53 Baby Fund: Steam Wallet cannot buy me nappy or chloroform, so please be patient until I recover my paypal.

I don't think this is what you have in mind, but I guess it is better than nothing: https://sheep-y.github.io/xenonauts-mods/X2 Log Viewer/index.html

I think (but can't confirm) it is hard-coded. You can however increase the capacity of buildings, or combine their features (such as combining garage with hanger). You may be able to make the big buildings smaller, but you'll have to change the battle map for base defence too.

Concur!

A good build. What I like: The bullets are easier to spot now, and I like how the screen follow them. I also like the new damage display that split the damage of each bullet and show stun damage. Love the pool of purple blood! Medkit works. Although it shows 0% hit chance on self, it can be used to self-heal. SMG make machine gunner more useful even outside of UFO, since he can now move and shot. Hello Reaper! Why are you hiding in the UFO? It seems that you are no longer one hit one kill. Thanks God! And now the bugs: Can't see cover indications. Used to set to max radius two releases ago. Hit chance is weird. I can make 2% burst that all hits. Actual hit rate feel like 95%. Some bullets hit obstacles but still damage the target. What that machine gun burst all hits, the damages disappear too fast; would like them to stack up and up. Because it is too fast, I am not sure but I think the first five bullets deal 8 damage and the last five deal 11. Same with two shotgun shots, all hits in first volley deal one damage and second volley another. How is armor degradation applied? I get wound notice from shots that wouldn't hurt any of my soldiers. I think it is nice to know I dealt a wound. The notice is too quick for me. Soldier does not stop moving when he spots an enemy. Twice when a soldier is ordered to retreat, he turns his back from the only visible alien that only he can spot, then crouch down without moving. In both case the alien is being spotted the first time in the mission. The moment when a crouched soldier stand up to walk, the TU preview on the ground does not regard the soldier as standing and show the wrong TU. Sniper rifle reload cost 1 TU. HP bar's max size does not drop with reduced HP. Number is correct, though. Haven't accidentally destroyed any cover or UFO object even when I expect to. May be related with all hits. I tried to stun a Reaper and a Sebillian, but not sure whether it is really working. Both have to be neutralised by guns at the end. I get no overwatch after enemy movements and reaper attack, and the aliens didn't make any overwatch either (auto-resolve off). I can't find the gameplay log. Has it been moved? Edit: Thanks everyone. Got the game logs now. Edit: almost forget the usual feature requests! Free camera? Jackal armour can be hard to spot when next to some rocks, may be a standby animation will help. Can we show enemy facing in their ground indicator? I find myself reading a drone for a few cycles to make sure where he is facing.

That is your assumption, not what I said. But I'm not surprised that you think your idea is creative. My previous response pretty much explained myself for your other points (e.g. I named four to five old MMOs above), so I'll stop by adding that I do have played at least one game that mostly meet my "name a game" challenge - except the "good result" part which is my point. It's a game that is turn based, squad based, top down, action point based (like XCOM 2012), open world, and is pretty complicated with jumping, climbing, pinning, throwing, lighting, large (multi-grid) units etc. When you attack, you pick a corner from the current position to launch the attack, and which grid of the enemy to attack (which also allows you to target hidden enemies). Line of Fire tracing is then done to the centre of the target grid to determine obstacles such as wall, vegetation, or smoke. There is no shot preview, so a good sense of space is very helpful in planning your moves. LoF is not shown so if you are lucky you can see the bullet hit the wall. If you are not you may never know it reduce your hit chance. And of course the LoF may be bugged; no system is perfect. It takes four to five hits from a main weapon to drop a standard enemy, with some taking a lot more. There is no health bar, the game only let you know when the enemy is at half health. Hit chance is hidden, starting at half half and goes down as the game progress. The game designer says the balance is intentional, designed to meet the tastes of modern gamers. For example, players are expected to grow up with the game and use experience to observe and create tactical advantages that make up for the drop in accuracy curve. Indeed, player feedback overwhelming compare the changes with "modern" MMOs (modern at the time). For this part, that means the combat is long and boring, you just keep repeating the same mostly missing attacks and may not even know why. It is possible to manually track every attack and every hit to deduce hit rate and hp, but most players don't bother. Expansions couldn't delay the inevitable and the designer admitted that this system is part of the failure, in that it does not make combats fun and does not meet player expectations. Now you cannot find any of this and other soul-searching blog posts on the series' official website; it is as if the publisher want to pretend this game never existed, esp. when you can still find articles for older games. If you are confident in your creativity, don't waste your time on arguing why we should agree your ground-breaking creative visions. Go ahead, actually work on it. Chris's vision on kickstarter convinced me. Aren't you confident in your ideas?

But this is not a game that aims to simulate real life. May I challenge you to name a game that plays like Xenonauts (turn based, grid based, tu or ap based, bullet sponge, low hit rate), that do 3d bullet tracing and hide shot percentage to good result? It is relatively hard to bug the display than bullet tracing, and relatively easy to fix too. And like Chris said, I get closer to the abstraction of the game through the percentage and can immerse myself better in the numbers. As a gamer, thinking in game terms is not alien to me. What you are arguing is the game (every game?) should get rid of abstraction by making things realistic (and fixing any immersion breaking bugs). What I am saying is like how MMO always have health bars (even Eve), games like Xenonauts also have common features that better fit the narrative. If you keep disregarding or sidesteping our points (by seeing the fallen leaves and not the forest), you are not making an argument, but an exercise in self-convincing. Anyway. There are many other games that pursuit realistic simulation if you look beyond this genre. Arma have already been proposed in the translocator thread. Squad is on free weekend on Steam. Don't confuse what is good for them as what is good for every game.

Don't despire! If a MMO concept has enough of a niche to be viable, you can find an MMO with it. From Sword of the New World, which let you control multiple characters, to Eve Online, which is so successful as the hardcore MMO that it's hard to remember it is a niche. Game design is an art partly because there is no average gamer and no one feature sets to please them all. That's why we have so many games! Anyway, my main point on the radar is that people naturally want info to help them plan, and this is the fun for me in X-1. This is not to say I don't appreciate some game's decision to hide the numbers. For example, Valkyria Chronicle does not show you TU numbers on the ground, and has firing cone with actual 3D bullet tracing. You can do the numbers but the intention is for players to get the "feel" of your weapons and your enemies. This two-layer strategy game aims for a different game experience from Xenonauts, and has different balance (e.g. accurate soldiers) and different game mechanisms.

A good question. The short answer is not always, you don't always see everything. The first MMO (arguably), Ultima Online, did that - no HP, no level, no always-on name. Powerful players can and do freely roam around and kill noobs for fun, which is also real for a world without governments, too. Asheron's Call is another example. They are old because the MMO trend - the money - moved away from realistic simulation. MMO is very sensitive to what is fun for enough players to be economically viable. Time has proven that game-ish worlds with colour-coded overhead names hold enough unknown and danger for many players to keep paying. This does not mean you need to feel the same as an individual. Different gamers has different tastes and play different games. Have you tried The Division? Note that ships do display their names, flags (alignments), and tons (level) out in the real life sea, so the labels at least is not a phenomena limited to games. Radar screens in airports display even more, so the lack of overhead bars in real world is may be not because people don't prefer more information when they make plan. My last post may be rich in sarcasm, but I mean it when I said I wasn't presenting an argument. You said you are interested in what people think, and this is simply what I think. Last I check the thesaurus, argument is not a synonym of opinion. So of course opinions should be non-arguments. Your great mind asked quite a few question on what I think, but my humble mind have had enough intellectual entertainment from our last exchange in the translocator thread. Like how a causal wow player can be satisfied with the horribly shallow and world shattering health bar, this time I am happy enough with the simple answer of this is what I think.

Your argument is so logically sound, and your statement so sincere, that they are the bane of all non-arguments. Enlighten me, please. What is wrong with having accurate data or all the information on the board? Chess, draughts, go, these real life games give accurate position of every pieces on the board. Does a commander in the field play in turn? Does soldiers in the field avert their glaze at ground further than 18 squares and never see the smoke from the crash site? What makes shot accuracy so special in a game that you feel compelled to single it out? Of course this is a game, to me. I don't know how you came to the conclusion that I got accustomed to having shot accuracy, since most games I play do not have them. What I am saying is the ground combat is a grid based, turn based, layered 2D, non-simulation game, with very inaccurate shooters, made on a very limited budget, and I think the simple percentage is more beneficial in this context to the big picture. I get in this game better with it than without. This is not really an argument, of course, as you stated, which is why I want to hear more of your exemplar arguments. But if you think what I said is stupid, I would understand if you don't feel like wasting your great intellect on my non-sense babbling.

The generator is not for me, so I tried some people that match it. You decide how good they are! Commander Shephard Sid Meier Donald Trump I am happy with the nose and mouth selection. Eyebrows and ears feel very limited. Face shape ok. Smile lines missing. Eyes has a good list but can always be better

I also think it's jarring to see the screen pops on and off. And as I now often play without sound, I can't hear any suspension. I would say sliding or greying out the UI is good enough to indicate alien turn. XCOM 2 did a good job for me by centring on and temporary reveals the dying civilian that would otherwise be hidden. In Xenonauts I guess we can expand it to include hidden firing civilians too, which would helps build the sense that they are fighting too.

Concur.

No way! The landscape changes! Sometimes you are in a barren land, sometimes a forest, and sometimes it's snow covered. Your team is fighting all around the globe! Imagination! A few releases ago tested the random map, which works, but for now we are back to a fixed map which feels to me easier to report, test, and debug.

Yeah. I think we gave feedback on it since first preview, but it simply isn't high priority. Here is a list to get you started: ASDF Move screen QE Rotate screen 1 to 8 Select soldier; double press to center C Crouch / Stand up Space Stop a soldier mid-walk Enter End turn Right click Turn soldier (empty ground) / Toggle shot mode (if firing cursor) / Open door (if door cursor) Left click Plan a move (empty ground) / Move (click again on planned destination) / Fire (if firing cursor) Ctrl Calculate hit chance from destination of planned move, instead of from current position. Soldier will move and fire if you ctrl+left click.

Hi Pave, do you know you can make games without paying money and without programming skill? It's a good way to learn more about game developments! Unity 5 has some nice tutorials and is relatively easy to get started. Unreal 4 is another, but I'd say it's more intended for experienced teams. Both are free and "cross platforms". Once you have spend a hundred hours or two and have a basic understanding, you can start think about the next step. Spoiler: you will need to code to reuse game assets. Lots of codes. And even with lots of code, expect to fail to reuse some assets like lua scripts, which big mods like XCE and X-Divisions depends on. Rotation is another part that I think will disappoints you. Good luck, aspiring remaker. I hope you'll read this as an encouragement.

Yeah, first idea sounds good. Reminds me of TFTD cruiser terror and island missions. The aliens is quite capable of jamming communication and liquidating all witness there. Of course, if there are too many surviving witness, the Xenonauts will need some better way to silence them like MIB flashlight. But lore wise it seems to be a good improvement.

I take it in X-1 that governments wanted to keep it secret. The UFO cover up propaganda have always believed this is what is happening in real life even today. Terror attack happens in later game (alongside escalation of ufo attacks) and signal that the war can no longer be kept secret.

Ok. This time I am on a barren land, with the sand of the land meshing well with the colour of bullets. I definitely cannot see who is overwatch shooting who. I can catch some flying rocks if I am lucky. In one case I only know about the overwatch in my turn, when I see the floating damage on the head of a drone. In another case the screen centred on bottom side of the ufo but the action happened in the front door, which I missed as I'm scanning for firing action on the left side, and only know it after seeing the body of a sergeant on the ground. Note that I usually play without sound, so I didn't even hear his scream. I'll stop play testing gc for a while because I consistently don't know what is happening at all in alien turn. I barely catch them moving when the screen can centre properly. Otherwise, first time I run the game it crashed after I think the third alien turn ends. There are some LoS issue with walls and LoF through wall at close range as listed. One of them I don't see any alien on the map (blocked by wall) but the indicator is on the right of the screen. Another main bug is my soldiers will stand up from crouch, turn, see nothing (absolutely nothing because he is facing the map edge after turn), and crouch down again, wasting CP. Alien accuracy is low enough that I can play more recklessly and lost only that sergeant at what must be point blank range, because the sergeant was right next to the door at full AP and the last alien is standing right behind the door the next turn. Never get to see the inside, though. Wish I can continue to explore the map after the mission. Didn't test pistol as my main guns are doing as low as 6 damage to the sebillian, which I guess match the novella quite well.

I agree that the reaction shot system seems to be confusing to quite a few players. Providing an indication of who may shot you and how close they are to shot you is going make the system more obvious and "less random". We may even show a "reaction fire meter" on lower difficulties, so that players can learn about TU% and multiplier. As for idle stance, if the soldiers are going to look around them, we'll need to get rid of vision cone to keep it consistent. Or we can have the soldiers flex their muscles without turning their heads, like command Shephard. Whether those exercises are obvious when viewed from third person (instead of first person) we'll know after trying them out.

Notepad++ seems to be the tool of choice around here, so I think this news is worth a note. Last week WikiLeaks released over 8000 CIA documents, some of which document their hacks, and one of which is about hacking computer through Notepad++. Well, the term "hacking" is a bit liberal in this case, but that's what Notepad++ says in the release note of latest update, in addition to other enhancements. I particularly love the shift+enter reverse search in search dialog. Notepad++ won't check for update until you launch it, and updates are not immediately pushed to the updater. To protect yourself and enjoy new feature, update now!

Hmm. How is that different from a (fixed) low to zero shrubbery block chance?

Again? Well, since this is not a first person "strategy" game, I opt for fixed and reliable calculation. Planning is the fun part for me, not throwing half the soldiers' actions against a fence with an unknown and unpredictable block %.

Hide cover when in aiming mode sounds like a good idea. Wouldn't mind if it is the default without options. Also have the experience that it's a bit hard to tell who is being targeted when there is a bunch of aliens.