Chris

So this is one of the major mechanics that strikes me as unbalanced in the current game: the combination of squad sight and persistent LOS (i.e. a unit can look at a location and move away, but that location still stays "revealed" for the rest of the turn). This means you can game the system pretty effectively by sending your soldier into range of an alien to spot him, then run him out of fire range to keep him safe but still pick the alien off with your snipers. That only leaves you vulnerable to reaction fire during the entire process. It also leads to a problem where if an alien spots your team, they will all be able to shoot at you even if you then kill that alien. It's frustrating because there's nothing you can do about it. I'm therefore thinking we'll make these two changes: LOS is no longer persistent throughout the turn. The only areas revealed are those that are directly in the LOS of a unit at that particular time. Therefore if a unit is killed or turns away from an area, it is no longer revealed. If a unit is suppressed, it loses all LOS. This does more to address the second issue, as if you come across an alien in your turn you either need to kill or suppress it or you'll possibly get enemy squad fire at you during the alien turn (or retreat out of range). It only partially addresses point 1, but unfortunately that's always going to be a valid tactic so long as we don't decide to force to utilize their units sequentially without letting them swop between them - and I've no plans to change that. Thoughts and comments welcome.

There were some display bugs in the game on Friday so I didn't release one then and I've decided to actually have a weekend this weekend, so you're probably looking at Tuesday / Weds next week for the next release.

Here we go: http://www.xenonauts.com/devfiles/PlaymateFontMaker.zip Forever more, Playmate Font Maker will have a home.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdcuf731071qcqscno1_500.jpg

xracer - I'll probably ask the Spanish translator to create a forum thread etc on here so you'll get a chance to interact with him. No harm in getting the community to help him out.

They'll work in the next version though!

Yeah, we need to reduce the chance of the power cores exploding really. It should be an occasional annoyance that they haven't survived more than the repeated block to progress that it currently is.

Don't really want to change the rank system at this point, but I do plan to slow down the speed at which soldiers rank up and gain stats. The next version has an indicator on the UI that shows when a weapon is out of range too.

There's a new demo coming in a couple of weeks with the Steam launch that you'll probably enjoy a lot more than the Kickstarter one. Regarding the setting, firstly, it's far too late to change it. Even if it wasn't, though - gameplay is far more important than the setting, so what we've come up with offers the best gameplay possibilities and the setting is wrapped around that rather than vice versa. As an example, it's neither fun nor interesting to have to manage 16 missiles per aircraft. Ultimately, the choice of aircraft may not be optimal but they're recognisable and look nice so that'll do me. There's also a very good reason why we don't use the YF-12 (you're not the first to suggest it), but unfortunately you'll have to complete the game to understand what that is.

Belmakor - no, it's not easy to add new icons to the UI. There's not really much room and it's not a trivial thing to do in general. The damage multiplier would be an entirely new feature as well. Lt_Parsons - I don't know about multi-shot tbh. Possibly. It doesn't really make logical sense though, as the shots are divided into single and burst shot already. Incidentally, the flare light effect is implemented in config.xml though.

Looking at this now. Moving the clip size to ammo isn't a significant issue I'm sure, and we can probably move the definitions for single-shot stuff to the individual shot levels. However: 1) I can't be bothered to move all the settings in weapons_gc.xml to each individual single-shot level myself. Someone in the community will have to do that and give me a nicely laid out file to those specifications before I have those changes made. 2) We don't have different cursor images for the burst fire accuracy levels, and even if we did the code doesn't support it at the moment. I'm not particularly keen to spend development time adding different burst fire accuracy levels at this point. So for now that'll stay as just one level of accuracy.

Yes, we'll have a look at this. But Iron Man mode isn't a great idea until the game is more stable.

Wow, German isn't exactly snappy, is it? We also need to bear in mind the UI space for some of these project names etc, as there may not be enough room. Anyway, here's my input: Aliens: alien, extraterrestrial and invader etc are just used to ensure the text is not overly repetitive. Interchange them as you want. Harridaner: I think that's probably the best choice. Reaper: "Bladed Horror" is a perfectly adequate translation of the unit, if you guys think the word is evocative in German, or the direct translation of reaper would work fine too. Wraith: Phantom sounds fine. It's basically just meant to represent something incorporeal due to their ability to teleport through walls. Fury: "Wrath" sounds fine to me. Hunter: Hmmm. It might be worth just using a translation for "Scout" here, if you can (I'm not quite convinced by the idea of calling it "pursuer" or something to that effect). The role of the unit has actually changed in the game quite significantly since it was drawn up, as it's now not actually intended to hunt enemies like it previously was and is rather intended to explore instead. Scatterlaser: Yes, this is the laser machinegun. I'll let you guys decide on the most appropriate translation of it. Plasma bolt: this is a powerful single-shot vehicle mounted weapon that does single-target damage. MAG / MAC - Yes, this is Magnetic Acceleration Gun and Magnetic Acceleration Cannon. Avalanche - this name is taken from the original X-Com, where the heavy missile is the Avalanche. Overall, it's nice to see this level of discussion and hopefully a good quality of translation will arise from it.

Just a quick note to say I've now organised the strings.xml alphabetically (in the last release), and will do so in future too. Sorry for screwing up any previous work but it should make things easier in future.

Yeah, giganto-soldier will be gone from the next build.

I don't think we do have one in place. We probably should.

Yeah, it's a bug.

Yeah, they can survive after battle but if that occurs then the end of mission screen should list them as wounded rather than KIA.

It won't affect rebalancing as that's just changing the XML files. It's only going to cause issues if we have to make changes to the actual .exe file post-release (and I'm really hoping we won't have to do that).

The sub-map randomisation does still work, but it'll only ever add minor variation (like the interior layout of a building etc, or the colour of a car). It's less useful than it would originally have been as we've now put more fine control of object placement into the Level Editor. We probably should add more levels, but they're time consuming to make and they're not game-critical right now, so they'll come later. Sadly there's already 12 different light scout maps (representing about a week of my time) but you're right that it's still not enough variation...which is a bit mind-bending. Perhaps we'll need about 30 in the final version? Either way I'm hoping the community will chip in a little bit. It's more than possible we'll need well over a hundred levels in the final game, each one painstakingly hand-built...

It's fixed in the dev version, should be fine next build.

Yes, the next version should sort out the missing dropships. The troop capacity goes up from 8 to 12 to 16 with the 3 dropships, but we might nerf that to 8, 10 and then 12 if 16 proves a bit too unwieldy in terms of squad size.

You can sort available recruits via a particular stat on the new UI, to make this simpler.

If you've already bought the game you'll have a Desura key for it already, and that won't change. You'll always be able to download it from Desura completely DRM free, as well as having it on Steam.

We'll release an update on Thursday / Friday when I'm back at home. There's been some more bugfixes in the meantime, and the average person downloading from Desura but not checking the forums doesn't have access to HF2, so an update is required!