Chris

We considered training, but then I decided to remove the system. I think soldiers should level up in combat rather than through training. We may implement a system like in the new X-Com though where the soldiers you can recruit become more powerful as the game goes on to make losses a little less punishing.

In short, we don't have access to the engine source code so the massive number of files is because the engine needs to read them that way. It's causing us lots of problems but I'm not sure it's avoidable. This has been discussed many times though so I'm not that keen to write a long reply about it again.

Fair point, I'll put this on the to-do list.

I can see why people would want this, but that's not really the role that the vehicles fill in Xenonauts. The soldiers are meant to be the stars of the show and the vehicles are just there to support them (and be expendable).

Chess isn't less of an experience for being turn-based now technology allows us to have real-time multiplayer games. I don't see any particular game system as becoming obsolete just because there are alternatives to it. But yeah, adding real-time combat would be a mammoth undertaking - adding something that fundamental is not you can do easily and it's certainly beyond our capabilities if we want to release the game in the near future, I'm afraid.

This isn't really the functionality that aircraft are designed for, so I don't think its worth the coding time to add scheduling. You can manually do it with the waypoints with Shift-click but really you're meant to be using base radars to discover the UFOs.

OK, we'll look at this.

OK, I can see this would be useful. I'll put it on the to-do list.

Build V16.1 is approved by Desura for download via their client, and the standalones are currently undergoing the Desura approvals process. Build V16.1 is basically a large hotfix for V16, hopefully fixing several of the major issues with the game: 1) The Farm tileset crash should be fixed. This was happening at the end of the turn on the Farm tileset, and was caused when civilians moved and tried to vault over a wall. Their vault animations were missing, so the game crashed. I've updated their settings so hopefully this should no longer happen. 2) Invisible units: On the Desert, Arctic and Middle East tilesets, there were missing units. These were either civilian or friendly AI troop units where the sprites hadn't been rendered out yet. The updated sprites will be coming in V17, but I've added some placeholders there now so at least it's obvious what unit is meant to be what. There should be a lot more variation in the civilians by V17 though. 3) Middle East maps: The Middle East maps weren't done when we released V16, but they were still loading up. Therefore people would occasionally get unfinished maps, or maps where they couldn't get off the Chinook. I've put together a (basic) map for the Middle East now, so you can at least have a taster of how the tileset might look when the game is released. It will also prevent you getting completely flat and open / broken maps for the tileset (arguably more important).

I don't really want to add either of them, they're not really the kind of tools professional armies use. Molotov cocktails would be extremely easy to mod in, though. Suicide "belts" could just be made with big lumps of C4 too, if you're that way inclined.

Ko2fan is the chap who is porting Xenonauts to Mac and Linux and who is producing those builds for us for each release until the game is finally finished. That's not strictly developing Xenonauts, but his work is obviously still rather valuable to the project. (Posted that in the wrong thread yesterday. Was meant to be here.)

EDIT - posted this in the wrong thread, like an idiot.

Once we hit beta you'll be able to pay to add your name and nationality etc and pick an existing portrait.

Freedom of speech in the purest sense doesn't apply in the UK. Incitement to violence or racial hatred etc being the most obvious examples where freedom of speech is curtailed for the good of society. But even if you leave aside things that have their own separate laws against them, I'm not sure people have the "right" to verbally abuse other people. If they do, then that means bullying is perfectly acceptable. The question is really about the proportionality of the response; not every case of verbal bullying needs to or should end in a criminal conviction / investigation / caution, but then you're relying on the court system to be proportionate. Some would argue that the recent charges are too strong, but I don't think that's an argument for decriminalising verbal assault in any circumstances. Free speech is a grey area that it's difficult to make absolute statements about, and it always will be (ho ho ho).

Moonie, shouldn't you be pointing out that the game isn't stable at the moment?

Will be a fix for this later today.

We'll release a hotfix for the farm crash shortly, we've just worked out it's caused by missing animations for the civilians when they try to jump over walls. For the soldier role icon appearing on the portrait - yes, this can probably be arranged. You might need to remind me if it's not in the next build though.

It's civilians jumping over walls that causes the crash. I'll release a hotfix for it in the next 24 hours.

Sorry, this is a known issue (they're the local civilians, and friendly AI in the desert tileset). Should have mentioned it in the V16 thread. The sprites will be coming in the next update.

OK, so all developers now have red names. Should make life easier for everyone.

Yeah, I probably should do that. Maybe red names would be easier than a badge.

This missing sprites shouldn't affect anything. They're not there because the default "missing alien sprites" sprite is the Caesan non-combatant with the plasma pistol. The alien assets folder in this build is exactly the same as in the previous build, plus the missing support / plasma cannon sprites you reported last time. I doubt the issues are caused by missing alien sprites. Perhaps by civilian sprites, though (though that's also unlikely). Try deleting the weapon.shotgun folder for the friendly AI folder for the farm tileset and see if that helps.

Oh, actually, it seems the main branches have still not been approved. I was being a bit premature. Hopefully soon.

The Xenonauts demo had a bug with the aliens where they were able to reaction fire in any space they could see the previous turn. So if they'd turned around in the previous turn they had 360 degree reaction fire.

I'll be updating the Mac / Linux files within the next hour.