Chris

Explanation of what happened here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/2479-What-s-been-going-on-with-the-website-then

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/145-How-to-claim-your-Pre-Order-forum-badge!

So, what's been going on over the past week? No doubt most of your have noticed the absence of functioning Xenonauts / Goldhawk sites most of the time, and broken forums even when they were up. Unfortunately, with our sites down and forums not working, it wasn't exactly very easy to communicate what was happening (unless you follow me on Twitter). The long and short of it is that our hosts, Dreamhost, apparently suffered a RAID failure on their server and lost a lot of data. This was a shared hosting package so a LOT of sites were affected and though they set about restoring the sites from backups, the backups were obviously quite old (hence the old forum badges earlier today) and the volume meant it took a long time. Added to that, their backup server clearly wasn't up to the job - that's why the sites were down so much and you kept getting timeout errors. Even when our data had officially been migrated, their servers couldn't handle the load put on them so we were still getting timeouts. They seem to have that under control now, so both the Xenonauts and Goldhawk sites are up and hopefully should be for the forseeable future. There was a bunch of issues regarding our databases, too. This was why the Goldhawk forums weren't working even when the site was up. I've now fixed this - Dreamhost had a "restore backup" function I wasn't aware of, and though the backups only go back 5 days (ie. to a point where the databases were still not working properly), restoring one of them seems to have made the forums work again. I have no idea why that is, but I'm not complaining. A similar trick has brought the wiki back, and seems to be letting our bugtracking software work (most of the time) too. We also have access to our SVN code repository again, which means we can carry on developing the game (it is on the same server although a different domain). After a few days without SVN access, our coding progress slowed down dramatically as it's basically impossible to collaborate, so we're very pleased about that. Finally, my email has been a bit up and down thanks to me shifting the DNS servers for www.xenonauts.com from Dreamhost to Bluehost and back again. It should now be working, but if any emails to me have bounced in the past few days then that's why. You can resend them now and they should get through. Looking forward, we're going to continue to use Dreamhost until we finish development on Xenonauts, then move to a more dedicated and reliable solution. Dreamhost, for all of its faults over the past week, works almost all of the time. It's not the fastest and the massive downtime did not amuse me much, but I know how their interface works and migrating several sites and all the associated databases, domains, developer tools etc is not a small task. I'd rather just get the game done, at which point we can bin the dev tools and make the process much easier. So that's what's happened over the past week. Hopefully there won't be another re-occurence of it, but if it does then I'd advise checking my Twitter feed and reading my sweary messages about what's going on to keep yourself informed.

They announced their UK expansion 2 hours after I finished that 5,000 word article. I was not amused.

Yes, probably around beta.

Yeah, the fact the forum badges have changed back to pre-Kickstarter shows how often Dreamhost take backups

I will post an explanatory message tomorrow as to what has been going on for the last week, but we're up again (thank god).

Somebody from Xenolith mod database got in touch with me recently asking if we wanted to be involved with their site. Essentially the service is free and it is used by the community of Project Zomboid. I've noticed that a lot of people seem to be hosting their own files seperately and publicising them in threads in these forums. I think it'd be a good idea to move them to a specialist hosting site so people can easily find the install instructions and the download links (the threads can get convoluted, particularly for popular tools like the QM's Weapon Editor etc), and so that it'll also stop mods disappearing if the user gets bored and moves hosting or something. The features are listed below: Features: - Upload directly to our servers or use the built in Link-System to continue using services like Adf.ly or other filehosters. - No download limits. - Add screenshots or explanatory images in a gallery. - Gain exposure, thanks to our popularity system. - Add as many files and images as you want. - Track your visits and downloads in detailed analytical data. Full Graphs and everything. - Rank yourself among other modders, if you want to. No pressure, what-so-ever. - Add source code for other modders to use. - Optional: Choose from six creative commons licenses and let others know what they can do with your creation.

Ezryder - I'd rather you didn't mod the high level aircraft into the game. They're not there because they're not meant to be in the alpha rather than because they're not in the dev version of the game.

It was well worth attending. Had a good time, met lots of interesting people and the game got a good reception.

I think the shotguns are about right at the moment. Lethal close up, terrible further out.

In response to the first post - EMP is already in the game, and there will be specialist alien snipers too. The other stuff is unlikely for various reasons that are a bit too long to go into right now.

Hmmm, I think this might involve a fair bit of rewriting the way the game tracks stuff during the alien turn so I'm not really keen.

People should probably remember that there are a whole bunch of alternative weapon images available in the assets folders (including AK-47s etc) specifically so people can mod them in if they want to. But they won't be in vanilla Xenonauts.

Yeah the outline is what can't be done in the engine, rather than the transparency. It's a shame as it would be a very neat way of solving the issue.

Yes, it could be done but I think it'd be a lot of effort to make it work well (coding and animation are both time-intensive) and I'm not sure it'll be worth it with the rewards it would bring.

Yup, hopefully the aliens should be interesting enough as is. Your ideas are interesting but it's a bit too late to add new aliens now, I think.

Yes, this is probably something we should sort out.

This is already planned. It's probably the last feature we'll add pre-beta as it is apparently going to be a bitch to code.

Incidentally, it is possible to move another soldier before the other one finishes his move. The hotkeys allow you to move a lot of troops quite quickly that way.

The problem with showing an aircraft range is as MrPyro said. Unless the aircraft is at its base, it is not a circle but a weird bulbous thing that doesn't look pretty and isn't very intuitive either.

We might post up a vague milestones list shortly.

Doubt it'll take that long for beta, Ace. Unless putting the new UI in takes a lot of time. We can launch the beta with incomplete tilesets. The artist has handed his notice in and will be starting full time here in early October but is still working on new tiles in the meantime. I'm hoping for the beta in about three months. Then at least two months in beta. Christmas release would be the earliest I think. Timeframes are kind of hard to estimate though so I'm basically just guessing. That said, I'm hopeful the AI coding stuff will be resolved shortly and that would remove one of the largest obstacles in our path at the moment. Once that's gone, the road would look remarkably clear.

We've already signed a contract with Steam so I doubt we'll have to worry about this, but it's certainly a good thing to have there for the future,

Yeah, you can't transfer them from one base to another. Apparently this is very difficult to code as currently scientists / engineers are not treated as items, so we're probably just not going to include it.