Chris

A case in point - people want an advanced AI, but they also don't want it to spam grenades in every situation where a grenade would be better than shooting at a unit with conventional means (basically anything below 10 tiles in range). And so on. A game that was tuned to be wholly realistic rather than catering to gameplay enjoyment wouldn't be a very fun one, so the aliens playing by different rules is not inherently a bad thing.

Generally it's because people expect games like ours or the new Fallouts etc to have not only just the features that have become standard in the interim (nicer graphics, UIs that are not horrendous, gameplay that is not broken or so easily exploitable, etc) but then also to have all the features from old games too. People want games to "move on" ("else why wouldn't I just play the old game?" they ask) but when a conflict arises between the old and the new, suddenly they hark back to how great the old times were. And then it falls to the developer to weigh up both options and choose what they think is best - knowing full well that whatever they choose will be wrong. In this case, you need to weigh up the benefits and the cost. Aliens having limited ammo complicates the AI and has historically caused a number of bugs. It also opens up potential exploits and other unintended behaviours. As an example, you can imagine the capturing / killing an alien would be trivially easy if you had combat shields and stayed in cover just inside the alien firing range and waited for them to run out of ammo. I don't want to reward that sort of play style. If that sounds far fetched, then why is it important that we give aliens the ability to run out of ammo? The aliens carry enough ammo that it won't matter whether they can run out of ammo or not except in fringe cases that 99% of players will not see, so spending developer time on it would be a waste. For just normal in-fight reloading, remember units have no obvious reload animation, so you're more likely to end up in a situation where a reloading alien looks as if it just hasn't performed any actions instead of gunning down your exposed soldier - which is going to look more like the AI glitching or being stupid than being intelligent. Maybe you can add a sound or something, but even then the average player is still going to be confused irrespective of how clever the game is actually being. Hence, when Half Life is mentioned above, you're thinking about the Marines in it reloading...the human enemies that use the same weapons as Freeman uses, weapons that you already understand and expect to need reloading. But do you see the Vortigaunts reloading? The player's not familiar with the alien weapons in our game so they don't have to follow the same rules as the human weapons. Thus the idea of spending a fair bit of time on implementing and debugging a feature that has few benefits and a number of potential negatives doesn't strike me as a hugely important task.

Heh. Turns out you can just go into psionicpowers_gc.xml and turn the message duration setting down to 1 sec instead of 3 sec. I'll do that in the next version...and maybe I'll nerf it a bit too.

It was meant to appear in V19 but I don't think we actually got the bug fixed until the last Experimental build. We did a new prop for the alien Communications Array but forgot to update the recoverable settings for it. It's an easy enough fix using the Sub-Map editor. Just find the offending sprite in the alien base comms room and make sure the Recoverable box is ticked and has the right string in it. I think it's something like items.aliencommunicationsarray or something? You can find it as a prerequisite in researches.xml anyway.

Thanks. We'll be wishing the community a merry Christmas closer to the date though - still almost two weeks to go!

Very cool indeed. DHVRL looks fun. The Singularity Cannon is intended to be a Predator-only weapon when it re-appears.

As people have mentioned above, the hostile reaction you got was more from your manner than from your suggestions. If you ask polite questions like you have in your other thread then people will happily explain the issues to you...but if your first post is full of swearing and telling the developers they are morons you'll get a less warm welcome - even if you happen to be right (which you were not).

There is a shield / unarmed combination already. You'd do better creating new aliens than Xenonaut units, I'd have thought - people love new enemies. We created our sprites by rendering a 3D model from 8 different cameras in Maya at 480x480, then batch processing them in Photoshop to add a 3px (I think) black outline and then shrinking them down to 120x120px. Then you need to use Playground SDK 5's Filmstrip tool to create spritesheets from the animation sequence. It's a pretty long and involved process, to be honest!

Even if we don't go this far, we are aware the "in-transit" items are not very well flagged at the moment and are planning to do something about it.

Yeah - the game's not actually in 3D, so you can't rotate the camera.

You can switch between the different branches as you like (though it's a download each time). Provided you don't delete the save games, if you changed back to V19 you'd be able to load your old saves again.

I'll reduce it in volume by 10% relative to other sounds for the next build then - it is indeed quite a piercing sound relative to some of the other weapons. I've given it a test and it seems a bit weak and ineffectual if you make it any quieter than 90% original volume.

And they're arriving in the next Experimental build, you'll be pleased to hear.

Yeah, it's something we'll hopefully address before release.

Well, the weapon delay on all the alien weapons are set to 1 sec and the longest Xenonaut weapon delay is set to 1.2 sec, so I think people are exaggerating a bit here. We're talking fractions of a second at most. However, I reviewed the animations earlier and I do think the fire animations could be sped up by 20-30%. They can be a bit plodding occasionally. Assoonastis - the Androns and Predator are meant to walk more slowly than the other units, and thus have a slower walk animation, but we've not put the code in to allow individual units to move at non-standard speeds yet.

We knew what we wanted it to be, but what you were seeing was the competing pressures of trying to releasing builds that showed our community visible progress whilst also actually making that progress. Until the game gets close to completion, you just gotta have some of this: It is of course much harder to be confident that you've made the right investment in the early stages of development, but ironically that's when the team need the money most. You kinda gotta throw your money in the pot and hope the team don't screw it up

True, but just saying you don't think those suggestions are worth the effort required to implement them because they don't affect gameplay much (and explaining why you think they're more work than the OP believes them to be) means nobody gets offended. People are usually happy enough with a "no" if the reasons behind it are explained. Perhaps it'll cheer you up to know I'm processing your portrait at the moment?

The intention is that the air combat auto-resolve should be able to play the air combat as well as the average player - it is just a bit underpowered at the moment. See how it is in the next build, hopefully it'll be improved somewhat. The perfect auto-resolve idea is interesting but I don't think it'll be needed if we get our existing system working as intended.

Chill out, guys. There was nothing in the OP where he was demanding that we dropped everything to implement his suggestions, he was just politely offering his ideas and that's what this forum is for. Unfortunately quite a few of them aren't really possible due to the amount of work required for them / the stage of completion of the project / gameplay reasons (for example, doing animations on over a hundred portraits isn't possible and voice acting gets grating unless you have a LOT of it). Out of interest, are you playing the V19 Stable version or the V20 Experimental builds? There's many more maps in V20 Experimental, and the "artillery" option for dealing with crash sites is in the game - it's just called Airstrike. The current version is a bit unbalanced with regards to the air combat but there's a lot of improvements in it. Well worth checking out if you've not already.

It's very little to do with the number of frames (modders wouldn't be able to edit them even if we reduced the number by 2/3), and reducing the number of frames by 2/3 would probably leave it looking jerky. However all the animations have a customisable framerate controlled by the "frametime" property in their spectre. The crouch animations are all set to 50, which is why they display quite slowly - but it's easy enough to use regular expressions to search and replace them all down to 30, which speeds it up by 40%. I'll have a look at some of the animations shortly and see if any look obviously out of time.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/10/xenonauts-dev-diary-exclusive-first-ground-combat-screens-and-walkthrough/ It wasn't so good back in the early stages, but it's a lot better now we've done the majority of the art, balancing, writing and coding

It's a great idea until you reach different tech levels. What happens when you upgrade the Rifleman role to use a Laser Rifle by default and then start a new game?

Let us know what the popular consensus is. It's easy to turn down an individual sound in the game.

Just a quick note to let everyone know we're aware of the periodic forum issues / database problems and we are working on getting them resolved. Please bear with us!

Yeah, we'll be doing some more tweaking to the air combat balance in the next build. It's too difficult at the moment.