Chris

Regarding tension in real-time games, it is certainly possible but it's a different type of tension. Some of the tensest games I've played are Company of Heroes in multiplayer, which usually uses a victory point system where holding two of three victory points causes the other person to lose points until they reach 0 and the game is lost. It's the tension of time (can I get my Tiger to the VP to reclaim is before time runs out?) rather than tension of action selection (do I shoot at the Sectoid or retreat my soldier back round the corner?) but it is also rather effective if done well.

Don't the players take their turns in real-time?

Yes, the aliens can be set to have infinite ammo but a reload TU cost. However, we can't set them to have limited ammo because they'll exhaust their weapons in a prolonged battle and will then be defenceless. We can't let them freely scavenge weapons from the battlefield like the player can, because the aliens don't have weapon sprites for most weapons and therefore if they pick up an unfamiliar gun they'll default to appearing unarmed but will still be able to spray bullets from their chest. All the aliens planned to use grenades do have grenade sprites though.

Thanks for your thoughts and I'm glad you enjoyed the game. Construction / research times and the power of sniper rifles are both things that are still undergoing quite a bit of balancing, as they're actually quite hard to get right. Hopefully we'll find a good balance by the time of final release. UFOs on air superiority missions do actually attempt to shoot down your dropships and fighter squadrons, but they are relatively uncommon spawns. I'm sure long time forum members will regale you with stories of the good old days when they were much more common, but in the end we had to dial them back because they ended up being REALLY annoying. It's much more of an occasional thing these days.

Sent you a PM.

The existing strategic UI is pretty poor - the combat UI went through three iterations to become what it is now (it originally looked like this), but everything other than the topbar and the Geoscape in the strategic UI is still in its very first iteration. The new UI will look better and will be easier to use. It's not going to be perfect, but it will be better. And once it's in, we'll be willing to listen to all the small fixes that cumulatively improve usability a great deal.

The "dread" is the passive psionic attack of the base's Praetor.

Miklegene - if you can provide a save file then please report the bug. It's probably not something we can fix for you (try loading the autosave from the start of the mission and try to avoid the crash?) but if we can reproduce the crash bug then we can fix it for future versions.

We're planning to give this a test once both Aaron and I are back in the office. Likely we'll put it in one of the experimental builds so you guys can test it for yourselves.

There's no way to change the soldier art at this stage, even if we wanted to, as it's too big a job. Regarding the old map, it may be possible. The art itself is just a straight image swap, but the maps don't have identical landmass edges so different continent masks etc are used. They still work now, but I'm not sure if all the old art and continent masks will be compatible with the game at the end of development so I can't really say at this point. Also bear in mind that when the new UI arrives, the old dark Geoscape will be much more inconsistent with the rest of the menus than it is at the moment.

Sadly not, because the aliens don't have sprites for the weapons they don't spawn with.

To me, it does sort of undermine the purpose of Iron Man mode (though I don't think Iron Man mode is properly ready for use yet). But ultimately the game is there for you to play it the way you want to, and if you'd prefer to play it that way then by all means do so.

It's entirely free for the entire weekend. If you're an X-Com fan but are not sure whether you want to play it or not, you may as well download it and have a play just so you can have an opinion of it. Won't cost a penny.

Oh, and here's a preview of the new base map style. Radar is under construction: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/basemap.jpg

Hello everybody. As it's been about a month since we brought V19 Stable out and there's no sign of a new experimental release, I thought I'd write a development update to explain what's happening. Firstly, it's vacation time for the team. Aaron is off on his honeymoon for two weeks tomorrow, which he'll spend hiking around glaciers in Iceland. My "vacation" is slightly less exciting and has come about because the flat I was due to be moving into last week has not been finished yet and now I have nowhere in London to live. I've headed abroad to visit my family for a bit and am still working a bit, but it hasn't really helped production. That's not to say we've not been making progress - it's just that we've been making progress on some rather boring things. We've rewritten the night mission lighting code, as that was very performance intensive and was causing noticeable slowdown particularly on slower machines. The new code is roughly 1,000 times faster, but ironing all the bugs and unusual behaviors out of it took the best part of a week. Similarly, we spent a week rewriting the accuracy code to make it behave a bit better. Previously it suffered from a problem where shots would ALWAYS hit a (standing) unit if they passed through that tile, which caused issues when shots missed. For example, at close range units would have to turn 45 degrees to not hit the target. There was also an exploit where firing at the ground tile directly behind a target would pretty much guarantee a hit on them. The new formula allows shots to pass through units. Missed shots can now hit behind the target, or even the tile they are standing on, without injuring the target. Additionally, all shots are 50% less likely to hit a unit unless you are specifically aiming at that unit. This fixes a lot of the exploits and should cut down on accidental hits and friendly fire by about 50%. This is a big improvement to the game, but it has been a *lot* of work and that's why we waited for V19 Stable to be complete before we started work on it. We're now working on smaller things like getting the new jetpack animations in the game etc. GJ is back at work on the AI. His most recent fix is that aliens now target vehicles correctly, but he's also working on fixing a number of other issues with the AI. Aaron's done new maps and increased the randomisation for the Industrial and Arctic tilesets significantly, and he'll do the remaining tilesets when he gets back. The new Tundra tileset, Abduction missions and indoor Terror Missions are also still planned, though the latter two may be rolled together. Tile paintovers continue and the Alien Base tiles are now all done (and look awesome), so we're on the Xenonaut base - the final tileset left to paint over. The new UI is coming along too. We're discussing the final changes to the last few screens - the big merge of the new UI code and our normal dev branch will probably start next week. The "progression" art for the various screen backgrounds is also on track to be completed for a Christmas release and I'm busy getting the new base tiles done to replace the existing base structure artwork. It's in a blueprint style that I think works much better than what we had before: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/basemap.jpg That's about all there is to report, I think. We'll start work on putting together V20 Experimental 1 in just over two weeks, as both Aaron and I will be back in the office then. Expect something around the end of the month.

Yeah I'll write an update tomorrow, most likely.

This thread should tell you everything you need to know: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5245-Steam-Keys-How-To-Claim%21 If not, drop me an email.

Xenonauts is hopefully going to be released this year, then any future work on it is likely to be subtle balancing or bugfixing or adding more maps. Paid DLC is unlikely if I'm honest. We do have other games in prototype stage at the moment, simply because some of our team have finished their roles on Xenonauts already and we need to keep them occupied or risk losing them to other companies. Needless to say, it's much easier working with Unity than it is with the Diner Dash engine...but in any case, Xenonauts is our flagship product and we're primarily concentrating on that. What happens next is not nailed down yet. At the moment we're planning to do a "quick" 2D game to try out some new stuff and maybe do some experiments with tablets, before returning to making a larger tactical turn-based combat game in full 3D. At the moment we're prototyping a much more robust system for aiming and cover etc using grey block levels and the like - we're essentially fixing the design issues we've had with Xenonauts. That'll likely take quite a while but should pay off long-term. As for the Xenonauts universe - I think I said I'd rather cut my own legs off instead of immediately doing Xenonauts 2, rather than that I'd stab anyone that suggested it. At this point we can rule out our next turn-based combat game being a Xenonauts game, but we may well revisit the universe at some point. I don't quite feel we completely nailed Xenonauts - I like to think we could do better if we started over with a better engine and the extra money and experience we have now. A reboot rather than a sequel would probably be my preferred route. As I say, though, anything after the release of Xenonauts is just conjecture at this point. We'll only fully be able to plan the next move once it is out.

The key point with iron man is that there is an autosave, but there is only one and it's overwritten every time a major event happens. If you don't autosave regularly then the player can just Ctrl+Alt+Del out when something goes wrong and go back to the save they had at the start of the session. Saving after every major event prevents you going back in time in any way (the entire point of Iron Man) and also provides the player protection from crash bugs or power cuts or whatever.

I think the "stasis pod" idea is a good one. There's also no reason why we can't sometimes make it an indoor mission using the vanilla Xenonaut base tiles too, as if the aliens have attacked a research facility or something.

It'll get better later, because once the donation system is in place we'll be able to balance the value of crash sites for all players rather than just the ones following the intended playstyle. This is exactly the issue that led us to develop the new system.

Hi - thanks for the post - your English isn't too bad either, don't worry. The different ammunition types for weapons and different fire types would overcomplicate things in this game, I think, given there's already 5 different types of weapon in each "tier". However, they are ideas I like and something I would consider in a future game where we're less constrained by having to remake X-Com faithfully.

Indeed. However, I think it's been established that you have above average air combat skills, Dranak - the Foxtrots do deal with big ships in the most straightforward manner.

Overmind - you really need Foxtrots with torpedoes against the big UFOs. Light missiles don't do enough damage against them.

The new UI is the main feature for the V20 series of builds we're working on. Fonts do scale correctly in that.