Chris

WiseSplinter - yes. Elydo - yes, to an extent. If a room is formally upgraded (lab / workshop / missile turret) then it gets a new sprite, but if not then it doesn't change.

Flamethrowers are a major regret of mine. Aside from the animation issues, you guys have seen the chaos caused by hypervelocity weapons in bug terms so I dread to think the issues flamers would cause. A more robust shooting model is very high on the priority list for any future turn-based combat games we make, believe me.

Glad you like it.

Have you destroyed the power cores? The final mission briefing is below, it was only added relatively recently so you may have missed it. If you've not destroyed the power cores, the door will not let you walk through it - but it also should not be openable / destructible. If you have blown up the power cores, it should work fine and it is incorrectly barring your path. So something is broken, I'm just not sure which. Could you write up a bug report one way or the other please, including that video?

The final tier weapons are still in the game, yes. If the Alien Battle Rifle is that rare then it's something we need to look at in balance terms.

Thanks. I had a browse on the net and we found a tool to do it yesterday (Photoshop had problems with the alpha channel), and we're running some tests now. So far it seems to have no gameplay effect whatsoever, but does significantly reduce the game size. Unless we find any serious issues we'll update all the images for the next build, which should reduce the game size down below 2gb as we're getting a 60-75% file size reduction and the unit sprites take up over 3gb of the 4.5gb game. That should make things a lot less painful for people without fast connections - so thanks for suggesting this, it's been really helpful.

I think it is - though it probably does have some bugs in it somewhere, as it's not been heavily tested yet. You may want a Valkyrie with a full complement of soldiers (14 and a tank), though.

I quite liked the bit where I read part of the first post and began typing exactly the same reply that I'd already posted a month ago. Reassures me that I've not undergone any major personality change in the interim

Thanks for the suggestion. It's too late to change a lot of what you've said, but we are working on some of it. The AI gets more aggressive later in the game, but early missions do need to be improved a bit. The original X-Com didn't allow the player to rotate the view, though - it means that every single sprite in the game needs to have 4 different views, which quadruples the amount of art you need to do compared to a single view (though admittedly many props will have 4 variants already). A full 3D engine would work much better in terms of rotate-ability, but sadly it's too late to change now. Something to bear in mind for the future though!

What tool did you use to reduce them to 256 colours, btw?

It won't speed up the loading in the game because the engine doesn't support compressed textures (don't ask, long story) but it might work for the sprites. We'll look into it, as it does seem a sensible step to take if we don't lose any image quality by doing so (the tiles are where most of the colour comes from on maps).

I guess we'll put it back in a RAR file then. I assume the previous RAR files were working for you?

The V19 Stable everywhere is the updated (good) version.

Rack actually guessed correctly a few posts up; I imagine the reason X-Com did not contain it is because being able to look round corners means less tension.

Should be, yes.

Syndicate is still one of my favourite games of all time. I imagine we'll get around to it at some point.

This will probably happen, but it's not really what GizmoGomez is talking about. The problem he's talking about is being unlucky and not getting the UFO you need for new technology early enough in the game, so you're attacking larger UFOs with outdated technology.

The Starship Troopers movie was actually awesome.

Sorry, there were some bugs in the assets that meant we had to cancel the process and start again once we'd fixed the bugs. I've just sent the V19 Stable files off to Humble Bundle guys and am uploading it to Desura as we speak. Mac / Linux builds have also been delayed but will be along in the next few days.

The next game won't be a Xenonauts expansion or sequel, although we may continue to support Xenonauts on a part-time basis after release. A sequel is certainly not out of the question in the future, but it's not something that will happen in the next year or two.

That doesn't mean we won't do it, of course - it's just not the only thing we're working on. It's more than likely that some accuracy problems are fundamental and won't be correctable, but others can be fixed. It's a complex system and there's a lot to consider with it...but it is being looked at.

Blank pictures are still to be expected. ##### research projects are not. Please report which projects are causing it (best as a bug update) and I'll update them accordingly, it'll just be an error in strings.xml.

Thanks for the thoughts. I've only read the first page but it's useful to have new player thoughts. I think the game might be a bit too hard at the moment on normal, as you suggest. We'll look into it before release. EDIT - naturally, not having read page 2, I failed to realise I'd already replied to this...

The latest version of the game has the "finished" Xenopedia and they have been toned down a bit - the humour and sarcasm is no longer forced in at every available opportunity, because I thought there were some instances where I'd gone too far and it was a bit clumsy. However, I think having the arrogant asshole scientist is a good thing in general. It gives the game a bit more character (which is important when there's no actual in-game characters that aren't entirely randomly generated and therefore utterly devoid of character), and it is sort of justified by the fact you can't just replace a scientific genius if you think he's got a bad attitude. Many famous geniuses are characterised by being rather difficult people in some way. Your personal mileage may vary with my writing and it's cool with me if you think it's bad, but I hope that more people will like it than dislike it.

We don't want to add any more scripted missions beyond the starting two Light Scouts - we script it too much, and it just turns into a standard new XCOM-like strategy progression. The RNG is a pain sometimes but it balances out over time, it's just at the very start the pain is unusually bad if you're unlucky so we felt we had to mitigate that at least.