Chris

That was me being ironic. I've no intention of changing the lore, it was just a joke. Once again, game balance trumps realism. This is a remake of X-Com and therefore combat takes place at short range (which is more tense) but the soldiers can't be accurate to a realistic degree because then everyone would hit with every shot at that range (there would be no tactics, nor soldier progression with experience). There's also no gameplay "fun" in allowing a soldier to take all the equipment he could possibly want onto the battlefield. @Mordobb - the reason the refueling time are the way they are is, again, because of game balance. It stops the player using the same interceptor squadron from shooting down all the UFOs in a wave. That's not bad design or execution, that's good game design and execution. Letting "realism" dictate game mechanics is a terrible idea unless you're attempting to make a military simulation. If you want an accurate military simulation, go and play Arma - if you want an X-Com game, play Xenonauts. You can express your opinions, of course, but be aware that this game is not a milsim and if I see any change as detrimental to the intended gameplay simply to increase realism then I will have no interest in it.

We likely will on Monday. The launcher does have a built in RSS reader linked to this forum though, so the announcements here are visible every time you boot up the game.

Aaron's been on the team for over two years now. You can thank the Kickstarter and everyone that put money into it for me being able to hire him full time. Re: the vehicles, we've not decided what we're doing with them yet. Secondary weapons may not make it in at all, may be full-blown secondary weapons, or may end up using the Quick Grenade slot. We don't really know at this point. For the realism updates, I'll have a look at the thread at some point but I'm making no promises. The whole "graviton" issue, for example, arose out of the fact a bunch of people complained that my original anti-matter based explanation for plasma weapons was breaking the immersion and would be much better if I used gravitons instead. But I will at least read your suggestions.

Yeah, you can pick up alien weapons on the battlefield but you can't keep them after the battle. They're too powerful to let you do that

As V19 Stable has just been released, this development update is mostly concerned about what's been going on in the background recently and what we have planned for the immediate future. I think the first thing to do is to remind everyone of the huge amount of progress that has been made over the last three months since V18 Stable - there's been massive improvements to almost every aspect of the game (balance and AI most obvious amongst them), and it's easy to forget quite how much has been done. The V20 series of builds is intended to be mostly polish, with an emphasis on getting the new UI installed / fully functional. The rest of the game will see more tweaks, but it's not likely to change quite as much as it did from V18 to V19. There will be further balance work, further AI improvement, new maps, reworking of the way jetpacks work and probably the Geoscape UFO intelligence too. Aaron and I have been discussing internally and we would like to have the game finished for Christmas. Goldhawk is has never been particularly good at sticking to deadlines, so please do not take that as gospel...but we're hoping for a Christmas release. The biggest missing component is the new UI. We've actually been working on this for a loooong time now (it's been keeping me busy) and it's basically complete in functionality terms. We're now working on finalising the formatting of each screen - making sure all the text is aligned correctly and all the scaling works correctly and so on. The only completely finished one is the Research screen, but they're 90% done at this point. There also needs to be further work done on the existing UI, such as the Geoscape notifications, Main Menu screen, combat Inventory screen and the pop-up menus. A different coder is working on these, but they all need to be skinned correctly and set up so the text scaling and so on is no longer a problem. It would be nice to have all of the game assets in place by the end of November - so all of the tiles are painted over, all the Xenopedia art is in the game, every UI background is painted and so on. I've been able to find a bit of time for the writing and I'm hoping to have a final Xenopedia complete next week, as I've now done about 65 of the Xenopedia entries and have another 23 to do. I know there have been delays there, but I'm just as keen as anyone to have that finished and locked down so translators can get to work. All in all, we've had a really good three months and the game is really quite playable at the moment - so I'm hoping that with three months more we'll have a genuinely good game that will deliver on what we've been promising for the best part of four years.

Just to make everyone aware, the updates on Desura and Humble Store will likely be on Monday. I'm also getting in touch with the porter so we can start work on getting V19 Stable across to Mac / Linux.

Not before V19 Stable, no. The jetpack animations are being worked on but that's something for V20. EDIT - the jetpack mechanics are also going to change so they work like in the original X-Com (i.e. hovering is permitted), except you won't be able to shoot when airborne.

It's not quite as simple as that. You CAN recolour it, but there's a whole bunch of lua scripts you'll need to tinker with as well.

That's not exactly what he's asking. He's asking that if his custom soldier is set to appear in the game, that portrait will not appear on any randomly-generated soldiers at all. So when he's playing the game, the soldier that represents "him" is the only soldier in the game he'll see with his face.

Yeah, so if you don't want your save games broken you can just use the Stable branch until you feel happy trying the new experimental builds again. The intention wasn't really that people would play literally every experimental build we make, although it seems some are trying to do that In any case, once V19 Stable is released there'll be another 2-3 week period before the V20 Experimental builds start to appear (releases are closer together towards the end of the cycle).

Evilbookworm - bear in mind there are two branches. V19 Stable is going to break all old save games but will be released later this week ideally. Once that is out you'll have full access to it for at least another couple of months. The experimental builds break save games regularly, but you have to opt into those updates to receive them.

Yes, that's correct - there are light and heavy versions of the three tiers. The upgraded Wolf is the Predator.

That's for a333 to say, I'm afraid. He did all the Cyrillic-support work, I've never had to use it myself.

Awesome

We do plan to revamp the UFO behaviour on the Geoscape a bit in the near future. Also, the bombers are a prime candidate for airborne terror sites that do significant relations damage if not dealt with (just a normal air combat) before they time out.

Suspension of disbelief is necessary here as well, as I'm sure you're well aware. There's no reason why the Xenonauts would only send 8 men into a combat site instead of throwing tens of thousands at it to make sure the technology was secured. There's no reason the Xenonauts wouldn't have essentially unlimited funding. There's also no reason why aliens capable of interstellar travel would attack in a carefully choreographed invasion that we ever had a hope of winning (unless you come up with a dubious plot conceit about their intentions). You'll never have a story and setting in a video game like this that is not contradictory to the capabilities of the two sides taking part, because if you did it simply wouldn't be any fun. I think you're demanding a rather high level of realism from Xenonauts - we have to come up with am "excuse" in the background fiction every time we do something unrealistic (which is all the time), and predictably they don't all hold water all the time.

For one thing, the Condor Xenopedia entries are old and haven't been changed for at least a year. Secondly, if we're going into backstory then planes are the only things that survive the Iceland Incident. There's no other surviving equipment at all. I think the entry makes reference to the airframe being reinforced with an aluminium alloy to strengthen it against heat weapons, but it's not really practical to build your soldiers out of aluminium alloys. The main reason, however, is simply that we want it to work that way for the game / research progression. There's quite a lot of things in Xenonaut / alien doctrine that don't make sense if you look at them too hard...but ultimately the gameplay always comes first so some suspension of disbelief is required.

PC version? If so, I have absolutely no idea what might be causing that.

Stun grenades have received a bit of a nerf in this update. This is because you're not able to spam grenades at the target to bring them down with the initial stun damage, as was previously happening. The idea isn't that you throw 6 at the target in the same turn and bring them down, instead you use a number of grenades over several turns to keep the gas level (all tiles of stun gas do equal damage) up and then you capture them that way. Frankly stun grenades are meant to be a poor imitation of the stun baton anyway, as they can easily be used without putting your men in danger so we can't afford to make them that effective.

Bear in mind the entire armour stuff got a rebalance about two weeks ago with a major boost to armour degradation, so this is most likely not the final balance of the game.

I believe the crash is caused by a soldier throwing BOTH a smoke and a stun grenade in the same turn. That is certainly a reliable repro step anyway. Ishantil - yes, it drops to 50% damage at the edges. Not sure I see the relevance though? Orcidea - yup, looks like you're in luck. billion - well done, good luck with the final mission (the explanation for it probably isn't in yet) Gromitek - yes, and probably due to incomplete balancing.

As we've said before, the main issue at the moment is that it's not possible to shoot through a unit. Maybe we'll change it in the future but at the moment we're working on a Stable build and we're not going to try changing something that may well underpin a lot of systems in the game.

It's possible that 90 AP is too many APs, given they're also tougher and better-armed. I'm not sure AP should be scaling significantly as well as those two things. Aaron and I can discuss tomorrow though.

I think GizmoGomez knew that, too