Chris

I have not read all of your post because it's a trifle long to be easily absorbable, however getting scientifically realistic technobabble is a bit beyond our means given the size of the team and my research consists largely of surfing Wikipedia. There's also a significant number of projects to get right and I'm afraid I can't rewrite them every time someone finds an inaccuracy in the material. I just don't have the time. It should also be noted that explaining a vaguely plausible theory in a concise manner (as my edits are trying to do) is probably preferable than coming up with something that is scientifically accurate and twice as long...as the average gamer probably isn't going to want to read a massive wall of slightly self-indulgent text after every research project.

It's a bug in the forum software I don't know how to fix unfortunately.

It's nice when people give us more credit than we deserve The issue isn't that aliens are seeing through walls, it's that they actually can't see the walls at all in some circumstances....hence trying to shoot "through" them as they're not even aware that they exist. It's a priority bugfix but it's a big job because the LOS code is quite complex at this stage.

If the aliens are going to go through logical contortions in order to generate a smooth invasion that allows the humans just enough time to unlock their secrets and defeat them, I think it's only fair that the Xenonauts return the favour! I don't see us adding a hacking ability and I don't think we'll release the source of the game either, but a lot of the stuff will be moddable using only text editors (and possibly LUA scripts). The AI is one of them; the stats of everything in the game is already accessible and easily modifiable.

Did the Strike Witches leave their trousers at home? I would have thought it would be rather chilly to do all that flying without the appropriate clothing.

My concern with reducing the 100% hit chance for actors is that I'd be very surprised if it didn't underpin a whole bunch of other systems in the game, so might cause unexpected results. Such as not having a 100% chance of taking damage from an explosion or stepping into fire, and probably weirder stuff still.

You have to actually go back to the landing room and abort the mission once you've destroyed the energy cores to get the victory (the research description on capturing a base does explain this). If it ended automatically then players wouldn't get the chance to clear the base if they accidentally blow up the power cores.

The hallucination psionic power creates additional copies of the psionic aliens when used. Unfortunately it seems the hallucinations can themselves also use the hallucinate power.

Haha. It is normal, but it is also stupid behaviour that I've passed onto the AI coder.

I'm not sure what the solution to this would be. If we have a lot of deviation, people complain it looks unrealistic. However, if you don't have much deviation then the bullets are naturally going to hit the tiles on either side of the target fairly frequently, because they won't have enough deviation to miss by much. If you put a check on the bullets not hitting bystanders, you end up with some strange logic - presumably you'd then also be able to shoot through other units to hit your preferred target too? Our current method just applies the same logic consistently to all actors. I guess the biggest real-life difference is that you don't have a 100% chance to hit a standing person in a 1.6m x 1.6m area if you fire a bullet into it. But it's an important underlying assumption for the game, I imagine changing it would cause problems with a number of systems.

Yes, it's basically because the explosive tile spectres were mis-set so they exploded after taking any damage at all (including taking 0 damage). They'll be fine in the next hotfix.

Sounds like he's playing V18. I think V19 Stable and V20 Stable will address a lot of his complaints. Still, I understand he's a well-known journalist so all coverage is good. I hope he gets a chance to review the game once it is officially released too!

Yeah, we will.

Thanks. I've dropped you a PM too, if you could reply to that either way that'd be great.

Aliens would previously also spend more time trapped in walls, reducing their combat abilities somewhat. This has also been fixed.

Thanks for your thoughts. The wallhax are an AI bug and we'll get it fixed before V19 Stable.

Were they shot with anything? C4 can explode if destroyed by weapon fire, I think?

I might just change the story so the Xenonauts can only hire the soldiers that failed their entrance exams everywhere else. It'd stop all the complaints about them being such bad shots. Also, I will be looking at Pinetrees' mod. I intended to add a lot more nations to the soldier lists but then got caught up in some other stuff, so duplicating his work seems a bit silly.

I'm looking at this with a mind to putting it in the game. The only issue is the length of some of the names - I'll have the cut out the Icelandic names because a whole bunch of them are going to be about 40 characters long if they are linked together.

Are you playing V18 Stable or the latest Experimental build? The aliens are much more aggressive in the base attack missions in the Experimental build.

Yup, we'll be looking into it shortly.

Power cores are not meant to be quite so weak, the sprite was set incorrectly.

In the latest hotfix they do.

The Xenopedia updates are just me making progress editing the existing text so it reads better. For the translator types on the forum, if you open the file in Excel the lines highlighted in green are "final". Hopefully they'll all be done for V19 Stable.

Just to clarify, my question was about why people feel the need to launch a ground combat mission after they've shot the UFO down. I'm not advocating letting them all escape, but at the same time not every crash site needs to be attacked (there's no penalty for not attacking a crash site, but obviously you don't get the rewards for doing them). It's just an observation really, I'm interested in the thinking behind it. Even in the original game I didn't use to do all the missions.