Chris

Not at present, no.

It's about time for another development update. Probably the most interesting news is that we've decided the next V19 Experimental build will be the last one to add new features, so once that arrives we'll go on another bug-fixing drive. Once we've fixed all the major bugs affecting play, we'll release it as V19 Stable. The next build is going to include the new Geoscape alert style, which matches the new topbar style and is quite a bit more attractive than the current "black box" style we use (the content remains the same). It will also contain the air combat auto-resolve, and improvements to the alien bases and final mission. What it will not contain is the updated UI for the various non-Geoscape screens. Progress on that has been slower than I was hoping (largely because the programmer responsible for it has been on holiday), and we still need to do the new Base screen and then fine tune all the other ones that have already been done. We're continuing to plough through the remaining art that needs to be done - hopefully all of the autopsy art will be done by the next build etc. I need to finish off editing the Xenopedia, as that's slightly fallen by the wayside recently but needs to be finished. Aaron is continuing to work on the balance and improving usability. Once we start working on the bugfixing, I'll also review the community maps and probably build a few new ones too. So I'm not sure V19 Stable is going to blow anyone's mind, but it should be a steady improvement over V18 Stable. After the next experimental build we'll be posting up some threads for people to report the bugs that are annoying them the most, and we'll start prioritising fixes for them. I've also started work on putting together this art book for the Xenonauts Kickstarter - once I finished drafting that, we'll be getting that and the T-shirts / posters printed out. So if you're a Kickstarter backer, we've started the wheels moving on getting the physical goods going. That's been hanging over our heads for a while now, so I think it's best that we start to tackle that sooner rather than later. In terms of general updates, things are going well here at Goldhawk. We're in the middle of a heatwave here in London (apparently it's meant to be 33 degrees Celsius today), which predictably means it is incredibly hot and stuffy in a room full of computers, and catching the tube is much like standing fully clothed in a sauna with a bunch of sweat-drenched strangers for half an hour. It's even reached the point where Aaron is no longer wearing heavy black jeans every single day...he turned up in (camouflage) shorts on Friday! Quite something. Oh, and I now have internet access again. I have been moving house again recently, and two of the people I lived with moved out a month earlier than everyone else - and helpfully cancelled the internet when they did so. My new place has teh interwebz though, so I'll probably be better at answering emails or checking the forums etc than I have been over the past month. So overall things are good, and hopefully V19 Stable will be along soon.

If that's reproducible, that's genuinely terrible bug I'll let Matthew test it out though, we'll fix it up if we can repro it ourselves.

Is this for all UFOs, or just the Scout?

I've given it a test on Windows 8 too, to see if that was what was causing it. There was a long pause on the HM screen (10 sec or so) at the end of the turn, but then it reached the next turn fine.

Hmm. Interesting idea, Antra4cite, I'll think about it some more. Dranak - redoing the air combat as something simplified would be a lot of work, but if it proves by far the most popular option then we will at least give the idea a serious evaluation within the team.

Well, actually, the debate in a nutshell simply boils down to this - "how important do you want air combat to be?" I don't think it's fair on people who buy an X-Com remake to expect them to have to pick up a whole new set of skills to be able to play a challenging game. In the current system, if they fundamentally don't like what we've done with the air combat at present (and it is somewhat divisive) then they're not going to enjoy the game. They'll be limited to a lower difficulty setting than they would be otherwise. A number of other people obviously enjoy the air combat and that's cool. It's a part of the game that you think contributes heavily to the difficulty of the game, and if you like what we've done then it seems like we're removing a big element of it and reducing it back to the same level as other X-Com games (although in reality we're not going that quite far back, but I can see where people are coming from). Fundamentally then, this is a debate about whether we're willing as developers to exclude people because they don't enjoy or are not good at the current air combat to improve the experience for those who do genuinely enjoy that part of the game. There are plenty of people on the forum that fall into both camps and it's not easy to come to an agreement between them. I think we're not willing to exclude people because people want our game to be more challenging. The people who want a tougher experience are likely those who will spend time on the forums, who are willing to try out mods, pick up new skills and willing to replay the game many times to do what more casual players might consider impossible. You'll be able to make the game more challenging relatively easily if you wish to. However, people who don't like our air combat and think it ruins the game aren't going to stick around. They'll just stop playing the game, hate it and badmouth it to their friends. That's a waste of a player, who might otherwise become a hardcore player once they'd completed it once or got a bit further into the game.

Wall of text continuing above discussion in the spoiler tags.

Iron Man is an added difficulty level that disables an external element of the game - repeatedly reloading saved games. It doesn't actually change the game logic at all, it just changes the way the player interacts with the game. The same with explanatory tooltips - they'll be an overlay explaining what each screen does. They change the way a player interacts with the game (are they informative or annoying?) but they don't actually change the game logic itself. Recoverable interceptors is a fundamental game mechanic and as I've pointed out many times before, it's not possible to balance the game if it is switched off unless you're also happy with the biggest factor affecting a player's chance of winning the game being how many aircraft they lose in the air combat. Switching it off fundamentally changes the underlying game, so there won't be a tickbox for it. Even if we wanted to, you'd probably also want to lower the price and build time of aircraft if you turned off recoverable interceptors so a simple checkbox is not a good solution. A mod is a much better idea.

We'll make the accuracy drop-off per each tile beyond optimal range a moddable number. It's probably something we need to be able to play with.

From what I understand they're not too hard to do, but they're not that high on our list of priorities as there's more important game-related stuff to do. They may well come in time tho.

Why stop at base defence missions? Maybe we'll make the scientists go and find their own research materials in the next update

Dranak - Without a viable alternative available that addresses the same issues as recoverable interceptors (and "do nothing" not being a valid choice), there's not really much scope for the decision to change no matter how many people voice opinions for or against. It's not us being deliberately aloof about this, rather we don't see any other option.

@Thothkins - The idea of having free interceptors in unlimited quantities is quite similar to recovering them after being shot down, except there's less time penalty for losing them and also you can't have the manufacture costs as a way to "gate" the invasion difficulty. So I don't think it'd address the problems people have with recoverable interceptors and would add a couple more too. @GizmoGomez - In the current idea you've posted, having the manufacturing project cost money means the idea doesn't address the issue that recoverable interceptors does - i.e. losing interceptors costs money which makes the game hard to balance as the money involved is going to be quite large, giving those who are good at the air combat too much of a comparative advantage. If you change it so that the airframe changes cost time, but not money, then the system is identical to the recovered interceptors one - but the underpinning logic is different and may be more palatable to players than recovering the plane that crashed. The only problem is that you're using the UI in a less intuitive manner there - you're buying an airframe, instead of building it in the workshop. I suspect that might strike many people as a peculiar design decision given that vehicles etc are made there. So while it may seem less hammered in in a logical sense, it might seem more so in an interface manner. But it is the most plausible alternative I've seen thus far. @Person - You're inadvertently proving my point there. In your example, the main factor in selecting difficulty levels is how good the player is at the air combat. That's the exact problem we already have, the air combat shouldn't be that important to the game (ultimately the ground combat is much more important). What happens if someone is a veteran X-Com player and wants a hard game, but doesn't want to pick up all the extra skills to do the air combat correctly? They'd then have to pick Easy mode. We can't make an X-Com remake and not cater to them. Ground combat and the strategy layer are the two "core" parts of the X-Com experience, as far as I see it, and primarily success in the game should be based on success in them. Having an interceptor rendered unusable for a week or two because you had it shot down can be a pretty severe penalty, one you're overlooking. It's actually far more severe than being able to replace it immediately at low cost, hence why 3) is better than 2). There's no reason why the length of the repair time can't increase with difficulty, either.

Nick - that's a good point, actually. We'll do that.

Yeah, I'll speak to Aaron and we'll have the soldier progression reduced a bit for the next build. We'll probably limit gains to 1 point per mission in each stat (currently 2), but make it twice as easy to get that one point as is currently the case. We'll also reduce all the stat caps to 99, from 100 for most stats at present or 120 as APs.

Nah, we're looking for project leads rather than ideas (we've got plenty of them). We're now closing these applications and reviewing what we've been sent so far. I will remove the post in a couple of days so people don't keep trying to send me late applications

Yes, unless we agree an advance on the profits for living expenses (this advance would be later deducted from your share of the profits).

It's because the balance in V18 isn't particularly good, unfortunately. The Experimental builds have improved / smoother balance (along with more crashes), but I'm afraid the balance probably won't be perfect until release as it's still something we're working on.

Yeah, we need to change the way the Wraith teleportation works. It's a bit annoying at the moment. We'll be having a general rebalance of the psionic powers in the coming weeks and it'll be part of that.

Email me - chris@xenonauts.com with your payment details and I'll sort it out.

As far as I can see, nobody as said anything that changes there being three options at this stage (as mentioned in the OP): 1) A game where the most important skill for the player is not to lose interceptors. 2) A game where aircraft are unrealistically cheap, to the point where losing them doesn't have much of an effect on the game. 3) A game where aircraft that are shot down are repaired and returned to action a few weeks later. People have suggested alternatives, but none that: address all the problems that invulnerable interceptors do; without causing even more fundamental issues; or breaking immersion to an equal or greater degree. You're also wildly exaggerating the whole "advertised features" thing. Air combat is still there, and you can still play it if you want to, it's now just not compulsory (and other forum users have told you that they don't want it to be compulsory). You've got no evidence that losing your interceptors for a couple of weeks and them having a higher upfront cost is going to make the game easier. So I genuinely don't see what there is to be so angry about? Feel free to point out the viable alternatives if you want and I'll read through them, but just be warned in advance I'm not going to type out a long justification for each one being viable or not as I've almost certainly already covered it in this thread or one of the others.

Went - I never said that was impossible, simply because it's actually already possible in our game. All you'd have to do is make sure all the the sub-maps had ground edge textures that matched up (for example, farm fields all had grass edges), make them all the same size, then put them in a single folder. Once you've done that, you can just paint an entire map with that "tile" and the game will automatically randomly fill each of the "tiles" with a random sub-map from the folder. In actuality, the effects are a bit ugly as they don't seem to have much logic to them. As I said in the previous post, any kind of urban area tends to have more "logic" to it than you might think and the randomised versions look unconvincing. We decided to use semi-randomised maps instead, so they had a more convincing appearance. ThunderGr - from my point of view, it looks like you're being negative for the sake of it. It might just had been the sarcastic "nice try" that made it come across like that. It's annoying to take the time to type a perfectly reasonable explanation of the issues at hand and then have someone be rude in reply. The answer to your question is above, in my reply to Went - that is actually already possible in the game but the end results look crap. I wrote that in my original reply. Re: the "incorrect decisions", you're missing the point. If we use the After*** games as an example, we could presumably have the same randomised map system as they use if we weren't a tile based game. But then we wouldn't be a tile-based game, and X-Com veterans would (rightly) be complaining that we'd changed a fundamental aspect for only marginal gain. I put "incorrect" in quotation marks because in this example, the decision we made there wasn't the incorrect one, but it may look like it to someone that isn't familiar with how every part of the game works and isn't aware that it's a choice of nice-looking map randomisation or tile-based mechanics. That leads to a situation where a developer ends up being criticised for making the correct decision, and if you look at it from my point of view for a moment, you can probably see why it's a frustrating position to be in. The Civ games are at a drastically different scale (a square is 1.6m in Xeno, it's a whole city in Civ), so don't suffer from anywhere near the level of edge blending issues as you get at a lesser scale.

Afaik, they are not tile-based games like the original X-Com and therefore it's nowhere near as problematic to do it for them. They use a 3D engine where units move more freely rather than from tile to tile, as RTS games generally do. Using square tiles is the biggest limitation regarding randomisation in maps, as both us and Firaxis have found. Even if I'm not correct about that, being so unrelentingly negative about everything we do really isn't achieving anything. If it's as easy to make a perfect remake of X-Com as you appear to believe, the success of this game and Firaxis' title suggests that you could do very well out of doing so. I strongly suspect what you'll actually find is that what you believe to be very simple solutions will have ramifications for the project elsewhere, and the reason why people have made "incorrect" choices is because that not making them would cause even more issues. And even if I am wrong, you can point it out without being sarcastic. I'm not quite sure why you believe paying $20 for a game entitles you to be rude to the developers?

Perhaps we will remove the auto-recovery on Insane, we've not made a decision on it yet. I'm not necessarily averse to the idea but the difficulty settings aren't something we're concentrating on at the moment.