Chris

You playing the standalone or branch version? Try the standalone.

Yes, the standalone still comes in a .rar but there's no compression once that is extracted. That's the best thing to download, I'm not sure the auto-updater is reading all the files correctly if I'm honest.

No idea. Probably not, given saving didn't work properly in V17.9.

Build V17.91 has been released. This post will be updated as things progress. At present: The auto-updater versions are available for Premium Pre-Orderers. There's a glitch affecting the Standard branch which I'm trying to resolve. The standalone versions are available on Desura (probably best to download these). The Mac / Linux versions will be ported if the build proves stable (V17.9 did not) This is mostly a stability update, rather than one that adds a bunch of new features. I'm not convinced the auto-updater is working properly so please try the standalone if possible, or in your bug reports at least mark which version you are using. Here's the changelist: BUGFIXES: Launcher load-up crash should be fixed. If it is still crashing on loadup, you can use the -novideo tag as a workaround (we'll see if we can put together a batch file for you guys to use). You can now save / load the game on the Geoscape. You can now save / load the game on the Ground Combat. When you load a Ground Combat save game, all the men and aliens are no longer crammed in the top left corner of the map. When you load a Geoscape game, you no longer get the "new technology available" popup. Hidden Movement should correctly show projectiles now, so your troops will no longer be gunned down without you being able to see it. Corvettes and other large UFOs no longer give ludicrous amounts of alloys when captured. You can no longer place base buildings outside the base grid area. The Sebillian Light Scouts still aren't spawning crew, despite my best efforts to fix it. As a result, I've disabled all Sebillian Light Scouts, so all Light Scouts will have Caesan crew (none of which should be empty). UPDATES / BALANCING: Overlay tiles are now supported. This means the car parks around all of the drosphips have been removed and their shadows will overlay onto whatever terrain they are placed on. There are a few new maps. The Western Town terror site has been updated significantly, and the Soviet Town terror site now has a work in progress map. Alien bases also have a map now. There's a new Corsair interceptor Xenopedia image. The rocket sprite has been replaced with a smaller and better version. The sight ranges of Caesan aliens have been reduced by 1 to 19. This is one greater than a soldier wearing Basic Armour, but 1 less than a Hunter armoured car. All alien weapons have received a 10 point accuracy deduction. The Alien Plasma Rifle has been reduced to 0 mitigation, so it will usually not 1-shot a soldier wearing Jackal combat armour (though it should still instakill a soldier with Basic armour). The Jackal has been reduced in cost to $40,000. Shotgun range reduced by 1 to 7, damage increased to 65 and mitigation reduced to 0. This is a net increase to its close-range firepower. The "kinetic" resistance of Hunter and Jackal armour has been boosted significantly. This makes your armoured car and Jackal-armoured troops much less vulnerable to early-game friendly fire damage, but still just as vulnerable to alien plasma fire (which uses "energy" resistance). Finally, it should be noted that this build does not use any kind of compression so is about 135,000 files. I'm pretty sure that either our file archiving system or or tile atlases have caused a lot of the texture issues in the last build, and I'm wondering if they may also be behind our invisible civilian bug. Therefore this build is uncompressed and we'll see how that affects these issues. In terms of balancing, I've not done too much of that this week. So once the Corvettes start arriving, my current balancing runs out and you're on your own. From what I understand, the Desura guys are at GDC so I don't know if authorisation is going to be particularly quick.

The farms regularly have large open areas. If two fields are next to each other with just a stone wall running between them, that's two 20x20 empty spaces next to one another. Unlike every other tileset, we can't just slap a rock or tree in the middle of a field or any prop other than a hay bale because it's a field - it wouldn't be a field if it was full of stuff, so there's only really any cover at the sides of it. So it already has open and closed areas. If you took the hedgerows away it would just be an open map. You need something to block off the maps so you can't see the full distance all the time otherwise there's no point taking any weapons other than sniper rifles on most missions. You only needed heavy plasmas in X-Com, which was hardly great from a tactical point of view. No, the maps aren't procedurally generated because they'd look horrible if they were. It's basically impossible to come up with a convincing looking and balanced map for a game like this using procedural generation. The ground tiles wouldn't link up properly unless you spent more time coding the level generation algorithm than you did on all the rest of the game mechanics put together.

Not ideal. The swf2mvec tool never existed in the time we were using Playground, I assume it was the precursor to Playmate. Even if someone was to write a tool to create mvec fonts from scratch, we've got to consider how the Xenonauts font will support special characters given it is in all capitals. Is that going to be an issue? I guess just having Cyrillic support for standard text (like in the Xenopedia) would be a huge boost though. Finally - a333, you appear to know what you're doing with fonts. Can you add a few basic symbols like $ : ; ' " etc to the Xenonauts font for me? I tried once but the program I was using kept screwing up the relative heights of the letters for some reason. If you know how to do it relatively easily, it'd be of great help to us.

Yeah, I got it. It made me smile.

That's a terrible name for a game.

True. The batch script should already been in the /xenonauts/ directory.

This is fixed in the dev version now, it'll be fine in the next public release.

It's because the Ctrl key maxes the amount, so if you have it held down it will only accept 0 or 99 as the two possible quantities. Sadly it's also sticky at the moment so if you press it once, it will apply to the next arrow click even if Ctrl isn't held down at that point in time. It's on Giovanni's to-fix list.

I repeat, the actual issue is that it's rather difficult to do in the code. It's not a good use of development time. I'm not willing to implement a load of weird abstractions for such a rare event either. I'd rather the coder in question was working on the new UI instead.

The actual issue is that the bases are basically the parent item for everything in them, and once they are destroyed having stuff auto-move to another base is harder than it sounds. It's stuff like a plane not being able to change parent base when airborne and stuff. Given it's only a relatively minor (and rare) issue, I'm just not willing to invest the time required to come up with a realistic gameplay fix for it.

There's a big button on the level editor that displays a preview of the entire level now, which rather replaces any need for Quick Battle and saves an enormous amount of time all round.

You'll need to have a Desura account, but you can download the game as one big .rar file without having to download their client through that. We may also look into the Humble Store, which has a similar arrangement.

I will be getting in touch with Valve about this posthaste.

Auto-sold? Are the aliens going to let you auto-sell all the contents of your base before they blow it up? I think they count as collateral damage, The tenuous logic could be something to do with the maintenance equipment that goes with it. It's not much use having an advanced fighter if you can't refuel, re-arm or repair it.

I think they're all just destroyed. Shouldn't come up too much though hopefully

Shush. We're in the middle of re-rendering them all because I used the wrong batch script to post-process them and the guys with particular weapons ended up too small. All the plasma pistol Sebillians are normal size, while the plasma rifle ones are all midgets. So they'll all be identical sizes, just with more intricate armour as they rank up. It's only the Androns that actually get larger as they rank up.

There's a batch script we can use to force quick battles, which we'll provide if we do more community level testing. The general feature was removed because I think it detracts from the game, and it won't be in the final game. It was just there for the early stages of development so people could poke about in combat to see how it worked.

Yes, the hidden movement screen bug (not showing your men die) is fixed in the developer version now and I'm thinking about the relative sight ranges of the aliens versus the humans.

General points - damage falls off as projectiles fly beyond their maximum range, so it's possible a plasma rifle shot won't instakill a Xenonaut if the shot is at good range. But yes, the Jackal should protect against it most of the time. The shotgun: yeah, I can see the points about it being a bit underpowered. I don't really want to increase the range too much, maybe I'll improve the damage instead. The AI isn't done yet, so don't read too much into that at the moment. But the aliens on crash sites are much more passive than those on terror sites and base missions, which will be more direct. Also his name is Gijs-Jan. Vehicles - it's now set so you can only have one vehicle to accompany your squad on any mission, so they can be a bit more powerful than before. As they only take up 2 soldier slots you'd be mad not to take one, but at the same time players can't spam them so they can be reasonably powerful. The Hunter has dual 0.30 cal machineguns. They are intended to suppress rather than kill the enemy, as they'd be a bit imbalanced otherwise. The weapon changes you mention Gauddlike seem a bit overly complex. There already is range, beyond which range and damage drops off. The "heavy" penalty is already a good 50% penalty if you move and shoot, so if you're trying to use a heavy weapon as an assault weapon it will end badly. The problem wouldn't so much be that the enemy are too close, but that the weapon didn't have time to get set up properly. There's also the additional AP cost per shot for long-range weapons to account for a longer aiming time. Finally, I've just realised we implemented both kinetic and energy armour values for amour for a reason - allowing me to make the Ferret largely invulnerable to small arms (kinetic) weapons but still vulnerable to alien weapons (energy). I can use this to somewhat reduce the damage dealt by human friendly fire too, while not nerfing damage dealt against aliens. That'll be a nice plus.

There are plenty of tilesets that are large and open (Arctic, Desert etc) so the farm ones are more enclosed than before.

Most likely it's a missing map. What UFO type caused it?

Can't repro it - been completing plenty of missions with 1 casualty, but it's not happening for me. How are you generating this bug? Let's get it fixed for the next update if we can.