Chris

I've had a quick look at your Soviet Town maps and I like some of them, but I think overall they're too densely packed with buildings. The average town actually has quite a lot of space between buildings - roads, parks, open space etc. I think your maps would probably take a bit too long to clear. There's also an element of your maps using some of your sub-maps that I don't think work so well, so it'd be interesting to see how one would look once I approve some of the sub-maps to go in the game and you use only them. I think that'd make them resemble the Goldhawk ones a lot more. My favourite map is the soviet_terror_corvette_landingship (though it does still have too many buildings, they are nicely divided up here). Arctic - just had a look at these. Not convinced by the "barneo base" ones, but the Freezer maps are nice enough. I think you make the Arctic quite heavily populated though! I'm not sure more than 2 buildings on an Arctic map is really a good idea. Desert - not bad, but I'm not sure the layouts really make sense. There are random concrete patches in the same and random fingers of sand sticking into the base. It doesn't seem like the way the military would lay out a base. It might also be worth adding some sandbags to this map - they worked well for the military soviet buildings. Industrial - these are quite good. I'd make more use of the grass rather than such large amounts of concrete, and I think we need more building submaps...but they have potential. Some of the wall placement seems a bit random, though - generally a wall is up against a road, or is part of a larger whole, or divides two different ground types. Perhaps this is where using more of the grass might help? Middle East - I don't think this looks particularly realistic, but I don't really think that's your fault. We need to do more work on this tileset as it doesn't fit together very well and it's hard to make maps with it at the moment. Town - I like the layout of your Town corvette map actually. Maybe I'll give that some tweaks and put it in the game. It has some nice ideas in it.

Wow. Lots of maps. Thanks for doing these, it's always good to see the community trying out the editor and posting up their work and it must have taken a while to do them all. I've not had a chance to look at all of them because you made so many, but here's my general thoughts on what I viewed (about 1/3 of them): - You need to be more careful lining up the edges of the ground tiles. The 10x10 ones and 5x5 ones are meant to have edges that line up with one another, if you don't do that then it looks weird. It seems you know this is an area to work on already, but having the floor join up in a sensible way (for example on the Farm maps) is half the battle when it comes to creating a realistic-looking map. I find it quite a chore sometimes but it has to be done. - Your arctic maps are densely packed with props, which doesn't look as bad as I thought it would, but you've gone a bit too far. Having two or three mesas touching one another works fairly well, actually - as does having a lot of rocks in a small area. But having a solid wall of them doesn't quite look right and can be a bit repetitive. - It seems this goes for all of the tilesets, actually. You've a tendency to re-use the same prop / building a lot in close proximity, which looks a bit unnatural. Overall I don't think they slot into the Goldhawk style particularly well, but I'm sure the community is happy to have more maps to play though!

I'd be very interested to see what you came up with for buildings if you turned your hands to the more complete tilesets, too! You've got nice ideas.

I've just sat down and had a look at all of your buildings. I really like some of your ideas here, and some of the buildings are excellent given the tileset as a whole is mostly incomplete. I've added some general stuff below for you to work on, and commented on specific submaps too in order for you to know what to correct. I think several of these maps could quite easily make it into the final game. General comments: -Layering - I've noticed in a lot of your maps that you've included exterior ground tiles on them, such as pavement tiles around them or grass tiles between buildings. In most circumstances you shouldn't do this, as if there is an empty tile on the ground floor of a building sub-map it will load the tile from the "ground" layer below it. So if you only paint the interior tiles of a building and plonk the submap down on top of (say) a field, the field tiles will be displayed up to the walls and everything looks nice and natural. You can see this in the other tilesets. -For the "flats" maps, I can see some of the tiles are a little misaligned or the tops of the window / door walls are different colours to the walls around them. Are you using the internal walls / doors for interior walls? -Stairs - you've got freestanding stairs, which look very strange. Put them against NE / NW walls and they'll look a lot more natural. -Wooden houses - we plan to split out this tileset into the Soviet Town (urbanised Soviet area) and the Tundra tileset, which will represent much of Siberia, Scandanavia and Canada etc. This will use the rural roads from the Soviet tileset and the trees and wooden houses, as we don't want the only "cold" tileset to literally be polar conditions. This means that the wooden houses will be present mostly in the Tundra tileset rather than the Soviet Town one, though you can use them if you really want to. - Roofs / Floors - we've not had our artist draw up any carpet or roof tiles that we can apply to these buildings to stop them looking so ugly. We'll get that done ASAP, at which point you'll need to apply it to these maps. We might also spend some time generating some new options for roof edges on this tileset as at the moment they frequently look pretty ugly. Specific sub-map comments (if I've not commented on a map, I don't think it works): Sovietbungalowpair - these are really nice, and I can see us using them in the game once the floor / roof tiles are sorted. sovietflatsLR - the stairs shouldn't be freestanding, put them up against a wall, probably the NW one. sovietflatsUD - I'd put these in if you made the bed placement more sensible - no shared bedrooms with loads of beds, no beds in the hallway etc. That's not really how bedrooms work, they're usually small and self-contained and the living areas are the large open spaces. sovietgarage - the one storey garage is good, but the pipes need to come off the roof. 2-storey one doesn't look right imo. sovietgasstation - I like the idea of this. The shop and the workshop machines work really well, but for the roof you need to have the half-height factory walls around the edge otherwise it looks unnatural. Not a fan of the ground tiles, but I don't blame you since we've not got any painted ones done yet. soviethospital - the roof ruins this. It might work as a 1-storey building, I like the ground floor layout and the garden at the front. KGB office - this needs a better roof. I'm unsure whether it should be 2-storeys tall or 3, but I think the ground floor layout is excellent and I like how imposing it is. I don't think you should have a window every square though, it makes it look a bit overblown. With a little work I think this would easily make it into the game. Soviet base - the whole sandbag thing is a really interesting idea. Not sure about the building as a whole, though - it might be too big, and I think it has too many windows. But it'd make a nice centrepiece for a terror map...or a smaller building with sandbags on the outer walls would. Very creative. Propaganda office - this is nice, but I think the props are too industrial for it to look like a printer shop. Maybe use more office furniture? Records office - nice ground floor look and layout, the upper level and roof don't really work though. Rich house - I think this probably needs a carpet for a floor, and I'd divide it in two. It's a pretty big house and there's not much to fill the space. Having it a pair of two storey twin flats might make the building's internal layout make more sense (it'll need an extra door on the front). Roadblock - I think this is an interesting idea. Maybe we should do some Soviet sandbags? The props look out of place because they're too saturated for the ground tile palette, and I think there's too much going on on the checkpoint (it probably only needs to be a few sandbags and one or two crates), but I like the military feel of it. Stasi - the one with the cell at the end works quite well, but the building is too narrow to look realistic. We'll need to do something about the roof too, maybe we'll do some new tiles to top that wall type. Wood office - this is fine, but see the Tundra tileset notes earlier in the post. Wood outbuilding - as above, except this needs the wooden floor removed from it given it's an outbuilding. Workshop - this works pretty well, except I'd take the car out and remove the white machines as they don't really fit in.

Mox - I did indeed check all of them. I forget why I didn't go with all of them though, I'm afraid. I think the Town ones I thought looked a bit unnatural. Not enough grass, not really enough cover etc. But I can't really remember. Let me know if you do some new maps and I'll have a look at them, maybe I'll have more to say on them.

And yeah, we'll probably release the "what could have been" artwork with the game.

Plasma torch and Alien Flamethrower are the same thing. The other vehicles won't be moddable, because we never rendered them out or got the art done for them. There's the infantry Particle Cannon, which has art and sprites done for it, and also the Soviet Weapons which have art (and the AK-47 has sprites).

Buzzles - nah, even with advanced weapons the early-game interceptors have no chance against end-game UFOs. Which is why this is sort of necessary. If the early-game interceptors did have a chance against end-game UFOs, there'd be no point building the late-game interceptors.

The problem with having destructible interceptors in any form is that you have to balance the game that to assume that the player will occasionally lose some of them (otherwise it is literally game over the moment you lose one). This isn't a problem in itself, except that aircraft are the most expensive and time-consuming things to build aside from bases. So if you have a player that is really good at the air combat or knows the auto-resolve combinations, they will be able to play through the game without losing any planes. The problem there is that because planes are so expensive, it means that they'll save a huge amount of money relative to the average player who occasionally loses an aircraft. This money can be spent on other parts of the game, making the ground combat substantially easier because a plane's-worth of resources buys a lot of weapons, soldiers and armour This means that the game becomes more about doing the air combat without losing any planes than it does about being good at the ground combat missions, which really isn't meant to be how the game works. If the player currently has loads of money, that will be reduced by balance patches as the beta continues to evolve.

Hmmm. I'd be interested to hear this too actually.

Might want to see a doctor about that

(EDIT - it was Lightzy's idea, not StellarRat's) posted this in another thread, and the idea struck me as quite novel (it's rare an idea on the forums does that these days). Essentially, it is as follows: interceptors cannot be destroyed. In combat, if "destroyed" they in fact have performed an emergency disengage after sustaining heavy damage. To make this work, we would have to increase repair times significantly and put a large penalty in place for dropping below 1% health - so if your plane manages to disengage manually without being "shot down", it is much quicker to repair than if it was reduced to 0% health. If "shot down", you could see them out of action for a week or more. This sounds very strange at first, but it does solve a major problem on the Geoscape - the fact that aircraft are a massive investment, which means losing one can effectively be game over. The way the air combat works means that players can quite easily accidentally lose a plane, and when we implement auto-resolve I can see the problem being even worse. In short, we've got three options: 1) As now, with the planes being enormous investments of time and resources and destroyable. This makes what should be a relatively minor part of the game (the actual air combat) extremely important, as it can make or break the game. 2) The planes are destructible, but don't take as much time or resources to build. This would allow the player some leeway in terms of losing them. Doesn't make a lot of sense that they'd be faster and cheaper to make than vehicles etc, though. 3) Indestructible planes, as above. It means that planes can be a big investment and people are punished for using them badly in the air combat, but not that harshly. You still can't shoot down UFOs that too powerful for you, so it doesn't unbalance the game, it just makes things more forgiving. I'm strongly warming to this idea. To an extent, it is dumbing down the game - but given how much aircraft have to cost relative to other things, I think it's quite sensible. What does everyone else think? EDIT - I've posted a few things on the thread up to page 7, this is my concluding post: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5193-Indestructible-interceptors?p=63807#post63807

Unless you're reporting the speed is great, in which case feel free to report it.

After our ongoing troubles with the forum over the past few days, we've decided to bin Dreamhost and move to a new server. As such, the forums will be inaccessible for some people over the next 24 hours as the DNS propagates and also we've rolled back the forums to where they were about 24 hours ago. Sorry if you've lost data, but this needed to be done as we can't risk having instability when we launch on Steam. Hopefully we won't need to do any more of it. Thanks to Solver, who helped with the migration and is currently providing our webhosting! We have more control over things that we did with Dreamhost, so that can only be a good thing.

The Steam release is next week, you probably should wait for it

We're working on it. Having some pretty major problems and I don't know what's causing them yet.

Really? Hmm. Maybe that's what's happening...

Yeah, sadly almost every new version breaks saved games. The joys of beta testing...

Hotfix for the AI is up here too: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5175-Build-V18-51-Hotfix-1-Released%21?p=63349#post63349 Speaking of AI, I bought Unity of Command a few days back and that has quite some AI in it!

This is just a hotfix for the issue where the AI can see through walls if they are placed on non-visible tiles, including their UFO walls. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26290309/V18.51_Hotfix1.rar Just update the .exe file. It shouldn't invalidate save files or anything like that, but if it causes any weird behaviour please report it in this thread instead of in the main bug forums. I don't want to confuse everything.

Yes, but not immediately before a big release

We're not going to add in a new throwing system prior to the Steam release. Lord knows how many bugs fiddling with the accuracy calculation could unleash.

I do indeed. Updated.

We've now heard back from Steam and we've pencilled in a release date for Early Access of the 31st May, which is eight days from now. This may slip back due to unforseen circumstances, but one would hope not. I've submitted all the marketing materials and I just need to wait and see what I need to do to start uploading builds and the like. I am still not 100% certain when Steam keys will go out for existing users, but hopefully that will happen prior to release. At the very least I want to give a few people Steam keys so they can test the download and update process on Steam to see if there's any nasty incompatibility surprises in wait for us. I'll post updates here once I know more about this. Build V18.51 will form the basis of the Steam stable release, with a few updates that we will test out via hotfix or on Steam itself if we get on there in advance. The likely additions will be: - Bugfixes - Xenopedia descriptions will be completed (but subject to future tweaks) - More maps (I'll look at the community ones as my first port of call) - Balance patch (Aaron has got a balance patch to smooth the combat progression we'll probably put in) This post is mostly to let everyone know the release date. It's gonna be a busy week!

The "finished" (obviously subject to future tweaks) Xenopedia should be out with the Steam release.