Chris

Hmm. So you did. I guess you get Aaron's cookie then.

Myxa - the problem with studies like that is that they don't prove whether those people would be spending even more money on those things if they didn't do piracy. Take this gaming example - someone is a serial pirate, but has their own particular moral code (as many pirates do). Therefore they pay for indie games because they believe in the spirit of indie games, and they pay for games with online multiplayer components (like WoW) because they have to do that. But they hate big companies like Activision, so they won't buy Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or whatever, they pirate it instead. It's not a particularly far fetched scenario, really. In a world where piracy did not exist, I reckon you'd find those people would buy more games than they do at the moment, even though they already buy a lot of games. Simply because many feel they have to play one of the Assassin's Creed games or one of the Call of Duty games once in a while to be able to feel like you're experiencing the full breadth of gaming. It's pretty hard to rage against the evils of mass-produced corporate gaming if you've never played them, after all - and without the ability to easily pirate them, you'd have to buy them instead (maybe when they're cheap in a Steam sale or something). So those studies are interesting, but there's no way of doing scientific double-blind testing to see whether piracy raises sales, so you really shouldn't base arguments on them. There's no way to establish causality.

Yup, except the outline is only at floor level. We're working on some now; the artist misunderstood my initial request so we're correcting it up today.

I do tend to agree with AvistTorch here.

Yup, he's a chap called Zach and he's done a good job with the civilians / friendly AI units. Also, I've never seen The Thing but I know Aaron's research for the Arctic tileset buildings involved watching it That tileset seems to have gone down well, anyway!

Aaron can't have a cookie, I've decided. He covered my monitor in pork pie yesterday so I dread to think what he'd do with a cookie if I gave him one. I'll have the artist do a quick mockup and post it later.

Skvid - yes.

QM - if you have technical questions about how the game works when creating new weapons etc, fire me an email. I think this will be a valuable tool for people to help us balance the beta with.

OK, so for 1) at the moment there's plenty of parts of UFOs hulls that can't be walkable areas because the hulls are curved down towards the edges of the UFO and the top of the tile is not 2.2m tall (the height of a tile in the game) near the edges. This means you get some unnaturally steep curves towards the edges of the UFO. The floor maps still won't extend right to the edge of the hulls, but it means we don't have to worry about getting the curves the right height so much, so the shapes should look more natural. 2) No, because you can't see through UFO walls. If an alien is visible inside the UFO but you have no troops inside it, we'll probably have some method of removing the UFO model in that case too. Shouldn't be an issue, it's just a question of identifying all the times you need to see the inside of the ship and making sure the game reveals the UFO interior in all of those instances.

No, if a unit is inside the UFO than that section of the exterior cannot be viewed at all. It'd reappear if all the units left the UFO. Not perfect, but it's hardly the worst thing ever. I think you'd get used to it pretty quickly. Multi-level UFOs would have a slicethrough on each level, though, showing you where the outer hull would be on that particular level.

Ah yes, it's probably the maps just aren't in place for it yet.

Jamming could potentially be interesting. As others have pointed out it worked well in JA2, but I don't think we'd consider putting it in until beta. It's certainly a non-essential addition.

Right, closed. Thread on the UFOs part 3 is here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/3557-UFOs-Being-Horrible-Part-3-%28New-Solution%21%29?p=43631#post43631 We've thought up a new solution to the potential issues that might well work better.

So I've thought some more about how the UFOs can be presented in-game. We've tried one of the test UFOs kindly produced by zzz1010 in our game, but it suffers from the same problems as our existing models (except some of the layout is more intelligent). Thankfully, though, Aaron provided a suggestion that may help justify his exorbitant salary. He's proposed that we have the walls of the appropriate section of the UFO disappear entirely when a unit enters them. I've thought about this a bit, and I think it'd work fairly well. I'll justify why below but let me explain how it would work in-game first. Basically, we'll designate a series of ground tiles in the game to be "UFO interior tiles", with the ability to group them into different sections. We'll then add the functionality where if a human unit steps on any one of these ground tiles (or perhaps as soon as they can see one of them), the corresponding walls vanish entirely. However, we'll use painted ground tiles that will show (on the ground) the space that the walls fill - they'll be black spaces with an outer border of whatever colour the ship hull is and a purple inner border. It should be clear at a glance where the walls are but they won't block visibility at all. This is why I think this is the best solution I've heard yet: 1) It means that our in-game UFO models don't really have to be hollow, as the player doesn't actually go inside them. They just disappear when the player "enters" them, leaving the floor outline. This makes painting over them so much easier it is untrue. Perhaps they'll still have to be sliced up (as when you see one part of a multi-tile object, the entire thing is revealed) unless we have the entire UFO area reveal when you see part of it, but it's still an order of magnitude easier than it is now. All the problems with the big UFOs go away, so we can have the big UFOs on the map in this system too. 2) The obvious corollary of 1) is that the UFOs can also be a bit Tardis-like in the way they can be bigger on the inside than on the outside. We don't have to spent quite as much time making sure that all walkable parts of the UFO are tall enough to allow a unit to walk around inside them (which really screws up the curves on our models) because any time the units inside are visible, the actual UFO model is not. So they can look more like the concept. 3) It won't be as difficult to see your soldiers inside the smaller UFOs any more, which is a problem none of my earlier solutions addressed. 4) It scales easily to cover our existing UFOs (Scout / Corvette) all the way up to the really big ones. For the big ones, you could just have a few "sections" of walls. Perhaps when you initially breach a large UFO, only the front half of the ship would disappear and the rear half would remain until you enter that. 5) Man, would it be easy to test UFO layouts in beta. We'd create the interior layout based on how well it plays in-game, then fit the UFO model to it after that. Changing the floor tiles is far easier than remodelling and repainting the UFO model (so much work we just wouldn't do it in the existing system). All in all, it's pretty much perfect for what we need - unless I've missed something. The only complication would be when units are inside a UFO and shooting out, but I think we can deal with that by having the UFO model removed if a certain door is open or certain tiles are visible etc. Some people might find it a minor annoyance not to be able to see both the UFO exterior and interior at the same time, but I think that's a really minor thing they'd get used to very quickly. So, does Aaron get a cookie for his new solution? If you're going to poke holes in it then probably best to do it now, before we spend any dev time implementing it. EDIT: Here's a basic preview of how it might look (though we'll probably do some more work to improve the visuals): www.xenonauts.com/devimages/testUFOwalls.jpg

Hi - yes, we've very much like to have the game in different languages if we can, but I want to get the game done first before we think too much about that!

mitrida: 1) Yes 2) These are for modders, as an extra.

HWP - I really have no idea why you're arguing that once a piece of software is sold once there are no further rights to posession of it (you're discussing privacy instead of possession for some reason). That's a ridiculous argument. If a user pays to gain access to the software, that doesn't mean that everyone else therefore should get it free because the ownership suddenly becomes public domain. Your argument about homes and shops is also misleading. If an armed robber broke into your shop, you'd plausibly be able to shoot him in self-defence the same way as you would in your home. It's nothing to do with whether it is a public place or not, it's about plausible threat to yourself rather than a violation of privacy. If you lived at work in a "public place" for some reason, say you own a small hotel, you'd enjoy the exact same rights to shoot someone if a dangerous criminal broke into the hotel than you would if it was your house because your safety is at risk in exactly the same way. Let's also not bring rape into this because that's certainly not going to keep the thread on topic.

@ Myxa Point #1 is a bad idea because it's hurting legitimate consumers with DRM for the first week (and remember a game usually gets played more in the week after release than it does any other time) to try and get pirates interested. It's not a good idea to hurt paying customers even a little to deal with pirates - if people have paid for the game they're entitled to have the best version of the game. If pirates remove the DRM, then the pirates will have the best version of the game until we remove our DRM from the legitimate copies. Also, we've promised a DRM free version as a Kickstarter copy. Point #3 starts well, as hosting manuals and mods is a good idea, but I wouldn't want to tie it to a purchase / authorisation system simply because it'll annoy and inconvenience people. Generally, we've got this far in development thanks to the trust and goodwill of the people who have pre-ordered the game and anything that unneccessarily inconveniences paying customers is a bad move.

Silence, Buzzles! Nobody must know the terrible secret of the acronym! I think a better solution would be to come up with a better word for the last letter of the acronym rather than remove it entirely.

I've updated my post a bit. What does UD stand for? Yes, confirming overwatch is annoying.

Myxa - OK, I think I read your comments as possibly harsher than you intended them to be (I thought you were trying to cause an argument). I still disagree with your arguments but thanks for taking the time to explain them more and to try and help us with your thoughts. I imagine you're right that piracy is caused by the way big developers behave, but unfortunately it does also affect independent developers too. Plus I still don't think that piracy is right, even if it does have some positive side effects sometimes.

HWP - my analogy is fine because the sports car is returned to me in at least the state it was taken from me, at a time where I was not using it. It's not depriving me of my use of it, but that wouldn't make it OK. The point is that even doing something that would help me (as some pirates appear to think they are doing by pirating my game) isn't morally right if I don't want them to do it. It shouldn't be their decision.

Some of you may have noticed that Firaxis released a game called X-COM: Enemy Unknown recently (others of you may have been hiding under rocks in a cave somewhere and missed it). This is kind of a big deal for the genre and for us, and I've been playing the game extensively. I thought it'd be a good idea to share my thoughts on the game and what I think we can learn from it. THE GOOD: 1) Appeal & Financial Success: They've done a great job at producing a game that caters to both new fans and old ones. What I mean is that the game looks good enough and has been streamlined enough that it can appeal to people who would not normally play turn-based strategy games at all. I've seen numerous comments from people saying "I don't usually play turn-based strategy games, but I really enjoyed X-Com". That's really nice to see. They've also catered to the hardcore fans, like me. I've exclusively been playing Classic Iron Man and it's a difficult game that I'm yet to beat. Admittedly some of that is because of the flaws in the game, but I'll cover those later. The important thing is that the game can be challenging if you want it to, and you can turn off all the cinematic crap if you want to as well. The wide appeal of the game is something that I admire and envy a little. Xenonauts is never going to have that broad appeal. We'll appeal to the hardcore fans but not so much the people who wouldn't normally play strategy games. It's not a problem, but it's good to see a turn-based strategy game prove that you can appeal to a large number of people and therefore recoup the investment spent on an expensive AAA title even if you are a turn-based strategy. 2) Successful Simplification: A lot of the streamlining works really well. Missions are much faster, the cover system is easy to understand and use, I think their reloading system is a good one too. The health system is clear and easy to understand, and is better than the numerical value that we're using in Xenonauts. They've made a fast, slick game from a game that was anything but, without compromising the tactical element too much. 3) UI: Somewhat tied into the above, the UI is great. Really slick and easy to use, presenting the information you need and looking great at the same time. This impressed me a lot, I never found myself fighting the interface. The camera perhaps, but that's a bit different. It might be this is something you notice more when you've been developing games for a bit, but it really stood out for me. 4) Level Design: Having spent quite a lot of time trying to work out how to put together convincing maps that are full of objects that can only ever be either full-tile height or half-tile height, I know how difficult it can be do to it. Firaxis make it look easy. You can look at one of their maps and it looks incredibly natural, but at the same time you can instantly see what is cover and what blocks LOS etc. Trust me, they've done a great job with that. The number of times I've looked at a prop and thought "that's a perfect piece of waist high cover" is untrue. It's actually even harder for them than it us for us, as their maps are very tight and constricted (unlike ours). 5) Destructability: Fighting in these maps is a pleasure. Your soldiers smashing windows and shooting through them, or just leaping through them, is great. Seeing walls and props destroyed by weapon fire is great, and explosives feel weighty and flatten the terrain just as you'd expect. Explosive tiles like the gas pumps or the exploding cars add a lot to the battlefield too. I think they've done a great job with the destructibility (even if the lack of free fire means you can't use it in the way you might want); you get a great feeling of power when you flatten half a building with a rocket. That's old school X-COM all over. THE LESS GOOD (THAT WE CAN LEARN FROM): 1) Restrictive Strategy Layer: the strategy layer is a shadow of its former self. It has some elements present and correct, but plenty of things that make perfect sense within the context of the new game but seem arbitrarily restrictive compared to the previous games. Why can't I just hire scientists or engineers? Why can't I buy a second Skyranger and attack more than one abduction site each turn? Why can't the aliens attack my base? Why does ignoring an abduction site in a country raise panic in the entire continent, but completing one only reduces panic in that particular country? Why can't I sell manufactured goods at all (or captured plasma weapons)? The game obviously funnels you down some pre-set paths, and one of the wonderful things about X-COM was your freedom to approach the game any way you liked. The genuinely emergent gameplay. This game feels more like a series of pre-set single-player missions, using the research / resource management to lock you out of the later missions unless you stay on top of it. Sure, it's a better strategic layer than the vast majority of games will manage - but it's not quite X-Com, and if you put that name on the game you'll always be compared to the original. 2) Alien "Discovery" & Free Movement: This really annoys me. If you've played the game, you'll know what I mean - when aliens are sighted (even if during your turn), the aliens will get a free move. This is understandable to an extent, as the game is extremely cover-based and if aliens did not do it they'd be annihilated in the turn they're discovered because they'd be out of cover. That said, they shouldn't be able to use the free move to move towards your troops, PARTICULARLY IF THEY ARE CHRYSSALIDS. If they are revealed towards the end of the turn (this can happen through no fault of the player, like a stray shot knocking down a wall) I've had them close most of the distance towards my unit with the free move and then immediately take their turn and murder a couple of my squad. You're basically toast at that point...not much fun on Classic Iron Man. The way that aliens will lurk in one spot is also annoying, because the game is obviously balanced that you are only fighting one group of tough aliens at a time on the harder game settings. I guess it's like in MMOs where it's important to pull single-mobs in dungeons rather than getting large groups of them. The only difference being that it is often semi-random as to what you encounter, so there's no skill in it. Worse, it actually encourages bad play. The game mechanics encourage you to flank the enemy and kill them, but doing that in-game often results in you activating a second or third group of aliens and turning a manageable situation into a bloodbath. This leads to a more boring playstyle where it is more optimal to snipe the aliens from further away. Not good. The amount of cover at the start of missions also causes issues sometimes, because you can find yourself pinned in the start zone by a couple of groups of powerful aliens, unable to really move forwards and flank and outgunned by the superior numbers of the enemy. It's just annoying when you get powerful aliens clustered near the spawn zones. There's also a lot of artificial behavior allowed by the system. Once you've killed all visible aliens, you're almost certainly able to keep all your troops stationary for a few turns to reload and heal up - more enemies won't "activate" until you move further forwards in most cases. It just doesn't seem very organic. Xenonauts is going to be balanced around the entire alien force in a mission working together to attack and flank you. This means there's never any "safe" moments and there's also no cheating done by the AI if you reveal a lot of the map early on. It's a fair fight. Of course, the disadvantage is we can't have as many aliens in each map (as you might well be fighting them all at once) and the system is less cinematic. I think we can live with that though. 3) 4-6 Soldiers: The most soldiers you can have at once is 6. By the time you reach the max cap, you're starting to feel like you've got a decent team going, but I think having at least 8 would be better. I think that the massive teams of 20 soldiers or whatever you could end up with in the original were far too big, but there are a lot of benefits to a squad in the 8-12 size rather than 4-6. The most obvious example is the zerg effect, where you send a massive group of men to kill a few aliens. Why does this matter? It matters because in that situation, the aliens are more powerful than the humans are. In every mission I've played in the new X-COM, there have been more aliens than there have been humans. Instead of the aliens who have turned up in this massive invasion fleet being individually fearsome, they're reduced to trying to zerg us. What? The role reversal seems to go against everything in the setting. In practical terms, too you can have larger maps and larger battles. The X-COM maps are smaller and more confined, and sometimes feel claustrophobic. The ones that ARE bigger just feel too big because you have so few troops to explore them with. It also means that casualties can be more common. In a new X-COM battle, losing two troops is a disaster even if you have a full squad of 6. If you're playing Classic Iron Man and you do it a couple of missions in a row, your game is pretty much over. One of the defining things about the original X-Com is the fact that your soldiers will often miss an easy shot or a pantless sectoid with a crappy gun will drop your best soldier with a single shot from across the map. To their credit, Firaxis kept this in the game, even though it's annoying - it's X-COM as it should be. But you can't absorb that bad luck as easily with a smaller squad, so it stops being annoying and can end your game. I had two Thin Men score two critical hits on my best soldiers from miles away on the same turn in a mission earlier, killing my two best soldiers (wearing their new carapace armour) instantly despite them being on full health and behind cover. It's very classic X-COM, but the mission was pretty much over at that point, mostly because the remainder of my team decided it was a good idea to run away screaming or shoot each other. There's always going to be spikes of random luck in the game but larger teams make them less severe. I'm not actually saying that the new X-COM should have had bigger teams in their game, mostly because the interface wouldn't scale up so well and the game clearly wasn't balanced around large-scale engagements. But I am glad that Xenonauts will have much larger teams. 4) Not Enough Maps: Much as I love the level design work, they really didn't produce enough maps for the game given how many you have to play in each campaign and they don't seem to be randomised. Plus the escort missions are horrible. I find it pretty surprising their first DLC is three new Council Missions, as if they weren't literally the worst type of mission you get given. If the DLC was a $5 pack to double the number of maps in the game, I'd buy it, even if they weren't new tilesets. 5) BUGS! - I'm not claiming that Xenonauts will be bug free on release, because I'm not that naive. Nevertheless, there's too many bugs in new X-COM to be acceptable for a AAA release. These are magnified massively because a lot of veterans will be playing on Iron Man difficulty, so if their game is ruined by a bug then they're going to be absolutely furious about it (I certainly was). The most annoying ones at the moment are the way the camera can't see through the roof when you're inside the Abductor ship, the dubious clipping for shot LOS (and occasionally with aliens strolling through walls), cars with no obvious flames emerging from them exploding for no valid reason, and the annoying bugs that don't let you select soldiers for missions. Also, if my soldiers only get to make one move per turn, why do they path through the poison cloud left by Thin Men? All I can take away from this one is a newfound appreciation about how annoying bugs are if you're playing in Iron Man mode. We'll do our best to get Xenonauts as bug-free as possible because I was genuinely livid when I lost a Classic Iron Man game to a bug. THE CONCLUSION: Overall, though, I have to say I've really enjoyed the new X-COM. Perhaps it's not quite the second coming that it was made out to be when it was first announced, but it's a damn good game and I'm glad to see it do well because I think it's good for the genre. They've indirectly raised the interest in our project too, which is also nice. Is their game perfect? No. Can we learn lessons from what it does well and what it does right? Definitely, yes. But do I think they've done a good job remaking the original XCOM and would I recommend it to a friend? Yes, I would. I'm still really glad that they didn't do a straight remake though EDIT - having now completed the game on Clasic Iron Man (this is the only way I played the game), my only additional comment is that the difficulty curve appears to be inverted.

Any DRM is effectively pointless unless a key part of the game requires access to an online server run by the company that made the game. It's always going to be cracked, almost certainly within a matter of days.

You were annoyed that I don't see the "good" in people taking something I've worked on for literally years without paying for it, directly against my explicitly-stated wishes? If you actually believe that, I doubt there's any point you continuing this debate as our positions are so far apart we'll never have any common ground. Half the point of the article is that EVEN IF you leave aside all the financial arguments against piracy it's still downright disrespectful to take something off somebody without asking. That was the whole point of the sports car analogy. It doesn't matter if you returned the car in exactly the same condition as you took it in, or even returned it in a better condition - the point is that it belongs to me and you should have the decency to ask whether you can take it before you do, whether or not I'd be worse off a result. Your arguments justifying piracy are awful. If you know a game is capped to 30 FPS on PC or you can see the forums aren't manned to a satisfactory degree, don't buy the game. The game is still going to be capped at 30 FPS if you pirate the game instead of buying it. If it's such an issue that it stops you enjoying the game, why are you still pirating and playing it? You'll only be playing it because you enjoy it, in which case you should just pay for it. Your arguments have absolutely no logic, and certainly nothing to justify you taking the moral high ground as you appear to have done in your post. If I wanted my game to be freely circulated on the internet, I'd use a business model where the game is free to download and people could pay however much they wanted if they felt the desire. Don't pirate my game and then have the gall to tell me you're doing me a favour. We'll release a demo at release, so people can try the game before they buy it. There's absolutely no excuse to pirate it. It's still going to happen, naturally, but don't expect me to like it. Also, while your final four pieces of advice are well-meaning and I appreciate you trying to help us, most of it is extremely bad advice. Except 2), which is pretty obvious stuff and not stuff I would ever do just to win over pirates. I have paying customers to worry about instead. EDIT - Oh, and if you don't agree with the "moral" arguments against piracy and don't appear to care that it is illegal, then there are no arguments against piracy. Just like there'd be no arguments against someone microwaving your pet cat if you ignore those two small matters. Disregarding morality is never a good idea in any argument.