Chris

Incidentally, the tier 4 name is the reason why I still use refer to ammo as "clips" instead of "magazines" else it'd sound ridiculous.

It's Playground SDK 5.

How stable is it for everybody? Can't see too many crash bugs being reported...

StellarRat - they'd also have be be very talented 2D artists to be able to paint over their own tiles.

Yup, this bug is the reason why we released a new build

Yup, it'll get harder as the AI improves. I'm surprised they only shot at you twice but in the final game they should murder you if you do something stupid

We missed our Three Builds to Beta deadline for hitting beta a few weeks back. Moderately depressing, but it served its primary purpose - to focus development on defined milestones and deadlines, rather than everyone getting work done in their own time. We've not hit beta yet, but I don't think we're too far away now. However, on the of the major realisations I had in the last month or so is that not all betas are created equally. Some people think beta means the game is literally ready for release when beta happens and the product only needs polish; others have a more liberal interpretation where the coding is pretty much all done and the primary purpose is to fix crashes and get the balance sorted too. Therefore the "beta" section has been subdivided into phases. Here's my proposed roadmap for getting there and what is involved at each stage: ALPHA: (The period of development where the game is actively under development and is so unfinished that the game / tech tree is deliberately limited so players cannot get too far into the game). V17 - Stability. V17.x should allow us to concentrate on our sprint to beta, so it will not contain any new features and we'll stop releasing new iterations of it once it is confirmed stable. This will give people something to play with while we get on with the work of finishing the alpha. BETA PHASE I: (The game is mechanically complete and the tech tree is fully unlocked. This part of development is focused on balancing the game to the point where it is enjoyable to play and eliminating crash bugs; game mechanics are subject to change during this phase. People who play the game will need to be prepared to deal with frequent crashes, but they'll have far more of a chance to influence the final shape of the game than in any other part of development.) V18 - This build will contain the following items: Full research tree unlocked, allowing the player to get their hands on all in-game armour, weapons, vehicles and aircraft. All projects will have Xenopedia descriptions but not necessarily art. All UFOs / alien bases are spawning the correct items to allow the player to progress along the research tree The final ground combat UI will be in place; effectively it is identical to the current one in functionality but will look prettier. Preview here. We'll have our first try at the Desura file reduction stuff to try and get the build working properly for everyone. The alien base tileset will be properly set up in the game, with some proper maps generated so we can test the map sizes etc to see what works best. Hopefully all the alien sprites will be in the build so there won't be any more invisible / missing aliens. There will be placeholder maps for all UFOs and alien bases (these won't look good but will let you test the difficulty of the number and type of alien within them). During Beta Phase 1, the following will all be added at some point: The final UI screens for all parts of the game will be implemented. This includes the new UI for all the Geoscape screens. The Geoscape map will be revised so it is no longer missing parts of the world, plus more cities will be added to it. All units will be rendered out and put in-game. All the 3D models for the various terrain tiles of all types should be rendered and put in-game, though they may not have been painted over in 2D. All building / prop tiles will be set up in the game correctly, allowing us to catch misset sprite issues before release and allowing people to build maps of their own without risking having the dev team change the sprites Placeholder for final mission. If it's fun, we'll get the map painted up. Lots of bugfixes, to the point the game doesn't crash any more. BETA PHASE II: (The game is enjoyable to play, stable, and can be completed; essentially the game could be released at any point within Beta Phase II, once the art is done. This is the "polishing" phase, where usability issues are addressed, final assets are added or improved and more minor balance issues are addressed - for instance, a particular UFO type might have too many aliens on aboard for its position in the difficulty progression. The game should be fun and shouldn't crash much, but the game mechanics should be pretty much locked down at this point. Lots of PR will happen before this point.) The final artwork for the research will be painted and added, as the Research tree will be locked down at this point (except for research / build times). All ground tiles will receive their 2D paintover. More ground maps will be generated to maximise replayability. The final launcher will be put in place. Finishing the file reduction process to make the game as easy as possible to deal with. Producing an official Soviet Weapon example mod, and looking at community mods to see if any are worth bundling with the game. Adding full tooltips and explanatory pop-ups to the game to make it as easy as possible for new players to learn the game mechanics. Adding various keyboard shortcuts or tweaking the interface to make the game as easy as possible to use, though not changing the functionality. RELEASE: (Woo! We're finally there! At this point we release the game on Steam, stop providing any kind of product support and sail a yacht made of gold to Panama.) If you think there are features I've missed off this roadmap, please list them here and I'll see if they need to slot in somewhere. I'm going to put together a proper project roadmap for the project shortly, that includes the release dates and features for each build we released. Quite possibly linked to a wiki description of that system, so everyone can see at a glance what has changed since they last played. And so if people moan about how development is slow, you can point them at that. Also I figure we can get some PR out of it too.

Lostwell, a couple of days maybe? Allowing for the porting time and the Desura authorisation process etc.

I hope we'll get something suitably gruesome done too. I guess we can't justify not hiring good artists for it either!

Violence is against the forum rules, Goolom. Behave yourself.

This is a bug if it's not listing them when recovered, even if they are then converted into Alenium. It should tell you how much Alenium is recovered from them, or how much they are sold for (if they are recovered before you research Alenium).

I don't actually know. You may well find that once we reduce the number of files in the game it behaves better. That's probably the most obvious change since the demo and seems to be responsible for most of the issues we have with everything That'll happen in V18, the next version planned.

V17.1 for Mac / Linux will be out as soon as we confirm it is stable on Windows. No point porting it if we've not fixed the bugs we're hoping to fix!

I told Aaron to write this update because he's producing TOO MANY tiles for me to keep up with on top of all my other jobs. Obviously he's replaced it with producing TOO MANY words for me to keep up with. At least he's value for money. EDIT - just to clarify, the 3D tiles are generally painted over by our 2D artist Remus, who does the props and the buildings. Mikael is our other 2D artist, who paints the ground tiles and the things connected with the ground (i.e. the cliffs and rocks and mesas you'll see in the next update). Both have done very impressive work to get the game looking like it is inspired by the 1990s rather than from the 1990s. Also, reading this article does remind me of all the technical challenges we had trying to get the units set up to render in perfect isometric setup (I invented a similar system for Maya, but we use multiple cameras and batch files for unit renders rather than Aaron's animated single-camera system). It's all faintly ludicrous now I think about it, but I've been doing it for so long that our convoluted workflows just feel normal

This is up on Desura now. It's been authorised for the standalones and on the branches. If it proves stable, we'll get it released on Mac and Linux too. Hopefully this is the last build we'll release for a while. It's just V17 with two fixes: 1) The _basebuilt.xml has been updated so you no longer start with too much technology, and the alien base no longer spawns at the start of the game. 2) The civilians and friendly AI soldiers have been disabled on the Farmyard map to prevent the crashes from occurring. I think we've fixed the code bug at our end now but I'm not willing to take any chances any more. THE LAUNCHER WILL STILL SAY V17 INSTEAD OF V17.1 - this is because I need to recompile the build to change the launcher background image, and doing so might add new bugs into the game. The .exes haven't changed since V17. If you already have V17, you can update it by using this simple patch (less than 100kb): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26290309/V17.1%20patch.exe

I'm in the process of reading through the story and covering it in the computer-based equivalent of red pen (though Lee has the final say on all changes unless they're related to the background story); I'm on page 22 of 28 so I'm not too far from having it done. It's a great story, I think people will really enjoy it. As I've said before, Premium Pre-orderers will have access to it as soon as it is finished and then it'll go on free public release with the release of the game so everyone else can too.

Lol @ Zinn. We'll look into that though (just not particularly urgently). I'm now uploading V17.1 to Desura as it seems to be stable. I think the crash bug has been resolved at our end anyway, I think it was an error in the code after all...which would explain why a week of messing around with the sprites didn't help. But whatever. I'm leaving the farm civilians and friendly AI troops disabled until the next build.

svidangel - that's without the V17.1 patch?

No, V17 says V17 on the launcher. Dunno how you've still got V16.1 unless you're on Mac or Linux. Right, patch here to bring the game up to V17.1. It disables AI and civilians on the Farm tileset and it fixes the starting tech and alien base bugs. That should leave the game stable. Please test it and let me know, and I'll update again if it works. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26290309/V17.1%20patch.exe

BTW are there still invisble civilians on the Farm maps for you guys?

Ah, god damn it. I've left the old basebuilt file in there which spawns the alien bases.

Welcome to the new development update forum. I've decided to split this forum off from the Announcements forum, which is talking about actual build releases, so I can use this one to talk about development progress on the project that is not always strictly relevant to the next update. So, development. My main concern right now is getting to a basic beta. I think we're in range of a quick sprint there, but if we're going to do that it's more than likely we're going to be spending three or four weeks with the current public build with no updates before we reach beta. This is why I'm finding the Farm crash bug so annoying; we can't leave the game unplayable for three or four weeks at a time. We've also taken quite a bit of money in recent weeks thanks to the Firaxis X-Com raising interest in the genre and not quite nailing the job of following up the original X-Com, at least in the eyes of the hardcore fans. I find it a bit concerning that their first experience of the game is probably massive Desura issues and then a game full of crash bugs. People have suggested I talk more on the News page about what's going on, but I'm loathe to do it until we've got the crash bug fixed. I don't want to attract a load of people, only for them to have a crap first experience of the game. V17 is released today and hopefully should be stable. If so it means we can gear up for the sprint to beta (I'll post a separate thread for our beta plans shortly) and it means I can start to talk a bit more, maybe do some PR work too. But really, stability is my priority. Incidentally, the Desura issues are being caused by the massive number of files in the game (the dev version has close to 120,000 now). This also causes ludicrous install times and the like. Happily, it would appear we've found a solution to the issue despite not having access to the source code of the engine. We can pack the files into an archive and the game can read them from there. We're still assessing how this will affect our workflow and limit the ability of modders to change the game, but at the very least we're going to archive the /units/ and the ground tile folders. This should reduce the file quantity in the game by about 2/3 and should fix the Desura issues and generally make the game more manageable. If it is problematic for our workflow, it may be that this has to be a gradual process (the first batch should reduce the file quantity by 50% or so, then we'll archive assets after we've stopped actively developing that area). I really hope this improves the quality of the experience for our players, and gets people of Desura's back a bit too. They're not perfect, but they do try their best and they are helpful guys - the standalone download feature was implemented specifically for us, for instance. The next biggest game on their servers in terms of file quantity was 10,000 apparently, compared to our massive 60-70k files. I'm not entirely surprised their systems broke - but hopefully we can put all that behind us soon! In wider development terms, the biggest change in the last few weeks is that we've moved into this new office. This took the best part of a week to get set up and working but it's been an amazing boost to my productivity (and sanity). Development is really rattling along these days, to the point I can barely keep up. I foolishly decided to not work for one of the days this weekend and my inbox was stuffed full on Monday. It's been a while since development was going at this pace and it's a good place to be, though it does mean I've got even less time for PR than usual. The chief reason for this massive speed boost is we've taken on our first full-time employee, Aaron. He's been working with us for about a year as our 3d tile artist, so he produces the basic 3D models for all the buildings and props that you see in the game (they are then painted over by a 2D artist before they are "finished"). He's now joined us in a full-time role and will be helping out on the design work going forward too. He'll be posting up something himself shortly, but basically he's been working on finishing the remaining buildings for all the tilesets in the game and is now starting on the props for all the tilesets so our missions are less open. This has led to us being able to put our new tilesets in the game - we've put our Arctic, Middle East and Desert tilesets in the game over the past month and we're adding cover and unique civilians to them at the moment to make them more playable. We've also got working concepts for the Alien Base going, and we'll be getting the Xenonaut base set up properly in the near future too. We've also done a bunch of the ground tiles and all the building tiles for the Soviet Town tileset, but I've not been able to test them all out yet. Basically, the lack of map variation in the game will cease to be a problem soon. The sprite rendering is going OK too - we're working on getting all the civvies and friendly AI units in the game, then we'll be rendering all the aliens out. Again, I think having the local unit variations has really added a lot to the game and once all the enemies are in the game it'll feel that much more complete for it. Finally, I guess I should quickly chat about coding. We've got a few odds-and-ends going on, such as adding base breaches so aliens no longer attack Xenonaut bases through the hangars all the time, but the biggest things are the file archiving mentioned above and the AI. GJ is busy with exams this week but in general progress is good. I'll get him to post some updates here so you lot stay in the loop, but I'm sure you can see that we're moving in the right direction there. The final piece of the puzzle is the new UI - that'll appear in the early beta I think. Oh, and we should have a Steam page up shortly too. That'll be nice to raise project awareness (though it won't support pre-ordering yet). Right, time to write up the beta plans..

I really didn't want to have to do this, but I'm uploading a new build to Desura today. The dev version of the game is not having all the awful farm crashes the public version of the game is and I just can't seem to fix up the V16 assets to not crash all the time. Therefore, I've compiled a whole new build in the hope the game will now be stable. Build V17 is awaiting authorisation on Desura as we speak. There are no major changes except a whole load more alien sprites have been added to the game. These were cut out of previous versions to save file number and file size but it may be that some of these missing sprites were causing the crash. Thus, I've left them in this time around. There's also a few sprites for the Xenonauts with alien weapons now, but I'll discuss that in the next update. There are a few small amendments in the code for the overdamage mechanics but they've not been tested properly yet and may well not work, as they've not been fully implemented. This is why I don't like releasing builds like this, but the stability issues are forcing my hand. Proper update with beta plans etc will follow shortly, but I don't want to be chatting about that while the public build is still unplayable. Once you download it, let me know if you're still getting crashes. If it is stable, we'll port it across to Mac and Linux. EDIT - gah, more bugs. Right, patch here to bring the game up to V17.1. It disables AI and civilians on the Farm tileset and it fixes the starting tech and alien base bugs. That should leave the game stable. Please test it and let me know, and I'll update Desura to V17.1 if it works to fix the crashes. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26290309/V17.1%20patch.exe

Well they're just a placeholder to let me check if the fixes will actually work before we upload to Desura...

We've been doing pretty well sales-wise since the new X-COM arrived. That's why I'm keen to have the crash bugs in V16 fixed.