Chris

That's about good enough to start a webcomic with.

It's in progress. I was going to get them all done, but then I realised the tech tree is probably going to change a lot in beta and I'm not paying for all the art until I know that it'll be needed. I'll write all the descriptions for beta though, even though I'll probably then have to throw half of them away.

But yes, the original is quite cartoony. As people have pointed out, you only need to look at the fact the Floaters are bright purple and wear *capes* to realise that. They're like rubbish, brightly-coloured vampires!

Gorlom, whether your aesthetic sensibilities are worth my sanity is another matter entirely

Basically, we'll unlock the full tech tree for the beta.

Nah, changing the engine is not an option sadly. We'll see how it goes, the coders may have found a ray of light on this issue but we'll see in the next few days.

I just wiped a Classic Iron Man game because the last move of my turn spotted some Chryssalids on a terrror mission, and they used their free move to close the distance between them and my team, then used their turn to kill my soldiers and turn them into zombies (which promptly overwhelmed the rest of the team). Hence my irritated post on the soldier name thread I'm enjoying X-Com though, but it does feel a bit restrictive and random at times.

OK, so I suspect Desura has hit breaking point with our latest version (Build V16.1). The mirrors issue that meant nobody could download the game yesterday was caused by my uploads to the branch being corrupted. It seems that Desura is crashing when it's generating the updates on my PC, and when these files are uploaded they cause the mirrors issue. Thus we've rolled back V16.1 to V16. The Desura guy is going to upload the patch from his end tomorrow and try to get it working. It may be a minor issue causing this, or it may simply be their upload system has melted under the sheer weight of files in our game. Please just use the standalones for the next few days. We are working on a permanent fix for the Desura client, but all the solutions are a bit drastic. Essentially the problem is that when Desura updates the game, it performs an MD5 check on every file in the player's file directory to see if it needs to be updated. Because we have so many files, this takes a very long time and often causes crashes. My wider concern with this is that I think Steam works in a similar manner. It's more than possible that Steam would be having similar issues if we were using them, because games simply don't have 80,000 files in them these days. It's a result of us using a woefully inadequate game engine which we don't have the source code for, and it'll only get worse when we add in all of the alien sprites for beta. Two things we're looking at to potentially fix it up: 1) I'm talking to our ground combat programmer about consolidating all the files into a a few big single files. I'm not sure this will be possible, but if so it's clearly the best option. Not having access to the engine source code means what would be straightforward on other projects is not so here. 2) The first time you download the game on Desura is absolutely fine because the MD5 checks aren't needed. In an emergency, we can just set Desura to download a full new copy of the game every time there's an update. This is our fallback option (it also means that if the game is really stable when we release it on Steam and no patches are needed, the number of files won't be an issue). The post-install unzip system we proposed recently doesn't look like it'd help the situation at Desura's end, unfortunately. Anyway, my main concern here is the sheer number of people who don't read the forums etc and are buying the game and not having it work. It's really not a good place for us to be in, and we'll get it sorted one way or another in the near future. For those curious about Steam, I did check with them and their position is still that they'll only sell the game when it goes gold (ie. when it's finished).

The only thing that would be hard to reproduce for Xenonauts' look in 3D would be the ground tiles, which are hand-painted by our very talented 2d terrain artist. If you go back to the screenshots of how the game looked prior to getting him on board, you'll see how much difference it made. It'd be possible to make his art a texture and apply it to a flat plane for the ground, but that'd look a bit weird in 3D. And yes, if I were to do it again, I'd have done it in 3D. That said, being limited to 2D did force us to go for this more cartoony style because it was the only way to plausibly have the game not look terrible. I suspect if we had a better engine we would have gone for a more realistic 3D art style instead.

In some ways I feel sorry for Desura because our dated engine tech means we need ridiculous numbers of files in our game, which is more than their systems can handle given it has to check every single one to see if it needs updating. If we using Unity or something, none of this would happen and they wouldn't look so bad. But then sometimes they'll go nearly 48 hours without authorising our files and I find that less impressive.

Hopefully this is fixed in V16.1, although possibly the Arctic one may happen still. If it does, then report it again and I'll update it.

This is the latest version, right? The launcher screen says V16.1?

Sorry, was a bit tired and annoyed when I wrote my last post. I'll have another think about this later.

The standalones are up now. Apparently the update I uploaded to Desura was corrupt, which caused the issue (not sure why though, I think their upload service was having problems when I did it). I'll re-upload it when I get to the office anyway and hopefully that'll work.

The callsign IS the name for all intents and purposes, as I said less than a page before. The actual soldier name is used nowhere in the game except in one small fluff text string on one screen. If we make both editable people are going to be complaining that they have to edit every soldier name twice, because if they just change the "name" then the soldier's callsign will still be his old name and that would look ridiculous. I'm genuinely surprised people find one tiny line of text so ridiculously immersion breaking that we're being asked to take it out of the game. I'm also going to have to think about whether I want users to be able to completely overwrite their soldier backgrounds given they can already rename their soldiers to whatever they please. Also, TrashMan, your last post makes no sense. Renaming your soldiers won't change whether they look like your friends.

If we did this, it'd have to be a pop-up "Are you sure?", although it'd be possible to make it situational so it'd only ask for confirmation if you had a troop that hadn't moved etc. But even still it runs the risk of annoying more people than it helps...

I've just uploaded the V16.1 standalones to Desura, so it's up to them to approve it now. I'm not sure what's going on with their mirrors issue, I'll ask them tomorrow morning if they're still having issues with it. I understand the frustration with this and I apologise for the ongoing issues, although there's not much we can do about it. I actually emailed Steam yesterday in light of Towns and Zombies etc getting Greenlighted but they still don't distribute games until they're finished. So not too much we can do there.

Shuichi Niwa - having the player being severely handicapped (or bored) by the early part of the game simply because they've had bad dice rolls is bad design, because they can't do anything about it. It's particularly important early on because the game only really starts when you've got something to research. For the soldiers, I think you guys are right that the better solution is that there's more chance of a good soldier being added to the pool rather than all the rookies getting a blanket upgrade. I understand that the game is a bit different to EU, but I still think this is a good thing overall as it does mean losing your elite troops isn't an automatic instant game over. It'll just make life harder for you. I don't intend this to be a major upgrade, but it should give you leeway to lose a few troops each month without having too much operational efficiency loss (unless they're your really senior guys). For the training system, it wasn't technical issues that made me drop it. I didn't like there being a major method of training up soldiers outside combat, so it got limited to upgrading Rookies to Corporals. But at that point, it was barely worth having it at all, so we cut it to prevent bugs, simplify the design and reclaim the UI space. This method does the same thing as the training, but does it passively so gives the player less pointless crap to worry about.

Fixed that for you, StellarRat. Reasoning below: Seeing bullying purely as a threat to violence is an overly simple view of it. For example, if I went to school or worked with you and spent every hour of every day telling you your were ugly or fat or whatever personal issues you might be sensitive about, it'd probably have a negative effect on your life. Yes, it wouldn't be a socially acceptable thing for me to do, but that's not guaranteed to stop me from doing it. It's not a threat of violence, but it's clearly still bullying. In that instance, I think the person being bullied has a right to not be bullied. Most people would agree with that statement too, and anyone saying "well, that wouldn't bother me" needs to think about the people that it would affect (they're probably wrong too). Consequently, it's illegal in this country as harassment. This is why free speech has to be a grey area. If it was set out in black and white, people would either have a free reign to bully and harass other people as long as they didn't make actual threats of violence against other people (not good) or they would never be allowed to say anything even vaguely offensive or critical to anyone else (also not good). And once people start accepting you need grey areas, it becomes a bit hypocritical for them to say "OMG we don't have free speech any more!" because they well know they never really had it. What they mean is that they think the law should offer people less protection against other people being offensive to them. I don't have an issue with that stance, but I think you should say it for what it is rather than just lazily bandying the term "free speech" about.

So everyone would be happy if the line saying "soldier name" in tiny writing was removed from the Soldier Equip screen?

OK, a few things need clarifying about the existing game mechanics as are first: 1) @ElTee - the training system in the game is getting cut, so don't consider that when you're thinking about the soldiers levelling up through time. 2) @StellarRat - your soldiers level up through performing actions, regardless of whether they kill aliens or not. There's no EXP boost for killing aliens. 3) @StellarRat - you're never punished for not attacking a crash site (it appears to be a common misconception). 4) @TornadoADV - in the late game, the local AI forces already start spawning with laser weapons. The point of these ideas is to add general smoothing to the difficulty curve, rather than adding anything too major in the way of new systems. A quick % check if a UFO is shot down is trivial effort, adding a full system for friendly AI aircraft is not. I also don't see the value in adding loads more micromanagement to the game that that would entail. Regarding the realism of having local forces down UFOs - local air forces would have a LOT of aircraft and they'd definitely be using them even if they're not particularly effective. Presumably they'd enjoy some early success due to weight of numbers. The Xenonauts have three aircraft at the start of the game, so even if they are very effective they're a bit of a drop in the ocean. It's where they go after that that makes them special. For the training, I'm not putting a training system back in. We played about with the idea for a while, couldn't get it to work, and even thinking about redoing the UI plans to feature a new training system too make me come out in a cold sweat. The long range Chinook, I think we'd just say it had access to in-flight refueling - I don't think that's too big a leap. There are terror missions in the game, but they come in later - the Corvette is the first UFO that does them. They're generally missions with more, tougher aliens and more like an outright battle than trying to capture a UFO so it makes sense that the crash sites come first. They have less and weaker aliens in them, so they are a good way for the player to adjust to combat and capture the stuff he needs to start his research before the terror sites spawn. Therefore they're not really a solution to the early-game issues.

The full .rar standalone isn't available yet, sorry. I left it uploading to Dropbox overnight so I could upload it but my PC went to sleep. 3 hours left on that before Desura can approve it.

I've been playing a lot of the new XCOM and one of the things I liked about it was the way that it did smooth the difficulty curve a little - such as you getting high-level soldiers as mission rewards and later in the game they joined as Squaddies instead of Rookies etc. I think Xenonauts could benefit from some gentle smoothing of the difficulty curve in places to make it a bit less unforgiving. I was wondering if people had thoughts on these two ideas: 1) The quality (stat point average / rank) of the soldiers available for recruitment in the pool should gradually increase as the game goes on, up to a cap. This will cushion the blow of losing soldiers a little, though new soldiers should always be worse than what you already have. Perhaps the new soldiers would max out at Sergeant at the end of the game. 2) There's an issue with aircraft ranges and game balance at the moment. I want to encourage players to build multiple bases in the game, so the range of interceptors and radars can't be that large at the start of the game or there's no need for them. However, this leaves a situation where at the start of the game the player quite often is not able to intercept many UFOs because they don't enter their airspace. Which means very few crash site missions for people to play. There's several ways around this - making early UFOs only spawn near the base is one thing we can do, but I don't like that level of "cheating". I like the events popping up across the world, showing you that there's a world outside your radar range that the aliens are attacking. I propose that each UFO has a % value set for it, which is the % chance that it will generate a crash site instead of escaping to space if it successfully completes its mission - the logic being that that local air forces managed to shoot down the UFO. This would initially be set high, but would rapidly tail off and would be non-existent by the mid-game. This would nevertheless give the player some breathing room. There'll always be a supply of crash sites early game (and thus stuff to research), even if the player is unlucky with their interceptors. The main change here would be that the dropship will have to have a much longer range in order to be able to deal with the crash sites, but I guess I could live with that. I did want other bases to have their own troops etc, but I'm not sure it's going to be possible to force that without gimping other aspects of the game (not being able to reach terror sites etc as in the current builds) at the same time.

Good points, these. The reserving APs stuff we'll have to look at in beta, as I don't think it'll be a case of simply just adding a couple of quick icons in so it's not a quick fix. But it is known. The cycle through units with remaining APs button is a possibility, though it will be a keyboard shortcut if it goes in. But lots of people want different functionality out of it - there's even two different suggestions in this thread too. There's also the question of how people will find out the key is even there if it's just a hotkey. Something for beta. To be fixed up in short order: the soldier role deletion, save game overwriting functionality, the Escape menu closing.

If you can get the Desura client working (many have problems) then it's just a 50mb update.