Chris

Wait for beta. If it's not this weekend it'll be next week. I'd always get the standalone at the moment though, it's more stable than the Desura version.

We're working with the assumption I'll compile the build tomorrow, but that might slip. Also, yes - I doubt Desura will be authorise the build over Easter weekend.

The porter is working on a Mac port, but the new launcher is causing some issues we need to work through. Eraser - there is a hidden movement freeze but it really shouldn't be happening that often. Have you tried the standalone? We're working on beta now.

Thanks. Just means I've not connected the research project to the dead reaper corpse, I'll do that.

It crashes on pressing "Play Xenonauts"? Hmm, sounds like missing / incomplete files. Have you tried downloading the standalone?

QM - I think we'd be interested in the source code if you'll no longer be updating it. Perhaps one of our coders may be able to turn it into a fully-fledged tool to be bundled with the game. Drop me an email about it. Sorry to hear you're no longer a gamer, but thanks for all of your efforts to help us out and participation on the forums.

It's actually bundled with the game now, under "Extras" in the launcher.

A tile is 1.6m by 1.6m on each edge. We'll have a look at grenades and how they work in beta, I'm aware they're a bit dodgy at the moment.

Beeprog - yeah, try the fix. The -gndcombat tag would just continually launch ground missions without you shooting down the UFOs first so I doubt that's active or you'd be reporting another bug entirely!

By far the most interest we've had is for Russian and German translations. After that, potentially French / Spanish.

There's no need for it, though. All the files you need are in the standalone, uncompressed.

Some of the text is hardcoded, either in the actual code or in the style .xmls in /scripts/. We can do some work on moving them all to strings.xml in beta. Remember the entire UI is going to be replaced in beta too...

Gazz - interesting, but as you mention in your post I don't want to go for that radical surgery (or not at this stage at least). A lot of our ground combat code is connected and redoing the accuracy stuff would be a major undertaking - certainly not the first thing we'll try. Your precision idea is interesting though. crusherven - cover in adjacent tiles is already disregarded from the to-hit accuracy calculation. The only problem is a "miss" can still scatter into that obstacle, so it doesn't look like that's the case. We intend to fix that. StellarRat - interesting ideas re: deviation / accuracy linkage.

Giovanni is correct. Once a UFO is detected you won't lose tracking on it until it goes beyond the second circle.

Maybe we'll look at it in beta. The main issue is lack of space for all the possible variables.

Fixed.

Yeah it probably need to be set for the Caesans too. OP updated.

Yup, known issue and I think it's fixed in the dev build. It's that large props aren't being revealed properly on night missions because of a LOS issue, rather than missing textures.

Use this thread please: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/4275-Shot-Miss-Scattering

The accuracy calculation is a bit dodgy at the moment, last week we implemented a debug mode that we're using to try and figure out why it's behaving strangely.

Giovanni has discovered the problem with the UFOs appearing without a crew, and there's an easy fix for it. Download the two XML files linked below and put them in /xenonauts/assets/ufocontents/ folder and it should work fine: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26290309/airplane.alien.lightscout.sebillian.xml https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26290309/airplane.alien.lightscout.caesan.xml (right click and Save File As) The problem was that the "missing crew" UFOs weren't on Research missions, they were on Scout missions. Light Scouts previously only ever did Research missions until I moved them forwards, so there was no contents column present for the Scout mission crew and thus they appeared empty...so not a coding bug at all! Enjoy.

The whole Desura auto-updater stuff is weird, though. I have a local copy on my machine that I upload to Desura - with the standalone it's fine, I just .rar it up and upload it to their servers and you have a 1:1 copy of what I have in that local copy. With the auto-updater, I run their auto-updater software and it scans it and uploads the changed files. But then the auto-updater version appears to be a different size (according to their dev tools, at least). When the updater again, even on exactly the same copy, it gave me a 5mb update to upload even though nothing had changed. Doesn't fill me with confidence it's not missing some important files somewhere along the line.

It's been removed and is going to be made researchable.

This is something that is brought up regularly on the forums - the when a shot misses the target, it often does so in an unrealistically extreme manner, so a soldier aiming at a target may fire his bullet up to 45 degrees away from it. I agree this is an issue, and it's something we'll be looking at fixing in beta. This thread is intended to discuss how it can be handled, as there's been about six thousand threads on the issue and I can't be bothered to read them all. One of the previous problems with a narrower scatter arc is that sometimes a shot would "miss" and then scatter into the target, hitting them anyway. We can ensure this doesn't happen in the code, so I'm sure we can even have bullets passing through the tile the target is standing in and not hitting him. There are two things the new systems has to bear in mind: 1) It should look reasonably realistic. The wild shot scattering at the moment is not realistic. 2) It still needs to preserve the X-Com style "hilarity" where you can accidentally hit your own soldiers. Not to the same degree as you can at the moment, but I don't think I'd be very happy with any system that didn't model the shot missing and hitting something nearby - whether it be terrain or a civilian or even an entirely different alien. To be honest, it might actually be as simple as narrowing the scatter arc to 15 degrees on either side or something and treating the target as having a (projectile) stopping chance of 0 if the shot is calculated as a "miss" before the projectile is drawn. Happy to listen to alternatives though.

Next week involves Aaron doing the last UFO, me doing a lot of maps and various parts of the team working on the final mission. If those things all go to plan, the game will be playable from start to finish and beta arrives next week. It may happen or it may not. I'd very much like to prove tiggerwof wrong though, so challenge accepted