Chris

General points - damage falls off as projectiles fly beyond their maximum range, so it's possible a plasma rifle shot won't instakill a Xenonaut if the shot is at good range. But yes, the Jackal should protect against it most of the time. The shotgun: yeah, I can see the points about it being a bit underpowered. I don't really want to increase the range too much, maybe I'll improve the damage instead. The AI isn't done yet, so don't read too much into that at the moment. But the aliens on crash sites are much more passive than those on terror sites and base missions, which will be more direct. Also his name is Gijs-Jan. Vehicles - it's now set so you can only have one vehicle to accompany your squad on any mission, so they can be a bit more powerful than before. As they only take up 2 soldier slots you'd be mad not to take one, but at the same time players can't spam them so they can be reasonably powerful. The Hunter has dual 0.30 cal machineguns. They are intended to suppress rather than kill the enemy, as they'd be a bit imbalanced otherwise. The weapon changes you mention Gauddlike seem a bit overly complex. There already is range, beyond which range and damage drops off. The "heavy" penalty is already a good 50% penalty if you move and shoot, so if you're trying to use a heavy weapon as an assault weapon it will end badly. The problem wouldn't so much be that the enemy are too close, but that the weapon didn't have time to get set up properly. There's also the additional AP cost per shot for long-range weapons to account for a longer aiming time. Finally, I've just realised we implemented both kinetic and energy armour values for amour for a reason - allowing me to make the Ferret largely invulnerable to small arms (kinetic) weapons but still vulnerable to alien weapons (energy). I can use this to somewhat reduce the damage dealt by human friendly fire too, while not nerfing damage dealt against aliens. That'll be a nice plus.

There are plenty of tilesets that are large and open (Arctic, Desert etc) so the farm ones are more enclosed than before.

Most likely it's a missing map. What UFO type caused it?

Can't repro it - been completing plenty of missions with 1 casualty, but it's not happening for me. How are you generating this bug? Let's get it fixed for the next update if we can.

It's already working better in the dev version. Basically there was bug where projectiles aren't tracked when they enter visible areas, so if aliens are shooting from beyond visual range then they can kill your guys without you seeing it.

Just to let everyone know that there is going to be another update planned this week. For this, we'll be making a concerted effort to improve stability in this new build. There's quite a lot of crash bugs and various save / load problems in the current build which we're working on fixing up. I figure by this point all the fixes will just carry across into the beta given it's so close, so it's hardly going to be wasted effort and should let people play far enough into the game to have more useful comments on balancing. There'll also be a number of new maps and improved balancing, and hopefully somewhat improved AI. I'm also going to release this one without file compression, either in the texture atlases or the in-game archive files (so it'll be a full 130,000 tiles again). I suspect these are behind a lot of the issues with broken tiles or invisible civilians etc. If the problems persist when the file compression has been removed, we'll know they are genuine problems with the code rather than the packaging of it. I'm letting everyone know about this in advance in case people are having massive issues with the game for some reason - a new version should be out around Friday that should fix most of these issues.

Matthew / Giovanni - here's repro steps. Set a game to auto-generate a crash site, and if it is out of dropship range you need to send the dropship towards it. It times out before the dropship arrives, so it turns back but there's no pop-up telling you about it. All other pop-ups won't appear either.

That attachment doesn't work. Doesn't sound good though.

If you're having a problem with the launcher crashing on load in V17.9, the file below should hopefully fix the issue until the next build. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26290309/Xenonauts%20launcher.zip This needs to be put in the Xenonauts directory, so /Desura/common/Xenonauts I think.

So this only affects grenades added to the soldier's inventory using a custom soldier role, right?

Yeah, it appears to affect all save games. We're looking into it.

Reprod, thanks.

Thanks, I've sent this one to the coder to fix up. It affects all combat save games.

I have had this once too. If anyone has any repro steps please let us know.

Noted, thanks.

Fair point.

Cool.

Lennard - the workaround is in the post above yours (if you don't want to wait for the official fix).

Dunno why this is, we need to get this looked at by the programmers. Should be fixed before beta.

It's a bug. It's because it's a multi-tile object, it gives you the set number of alien alloys for every single tile. I'll fix it up for the next build.

Did the standalone fix it?

Fixed up the Arctic mis-set sprites issue. For the other stuff, I have no idea what is causing it. I suggest that you delete atlas.txt and all the atlas files from each of the directories in /tiles/ and see if that helps. I can only guess that the texture atlases have gone haywire...

The /assets2/ folder and all of its contents was meant to be deleted, but I forgot. That should reduce the number of files by about 60,000.

You train reaction fire through your guys having reaction fire tests to see if they can reaction fire at aliens, whether or not they actually pass the test. I suppose there is scope to add a "reaction dodge" where a xeno soldier ducks and the shot that would otherwise hit goes over the head, might be a cool feature and it would be obvious what was happening then. Yes, the aliens have a longer sight range than humans. Perhaps I'll nerf it. I raised it in an attempt to make the aliens more dangerous as they weren't consistently shooting at my guys in my test missions. Perhaps I took it a bit too far for the early ones. Eraser - thanks for the comments, glad you like the game.

Yes, that's the one. Thanks. Where did you get that from? You're really earning your forum kudos today. This might let us correct the fact that there's no special characters like . , : $ etc in the Xenonauts font so it uses Arial instead, which are the wrong size.