Chris

Right. I'll think about this some more. New thread up, this one is too long now.

OK. I've read the entire last thread on the proposed new system and I'm going to look at the two-part missions again. There may be other solutions to the issue, perhaps shrinking the larger UFOs or coming up with better shapes for them for the tiles. Zzz1010 has some good shapes for some of the awkward UFOs so maybe I'll look at them in more detail. It may be possible to get the Landing Ship and Cruiser in the maps using the current method after all. Just to be clear though - in no circumstances will the outer hulls of the UFOs be destructible. The tiles just can't work that way with the paintover system we use, even if we continue using the current one. Also, no promises. If the two-part solution has to be used, it has to be used. EDIT: to inform the future discussion, these are the main issues: 1) The bigger UFOs are massive. This is relatively easy to remedy, simply by scaling them down a bit (which I'm happy to do if the other issues are fixed up). However, in the current form there's basically no point having a large UFO crash site with an exterior because the exterior would just be the UFO hull rather than buildings or terrain etc. Hence the two-parter idea in the first place. 2) The UFO shapes are rounded, which means it is hard to get a decent sized interior out of them if unless the UFO is large as the space is frequently wasted. I've seen a few of zzz1010's concepts and there might be room for improvement here (his cruiser in particular has quite an intelligent rectangular lower level space that hadn't occurred to me), but we'll see. This causes #1. 3) To be properly interactive, the UFO walls have to be cut into 1 tile slices and then painstakingly aligned in the game. This is incredibly labor intensive, and to paint them over so they are consistent with the other terrain tiles is also expensive. To paint them over in a wal that would allow them to be destructible (ie. so they have all sides of the tile painted rather than just the top) would be prohibitively expensive. Also, the 3D model has to be exported as a layered Photoshop PSD file with every tile on a seperate layer, else it's not possible to slice the tiles correctly, so just modelling up the UFOs isn't enough if the 3D program does not support this. 4) Randomisation of the UFO interior is not impossible in the current system, but it is much harder than in the proposed system. 5) Additional hull breaches are not impossible in the current system, but they are MUCH harder than in the proposed system.

Thanks all!

We're working on getting the error fixed up by archiving all the files prior to uploading them on Desura, and unzipping them afterwards. Hopefully that'll stop these problems happening - though we need to chat through it with Desura to make sure it is fully feasible still.

I'm back. I actually arrived last night but I've spent today doing chores and clearing the inbox of superfluous things, and reading up on what I've missed in the world (of gaming) over the past two weeks. Expect normal service to resume tomorrow. I'm setting up in the new office tomorrow and our tile artist joins full time on Tuesday but hopefully I'll have time to pull together all the work that has been done in the last couple of weeks for a release in the next few days. More details will follow on what progress has been made once I've read through my massive inbox, but I thought I'd just let everyone know that I have returned.

Also, Steam obviously support alphafunding now given that Towns and Project Zomboid etc are on there thanks to Greenlight, so that shouldn't be an issue. It's just a case of getting their attention really...

Yeah I should be able to upload the standalones using my smartphone at the airport. But anyway, if you've just downloaded the V15 standalone, this probably isn't worth redownloading the whole thing to get. You might just have to abort a few missions.

OK, this is a quick hotfix before I dash off that I'm uploading right now. There's an issue on some of the Chinook maps where you can't disembark the vehicles from the front entrance as there are invisible spacer tiles in the way. I've cleared them out and included the new maps in the hotfix. Also I've updated the version number on the launcher as it still said V14.11 before. I won't have time to put this on the standalone, I'm afraid - it won't upload before I have to catch my flight. I'll stick it in my dropbox anyway so perhaps there'll be a way I can upload it to Desura in an internet cafe or something in a few days.

Voidfoam - yes, obviously we'll make an effort to show the big UFOs and show their scale. But the point is, it'll be off map and you won't be able to interact with them. Then it's just a case of just painting a big static tile, which isn't too difficult.

Yeah these shotgun-wielding farmers are in V15!

Moonie, your posts are consistently negative given you know full well that the game is in alpha - if you're not prepared for weird stuff going on, wait until beta. Also anything other than sprites appearing in the incorrect order (so half-in-half-out buildings) is a bug. If you think it's something we should fix it'd help if you'd report it. Yes, I forgot to update the launcher version number. Oops. I might see if I can release a hotfix for the Chinook unloading bug though.

Ah thanks Dowly!

Ah dammit, it's a problem with the Chinook maps. I've not fully cleared the transparent blocker sprites from the map...bleh. Which orientation was the Chinook?

OK, we'll put this in the game. I think limiting it to explosive damage and that from hypervelocity weapons is sensible; small arms fire shouldn't do that. To those people talking about grenades, conventional grenades aren't that powerful but later-game grenades certainly will be.

It's all been authorised now, including the standalones. Please let me know ASAP if there's any major bugs in it!

As has been mentioned above, the larger UFOs are massive. We've even got a cruiser model done up, ready to be painted over, that we're not going to use now and the thing is about 50x50 tiles. In order to fit the dropship in the map, along with some terrain that isn't just the cruiser you're looking at something like a 70x70 or 80x80 map. If you think that's a good thing, I suggest you create an 80x80 map in the level editor and see how long it takes to walk across it. Plus, the cruiser is the smallest of the alien capital ships. To clarify the idea, this is how it'll work: - Smaller UFOs like the Light Scout, Fighter (including fighter derivatives like the Heavy Figther and Interceptor) and Bomber would appear on the map in a crashed / landed form but not be enterable because they're simply too small. This is a straightforward 1-part mission where you clear all the aliens off the map and win. - Medium size UFOs like the Corvette and Scout would appear on the map in a crashed / landed form and not be enterable. However, on clearing the map you'd get a second interior breach mission. - Large UFOs (landing ship and upwards) would be partially visible beyond the edge of the map. As mentioned above, there's no way to get them on the map. Once the mission is cleared, you get the UFO interior mission too. The "airlock capture" option may be viable for the Large UFOs, but I don't know. It depends what angle they've landed at and whether we can fit a entry point onto them - and also if we can get the tiles displaying correctly, which isn't a given. Interative terrain is much harder to do than a static, non-interactive piece of terrain. There wouldn't be switching in-and-out of the UFO. I don't really see the gain in that and it'd be making things far too complex from a design and technical standpoint. I think in the case of the Scout and the Corvette, which could plausibly be enterable in the mission, it'd be best not to do that. This is for consistency reasons. We need to pick a method and stick to it, and I'm pretty sure that this is how it's going to work now. Admittedly it's not perfect, but it seems the only plausible way to deal with the awkward shape and scale of many of our UFOs. Nice to hear some of the UFO games did it, I didn't know that!

This is a known error and it's at Desura's end, caused mostly because Xenonauts has so many small files and Desura struggles with that. We can't fix it for them, although we're looking into a few ways around it with them. The workaround is to download the standalones for now, as has been stated many times in this thread (and others) already. Instructions on how to do so here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/739-How-to-download-Xenonauts-without-using-Desura!

I have, they didn't reply. Which makes it a bit awkward, as we can't really go through the greenlight proceedure if we've already signed a deal. I'll chase them up when I'm back from holiday.

I was reading one of the previews of XCOM and it mentioned you had to be careful to not use too much firepower when attacking aliens, or there wouldn't be anything left to recover. We were planning to put something like that in Xenonauts, but it got swept into the big old "something to look at in beta" bin at the time. Now's the sort of time to start thinking about it, and whether it should work. My initial thoughts are that it'd be a good addition to the game. It would mostly affect rocket launchers (Ferret and infantry) and to a lesser extent, grenades and C4 charges. I think the main value in it would be to allow us to make them more powerful. At the moment they don't really have the wow factor where they flatten buildings and kill most things nearby. This is for balance reasons - it's just too easy, particularly with the Ferret. The upside of adding overdamage is that you can kill aliens quite easily using the Ferret rockets (if it hits) but you wouldn't recover a corpse or any equipment if you did. I like that idea. I'm not sure it's technically plausible to have a running HP value for each item in the game, so I think it'd make more sense to have a sort of damage limit for items. If the tile / unit they are on recieve more than that amount of damage, they are destroyed. I guess they should probably be replaced with some "destroyed remains" tiles to show there was something there, and there should be a generic mangled corpse to replace the normal corpses. Does that make you guys happy? Do you have alternative suggestions?

It's just much neater if it's split in two. Plus that way you can use the multiple entrance points more easily as the game will allow you to split your troops between them in the set-up round before the second battle begins. If you do it as one map that's not possible. EDIT - also, in terms of crash site generation, the escort craft are always disregarded. The only thing that matters is the main UFO.

Our current UFO designs are horrible for a tile-based game. It's annoying, because we'd have been called unexciting if we'd not come up with something more original than the flying grey boxes of the original X-Com - but anything other than flying boxes won't work very well in a tile-based game. We've come up with relatively plausible representations of some of the UFOs in the game, but we're working on our Landing Ship tiles at the moment and it's not going well. It turns out adding another level to the UFO (Landing Ships are multi-level) causes no end of issues. I think we're going to bin the current UFO system and move to a new one entirely. The previous system was: - Some UFOs are too small or awkward to appear in tile form, so they always explode when shot down in air combat - All remaining UFOs up to Cruiser size appear on the map are fully enterable by troops - Above Cruiser size, the crash site mission does not show the outside of the UFO at all - you start off breaching the UFO interior, so it's a bit like a base attack mission The new system will be: - UFOs appear on the map as a non-enterable piece of scenery. - Crash site missions are split into two parts; clearing the landing zone (UFO exterior) and then once that is clear, breaching the UFO itself with the remaining troops. - At the half-way point, morale and bleeding wounds would be healed and the player would be given the option to withdraw with all the equipment captured so far. There's a few advantages to this, relative to the earlier method: 1) The UFOs will always appear. That way we can have crash sites for fighters etc now, as we don't need to go inside them (you can just recover some Alien Alloys etc from the crash site). 2) It means we can show the exterior of the really big UFOs. They'd fill say 6 tiles all along one side of the map, which means you'll still get the "wow" factor of seeing something really massive. It wouldn't be practical to build a UFO that big under the current system, and it'd also be cheaper for us because that row of tiles would be non-interactive and non-destructable, so it only has to be painted once. 3) If a UFO has been shot down and is damaged, there can be multiple entrances - the front door, and some (semi-random) hull breaches. If the UFO has landed intact, there's only the front door. 4) We can have semi-randomised UFO interiors this way, and we're not constrained by the UFO dimensions as long as we're not too silly about it. The current UFO interiors are very limited by the shape of the UFO exterior, which is obviously set by the UFO air combat art. 5) Without all the thick walls, there'll be much better visibility for the UFO interiors. 6) Under the previous system, all late-game UFO assaults would be indoor missions. All alien base attack missions and Xenonaut base mssions are also going to be indoors, so you'll only ever go outside for terror sites. I think this would get really boring, really fast. This isn't really a point in favour of the new system so much as a massive disadvantage of the old system, but it's still a factor in my decision. Of course, the major disadvantage with this new system is that it's just a bit lame. You could go inside the UFO in the original UFO so I think people will find it a bit jarring that it is handled this way in our game. I don't really think there's any way around this though. I think the key is to make the two-mission format as user friendly as possible, as they were certainly not popular in TFTD. The second disadvantage is is removes the secondary win condition for the crash site missions, as you can't take and hold the UFO. You'd have to clear the landing zone then go inside. This means the AI is going to have to be very aggressive to minimise the chance of "last sectoid syndrome" occurring, because that's not fun. EDIT: My reply from page 4 is below: As has been mentioned above, the larger UFOs are massive. We've even got a cruiser model done up, ready to be painted over, that we're not going to use now and the thing is about 50x50 tiles. In order to fit the dropship in the map, along with some terrain that isn't just the cruiser you're looking at something like a 70x70 or 80x80 map. If you think that's a good thing, I suggest you create an 80x80 map in the level editor and see how long it takes to walk across it. Plus, the cruiser is the smallest of the alien capital ships. To clarify the idea, this is how it'll work: - Smaller UFOs like the Light Scout, Fighter (including fighter derivatives like the Heavy Figther and Interceptor) and Bomber would appear on the map in a crashed / landed form but not be enterable because they're simply too small. This is a straightforward 1-part mission where you clear all the aliens off the map and win. - Medium size UFOs like the Corvette and Scout would appear on the map in a crashed / landed form and not be enterable. However, on clearing the map you'd get a second interior breach mission. - Large UFOs (landing ship and upwards) would be partially visible beyond the edge of the map. As mentioned above, there's no way to get them on the map. Once the mission is cleared, you get the UFO interior mission too. The "airlock capture" option may be viable for the Large UFOs, but I don't know. It depends what angle they've landed at and whether we can fit a entry point onto them - and also if we can get the tiles displaying correctly, which isn't a given. Interative terrain is much harder to do than a static, non-interactive piece of terrain. There wouldn't be switching in-and-out of the UFO. I don't really see the gain in that and it'd be making things far too complex from a design and technical standpoint. I think in the case of the Scout and the Corvette, which could plausibly be enterable in the mission, it'd be best not to do that. This is for consistency reasons. We need to pick a method and stick to it, and I'm pretty sure that this is how it's going to work now. Admittedly it's not perfect, but it seems the only plausible way to deal with the awkward shape and scale of many of our UFOs. Nice to hear some of the UFO games did it, I didn't know that!

Build V15 has been uploaded to Desura authorised. The standalones are good to go as well; given the MCF errors with Desura they may actually be your best bet! Sorry about the delay on this; we had issues getting the civilians and friendly AI soldiers to spawn. As they're quite an important part of this build, I didn't want to release it without them. So, these are the new features: - Friendly AI troops: All friendly AI troops are now in the game for all tilesets except the Desert tileset. They have a variety of weapons, some unique, and many of them will level up as the game progresses and get their hands on laser weaponry. You can take the weapons off their bodies and use them in battle, but they disappear at the end of the battle. - AK47: The AK47 has been added to the game and there are also sprites for this for all of the Xenonaut armour types. Some people will want to loot this off the friendly soldiers and others may want to mod it in, so now there are the appropriate sprites there too. It's basically the same as the normal rifle, but with a bit less accuracy and a bit more power. It reloads using normal rifle mags. - Sprites: We've added the power armour Xenonaut sprites, so basically it's just a few alien weapons - Vehicles: The Ferret and future vehicles now have a shadow and explode when destroyed (cosmetic, no damage). If the shadows look misaligned, I'll be fixing that today. - Geoscape Selector: If you click several objects that are close to each other on the Geoscape, you now get a pop-up menu asking you to select which one you intended to target. Just like the original X-Com! - Shooting over crouched soldiers: You can now safely shoot over crouched friendly units in ADJACENT tiles the shooting soldier is standing. If the soldier is 1 tile away, you have 50% the normal chance of hitting him, so I think it's probably a net 20-30% chance of shooting him in the back of the head. - Draggable Windows: The pop-up windows on the Geoscape (the UFO detected or interception windows, for example) can now be dragged around the screen if they're obscuring something important. - Realistic Lightmap: The lightmap now changes with the seasons (it updates every 10 days). This means we've moved the start of the game forward to September so the lightmap starts pretty neutral. Not something I was overly bothered about myself, but Giovanni put it in for you guys - Burst Delay: There's now a seperate "burst delay" function for weapons in weapons_gc.xml. This controls the length of time between shots in a burst. The "burst" function controls the length of time before the first shot is fired, and is used to synch the soldier animations with the weapon projectiles appearing. Previously both attributes were controlled by "burst". - Chinook maps: There's now a NE / NW / SE / SW map for the Chinook for each tileset except the Terror Site town. - Linux Version: A Linux version of V14.11 is currently being set up on Desura. From when I get back, the Mac and Linux releases should be a bit more proven and we'll keep them synchronised better with the Windows versions. BUGFIXES: - Aliens no longer run inside solid objects. This was caused by a pathfinding bug that meant if the player couldn't see an obstacle, it didn't exist. That meant the AI was pathing through / into them and then getting stuck when the player revealed that part of the map. - Civilians and friendly AI troops now spawn again. - Ground combat saves should work correctly again. - Massive strength gain bug should be fixed. - Suppression system is per burst, rather than per bullet fired in the burst. - Lieutenant and Captain are no longer incorrectly switched in the soldier rank progression. - LOS bug where you could see on floors below where your soldier was standing are now fixed. Basically, on my return I want to have all of the Xenonaut sprites and lots of the civilians rendered out. Having plausible friendly AI troops on each map really adds to the realism, and having a variety of localised civilians for each tileset will be great too. In tileset terms, there's a few testmaps in place for the Arctic, Desert and Middle East tilesets that I've been using to test the friendly AI troops and the Chinook maps. Hopefully V16 will see all three tilesets introduced in a playable form; we're just working on the rock formations that will provide the higher ground and break up the flat terrain for all three tilesets. The buildings for them are done (thought not painted over yet) so we're close to having all three in the game. I think that'll make a huge difference to how fun the game is. For the UFOs themselves, please read this post. There's likely to be changes in the near future as to how they are handled. Then there's a less important discussion here on overdamage, which we should probably consider too. Finally - we're hoping to have half the custom portraits done by the next build too. So if you've bought one, that'd good for you. If you've not, at least there'll be a lot more variation in the soldier faces from next build onwards!

The entire map is going to be redone though so maybe hold your horses!

The next build will have to wait until the morning, I'm afraid. I'm having some problems aligning sprites which I'll fix up tomorrow and then release everything.

Ah. This may be an issue with the stun smoke not appearing, as some of the animations don't appear properly until put in the code. Have you ever seen stun grenade stun smoke appear in your game?