Chris

Hmmm. Look into it when I'm on holiday then, it may be worth doing for the units and tiles directories.

The reason why we've not implemented this is I'm pretty sure it'll cause a whole load of bugs if we do, and we could really do without that

Yes, but then you have to download the entire file if any file in it has changed, which defeats the entire point of people not just downloading the standalone. I imagine for the final version of Xenonauts everything will be zipped up, but not while we're regularly releasing builds.

The journalists I know who have played XCOM say it's a genuinely excellent game (those bastards!) but it is quite different from the original mechanically, even if the overall feel is closer than you might expect from something with that many changes. Xenonauts is basically an enhanced and updated version of the original. The two will play quite differently, I think.

Yes, this'll be redone. Look on the bright side, at least your country is still there!

I don't think those paintings are from the days of William the Conqueror somehow - I remember doing a class on sculpture and art history and being shocked at how late in human history people actually learned to draw and paint realistically. It was roughly around the Renaissance, or something like that. People literally used to spend their entire lives being "artists" and never come up with anything that looked remotely convincing (a mildly depressing thought). I guess it says a lot about the accumulated knowledge of humankind. Almost anyone can spend a few years being taught how to draw and paint properly these days and by the end they'll be able to come up with something realistic. But even if someone was an artistic genuis, if they were born a thousand years ago they wouldn't be able to do it even with an entire lifetime spent experimenting and practicing. Standing on the shoulders of giants, indeed. Aaaand....yeah, well done Gauddlike!

I'm quite pro-Norman. One of my aunts got bored (I assume because she was old and doesn't understand the wonders of the internet) and traced our family lineage right the way back to the Norman conquest of Britain. Turns out, I'm a direct decendant of William the Conquerer's sister! Which is pretty awesome, if you disregard the fact that probably about 10% of Britain can say the same given that he lived a thousand years ago. And the fact he allegedly looked like this.

I plan to delegate that to one of the team members. I'm trying to decide between Matthew, Giovanni and GJ at the moment.

Gauddlike is German now?

So, a lot of people are having Desura MCF issues with the download - I've had a lot of Desura messages and a lot of emails / forum messages about it. I've had a chat to the Desura folks and they've said they're working on a patch to make the issue better, but it won't necessarily fix it completely. In the meantime, you can log into Desura and download the standalone files here: http://www.desura.com/games/xenonauts The problem is because their system isn't that great at handling LOTS of small files, and thanks to a combination of the tiles and the sprites, Xenonauts has LOADS of small files. Unfortunately this problem is only going to get worse until we hit beta (when all the units are in the game). That's what you get for using dated tech - but it's far too late into development for us to change our setup. We'll use a better engine next time around though. Apologies for the difficulties it is causing everybody!

As our existing moderator (Sathra) hasn't been very active for some time now, I'm appointing a second one to help us fight the spambots and generally keep the forums clean in my absence. I have chosen Gauddlike because he's been posting here right from the very start of the project nearly three years back and therefore should have a pretty good handle on the way things should be run. Thanks for giving us your time, Gauddlike, and welcome to your new role!

OK, so I'll try to put out a build on Wednedsay then. For the person that suggested taking a day off work, that means you should take Thursday off as I generally end up releasing the builds late at night. And even then Desura sometimes screw around with us be taking ages to authorise things. Full research tree should be in when we hit the alpha-deluxe stage. And, yes, spambots. Hmm. Perhaps I should appoint another moderator then.

Yup, I'll have to give you a standard "when it's done" answer really. You never know what delays are around the corner, if any. Proper beta should be this year but I don't know how long it'll take to make the game fully balanced and properly fun once its there.

Also, to clarify: V16 when released will probably not be ready for beta either. We'll put what we can into that release when I'm back in the UK, and then we'll take stock of the situation and see what is needed to hit feature-completeness. It shouldn't be that much, but we're starting work on implementing the final Geoscape UI etc so we'll see how far we've got with that by V16. That's one of the major things we'll need in place before we start shouting about our beta to the world. Belmakor - we may pop across and see Ankor Wat, but I don't know if we can travel that far east and still get down south to do the diving we want to do. I hope so, but we'll see. Good luck with the schoolbuilding anyway!

I discovered a couple of weeks ago that the only space when my friends and I had a suitable time in our calendars to go off on holiday together for a couple of weeks was at the end of this month, specifically the 22nd September to 7th October. As the last time I took time off was December, I'm going to be in Thailand for those two weeks. The observant among you will have noticed an issue - V15 / beta is due on 9th October. Hopefully work will not completely grind to a halt with me being away even if I'm not able (or willing) to make it to an internet cafe, but in any case that sort of time was going to be busy anyway. Aaron, currently our tile artist, joins Goldhawk full time on the 8th and we're also moving into a proper office on that day (or renting a couple of desks in someone else's office, to be exact). There's quite a few admin tasks required for both of those things, plus there's the small matter of the release of XCOM on October 9th. So lots going on. The likelihood of V15 coming out on 9th October is therefore somewhat reduced - or certainly the likelihood of it actually being the full beta on 9th October is reduced, if it does come out then. Because of this, I'm happy to release a cut-down V15 next week - probably about Wednesday (giving me a day before my holidays to fix any massive crash bugs) with most of the progress we've made over the last couple of weeks in it, if people want. The likely features would be: - More sprites (all friendly AI soldier sprites and some more Xenonaut ones) - Arctic, Desert and Middle East Tilesets added (though unfinished, so they're bsaically flat and open at the mo) - Chinook spawn maps for all orientations been added to all tilesets - Can shoot over crouched soldiers - Armour degradation with damage - Vehicles have shadows, plus an explosion when destroyed - Pop-up windows on Geoscape (UFO detected etc) are now draggable - Lightmap is realistic and changes with seasons rather than being static - Burst delay tag for each weapon added, which allows you to set the time between each shot in a burst - Psionic powers now fully implemented with animation and sound (just need the AI to start using them now) - Autoclosing doors (at the end of the turn) have been implemented, which we'll use in UFOs / bases Bugfixes: - Aliens no longer run inside walls and objects, making them hard to find / kill - Ground combat saves now work again - Suppression system for burst fire is now per burst, rather than per bullet - Civilians spawn again - Massive strength gain after battle no longer occurring - Lieutenant and Captain ranks no longer switched - LOS bug caused by standing on a roof fixed up We'd then probably put out V16 around about 9th October, which would be the aggregated progress made by the team while I was away, plus more sprite rendering work and GJ's first major AI release. There's still some way to go before beta even if we hit these goals (which we probably will), but we're making good progress. It also occurs to me that what we initially advertised as "beta" - ie, it's possible to play the feature complete (if not asset complete) game from start to finish - probably wouldn't be a good thing to advertise too much. I think we may need a couple of weeks of sort of alpha-deluxe before we hit beta, because the game will almost certainly be a bit of a broken, unbalanced, buggy mess for the first couple of weeks of "beta". You forumgoers are used to that, but the last thing I want to do is do a big publicity drive and get a load of new customers to try the game and conclude it's terrible. I imagine it'll be markedly better after a few weeks of tweaks and bugfixes. So apologies for the delays, but I think the "Three Builds to Beta" schedule has got us pretty close to where we want to be even if we've not quite hit every milestone in it.

Yes, it'll just be a bundled PDF you can access from the launcher irrespective of the distribution method.

Hmm. Might have something to do with the relocation then, that's occasionally a bit screwy stil. I'll let Matthew investigate this one further.

Yeah, soldiers should stop when they see an alien. But bear in mind that the aliens often have the same or longer sight ranges than human troops, so in most cases when you see an alien they'll already have had a chance to take reaction fire at you (though they may have failed the reaction test and may still fire at you if you keep moving).

Yeah, we've fixed it up in the dev version now.

It'll be made available as soon as it is ready to Premium pre-orderers, but it'll be included in the final distribution of the game whether you are a premium pre-orderer or a standard one (plus Lee will want to make it available through his own distribution channels). It's too much work to write a 30k word story to just restrict it to the premium crowd forever!

Hmm, ok. Doesn't seem to be serious enough for me to warrant poking around to fix, I'm afraid. I've got better things to do and I might end up making the problem worse.

Strange. Anyone else getting this, or is it an isolated case?

Y'see GoodGuyEddy, you just look strange now. That's why you should just report spam instead of commenting on it!

Unfortunately it's difficult to find room to put new buttons on the UI, and I don't want to make it too overwhelming, so I'm not sure this'd make it in unless we have enough small settings to justify creating a seperate options screen for it.

There's a command in gameconfig.xml that controls the % chance of female soldiers spawning. Just set it 0% if you want no women and 100% if you want all women. Simple.