Chris

I think it's quite funny how attached people have got to the awful old Geoscape. I also think it's quite amusing how a few people are claiming it is harder to imagine that you're sat in a bunker controlling everything on a big screen with the new UI, given the fact you can actually see the walls of the bunker and the screen itself (and the other people in the command room!) I'm sure you'll all get used to it with time, anyway.

So today I've done various things, but at about midday the updated background art for the new Geoscape screen arrived and I went back to trying to find the look I want for the Geoscape in our new UI. I think I'm pretty much there now. Here we go: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/Geoscape_normal.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/Geoscape_zoomed.jpg For comparison, this is the current Geoscape: http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/5035/xenonauts20120106203251.jpg Basically, we've made it a bit more colourful and used the trusty black border around the landmasses to give them that handpainted feel. We'll redo the base / UFO / aircraft icons to fit the style a bit better too, but hopefully you'll agree that it will make the game significantly nicer than it currently is! Comments and feedback welcome.

Yeah, it's basically just if we did a realistic lift mechanism it'd take up the entire hangar, so we conveniently left it out.

We've fixed up the issues with the UI now so this release shouldn't be too long (hopefully).

Magic.

Quite a few of the tiles (lights, computer consoles etc) are animated too. We might put together an animated screenshot at some point so people can get a good feel of the game in action.

Oh yeah, the commenters who corrected me were 100% right. It's a little embarrassing I made the error about surrendering losses, if I'm honest - I expect the High Council of Accountants will be in contact soon, asking me to return my sceptre...

Also, check me out writing for Rock Paper Shotgun: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/13/how-the-new-uk-tax-laws-will-affect-indie-developers/ And then check out me getting schooled on depressingly basic accountancy on page 2 of the comments.

Time for a quick development update! It's approaching Christmas but we've all got another week or so to work until we disappear off. What've we been up to recently? We've been working on a variety of things. I guess the biggest change has probably been the level design system. This has become far more point-and-click, making it much easier to generate levels. Previously, props and walls and buildings were set at the sub-map level and this meant that moving them around in the Level Editor meant editing the submaps (which had to align perfectly to look correct). It was very time consuming, and not exactly user-friendly. Now we have a layer system, with the Ground tiles and then the Wall, Prop and Building layers on top of that. The game can deal with transparency - so if a wall sub-map has no ground tiles painted on it, it will draw the information from the Ground layer below it (for instance a field). You can see how this is much better than having to paint all the walls and props on the field directly, as you had to in the previous setting. Naturally this has both caused a lot of bugs and meant we've had to redo a lot of our maps, which has taken up quite a lot of time. This hasn't been helped that our ground combat coder has had workmen in his house for the past week and hasn't got much done in terms of fixing up the bugs. We're getting on top of them now but it's been pretty slow on the ground combat front for the last few weeks. For the Geoscape, we've done a bit of work on the balancing of the invasion and the research tree but that will continue in more detail once the ground combat missions are all loading up properly. We've also started work on implementing the new UI, but unfortunately we didn't fork the code before we did that so the release of our latest build has been delayed. The new topbar is in the game, but the graphics need to be reworked as we were experimenting with image scaling. Having an unusable topbar is not something we want in a public build, obviously! Aaron's been busy on the Xenonaut base tiles, and has now completed all of the starting rooms. You can see a few previews of them dotted around on the main news blog or on other sites; basically they look pretty awesome. They're also animated (consoles etc), but the animated tiles aren't displaying properly for some reason. We're trying to get that fixed up. He's also been working on the big brothers to the little Light Drone that you can see in the terror missions, also animated. Rendering has also been going fairly well. All the Xenonaut vehicles are now in the game, an entire new alien race has been rendered out and the Light Drone big brothers are also ready to go into the game this weekend. I think there's only one major alien race left to render...a rather annoying glow effect I can't quite figure out how to get rid of is giving me trouble with them, but I'll fix that up soon no doubt. The new UI for the ground combat is finished and in the game thanks to Giovanni. Again, this took a long time - there's issues with image scaling in the engine, so we've been scaling the images perfectly in Photoshop now and it means they don't appear at all warped. The image clarity for the pictures of the weapons and the various icons should be much sharper than before, unless you happened to luck into the right resolution before (actually a couple more icons still need to be updated but 99% of it is done). So, yeah - it's not the biggest thing in the world, but the visual quality of the game has increased another notch. We're now working on the new launcher too, as the existing one doesn't work on Mac and looks horrible. The new / final one will be much nicer and hopefully will have an animated background (of the same image) too. That'll be arriving in the New Year though, I'd have thought. Finally, we've had GJ over in London for the last couple of days to talk about the AI. Progress on the AI has been a bit slow recently, partly because GJ has been busy with his masters studies and also just because the AI is hard. Anyway, we've chatted through at length the sort of feel we want for each type of mission, the different AI behaviours we need for the various alien / friendly units in each mission type and good ways to generate that. I know we've been promising a better AI for some time yet and it's not quite materialised, but I'm hopeful it's not too far away now. I think that's about it. Not sure when V17.5 is coming out, but hopefully soon. Beta is coming together too, but we have to get the new level system working better before we can really get to grips with testing and balancing the research tree (though we have done some of that already). Thanks for your patience. I'll do another update before Christmas too.

Imperialus - yeah, I remember that actually. I literally couldn't imagine a situation where we'd possibly not have finished the game by the end of 2012. Making games was gonna be easy, right? All those guys in the AAA studios who took ages making games, that was because they weren't me and didn't know all the cool stuff that I did! Noobs! As I said, dev update will come today. In short, the major problem is that we foolishly didn't branch the code before we started implementing the new Geoscape UI so we have to finish the bit we're working on before we can release the next build.

Coding has been veeeery slow this week. I'll do a dev update tomorrow and provide some more details of what's going on.

Maybe someone should pretend to be a C++ programmer and see how far along they are...

The new UI will have a button for it, but I think it's Alt or Shift or Ctrl or something on the old one...

Update on V17.5 - the level editor updates are good to go but the new UI (we're working on the ground combat one and the new Geoscape topbar) has some issues we'll have to fix up first, otherwise people will be really puzzled by what is going on.

To be fair to Mr Gollop, I never emailed him because I couldn't find an email address for him so I sent him a Facebook message. Something I discovered recently is that Facebook actually has two inboxes for messages, and if you're not friends with someone and drop them a message then it goes into the spam inbox - and you get no notifications for those messages. So he's probably not even aware that I ever messaged him. I didn't really get the impression he had too much bad to say about the Firaxis remake either, tbh. Seems a balanced criticism of the game rather than him being annoyed. His Twitter posts seem to suggest he was intrigued rather than offended by the Gollop chamber too. But yes, I can imagine it'd be kinda galling to see your creation be essentially hijacked by others when people won't back you to remake it. But then if he'd done a Kickstarter for it, he'd be laughing

Nah, I just freestyle it based on which side of the bed I get up on.

Come on people, somebody must have had some issues and found some workarounds...

Yes, I hadn't noticed there were no women in the background of the screens. Maybe we'll paint in a few ponytails etc.

There's a few people who sometimes have issues getting Xenonauts running. I'd like to put together a list of all the things that people can try to try and get the game working (and if not, we'll give them a refund). That way, Matthew can just copy-paste the list into relevant threads and we can give the best possible customer service. Any experiences from the community would be appreciated as neither of us have ever had trouble with it working! From what I understand, potential flashpoints are Desura itself (so you can access Xenonauts.exe directly as a workaround) and the stupid windowed mode where you have to select a resolution that is smaller than BOTH the height and width of your current desktop resolution for it to work.

It's usually that the aircraft is airborne that causes this, I've had it happen to me a few times.

Hmmm. The main issue is we can't burn the DVDs until the game is finished, and sending out the rewards anything other than all at once makes the postage a bit expensive. We'll see, though. I'll think about it over Christmas.

Hmm. That's odd, it should be able to deal with a system like that. Name, is your graphics card 512mb too? My only thought is that the Geoscape map might be too big to load in that, but it's unlikely if the topbar etc isn't appearing either. Did you guys ever try the Kickstarter demo? If not, can you try downloading it here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26290309/Xenonauts_Public_Build.rar If that doesn't work either, it may just be that your PC can't run the game for whatever reason. If so, we'll get you a refund.

Hmmm. Space 1999? I've never watched either of the shows but I'm aware of them existing and looking like they'd be terrible.

Blake 7?

I know I've previously said that the current release will be the last one until the beta, but I've changed my mind. At the moment we're making some pretty substantial changes to the Level Editor to the point where the game just doesn't support the old maps and the old tile setup any more. As such, we'll be releasing an update to V17 next week. It's not a major update in gameplay terms, it's basically an infrastructure update to support the testing we're doing prior to the beta. It'll include the following: Updated Level Editor: The new level editor should make it MUCH easier to generate levels. We're implementing a system where you can stack sub-maps on top of each other in different layers, with empty ground tiles being read from the sub-maps below. Essentially this will just let you paint a massive area as a field, and then easily paint trees or props or walls or even buildings on top of it and not have to worry about the underlying ground tiles fitting together. The Sub-Map editor is still a bit of a monster to deal with, but the Level Editor should make generation of new maps child's play. We're releasing it early simply because it's not backwards compatible at all. Desura file compression: We want to give this a pre-beta test to see if it works. It should reduce the file count by about 75%. New Ground Combat UI: This will be in there. It's just new graphics, no new functionality really. Autohide Roof: This functionality will be in, though, which means buildings will be displayed with their roofs on by default again but should be hidden if you go inside or behind them. Nowt too exciting, I'm basically saying this so nobody freaks out because they think it's the beta when it is released!