Chris

Suppression is likely to sap APs, intially preventing reaction fire but then taking them away from the next turn too.

The game is only balanced for normal difficulty right now, so trying Insane is a bit pointless at the moment.

OK so this has been authorised on one branch but it still waiting authorisation on the other, and the full non-Desura downloads have not yet been updated. Hopefully it'll be available for everyone on Desura shortly. Yes, we've decided we need to implement suppression. I've always found it vaugely annoying that burst fire was overpowered and was always mathematically the best thing to do in any situation, assuming your gun could do it. This way we can add minor suppression for normal gunfire but add significant suppression for burst fire and reduce the accuracy by a lot. That should make things more tactical. The nerve gas grenades will be something we'll test, they may not make it into the final game. Basically the new smoke mechanics allow you to set damage for smoke types when you enter the tile containing it, and start a turn in a tile containing it (like fire). So we can just set the smoke to do chemical damage, and for stun grenades we'll set it to do stun damage. We'll also give normal smoke a small amount of stun damage too.

I've sent another email to the AI coder trying to chase up a fix for this, but I'm still not sure when it'll arrive unfortunately.

Build V9.4 has now been released through the Desura client (though I don't think it is yet active for those doing the standalone download). Barring a couple of small new features and some bugfixes, this is basically the build that will be released to the general public along with the Kickstarter build (we'll also add new art as and when it becomes available). Please test it as much as you can. If there's any major bugs in the build, we need to squish them before public release for obvious reasons. The key new features are as follows: - We've added a new launcher window to the game. This is a bit ugly, but in terms of functionality it is a big improvement. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, the game will remember your screen resolution from game to game, so starting up is less of a pain in the ass (resolution can be set in the Options screen). Secondly, we've added the Quick Battle function, which will load up a Terror Site immediately after you place your base. This is basically for people who want to try the combat but don't want to go through the early game to get there, but hopefully you guys will enjoy it too. This feature will not be in the final version of the game. - A new alien type has been added to the build, a light combat drone that appears on the Terror Site. The animations are not yet all there for it (nor are the SFX) but they will be before the game comes out. In terms of role I think these drones will come into their own a lot more once we implement supression, plus the AI to go with them. They're intended to harass the player at long range with inaccurate long-range rapid fire weapons, but without suppression they don't really have their own niche yet. Still, I like them. They're kinda cute in their own way. We're working on a nice death animation for them too, which should arrive this week. - The Xenopedia has several new research images in it, and should display better than before. The only major issue with it is that the text is still being cut off prematurely. I need to look into that in a bit more detail, as it's a problem with the game engine rather than anything that our programmers can do anything about. - I've spent a little time on the Title Screen, scaling up the text and formatting it better to make it easier to read. There's still a problem with the text scaling here though so on a large monitor it'll still be largely unreadable (though better than before). - I've added some new maps to the game, and I'll try to expand them a bit so there's more variation. The Light Scout maps are smaller than before now, though the Scout maps are the same size. Should be better than before though. Obviously you can check out the (still WIP) Town tileset too by clicking on the Quick Battle. There's some new props floating around on the Industrial maps though, and I've designed them to have fewer buildings than before. - The MiG construction images should be working well now. There's three images that show the progress of the construction. - There's a new grenade explosion, so now it's a bit smaller than the massive explosion we use for the rockets and explosive scenery. There's also a new plasma-type explosion for the alien grenades, but they aren't throwing them yet so you're unlikely to see it. - We've put various bugfixes in place. These include fixes for building the MiG causing your engineers to disappear, or your money to vanish. Also, UFOs should display their size correctly now. Previously they were always displaying as Medium irrespective of their actual size. - There's also been a pretty major fix to the accuracy formulas. Previously shots were missing targets, but not scattering properly and so not deviating from their original shot path. This led to shots "missing" but frequent still striking their intended targets, effectively making weapons much more accurate than intended. The AI bug has not been fixed yet unfortunately, so I imagine you'll still encounter hangs in the ground combat. We'll release a hotfix for that when it arrives and we'll also fix any major issues you guys encounter in the testing pronto. We want to be sending this build out soon, so hopefully you'll see a flurry of activity from us over the next few days. The features we want to add to this build before it is complete are: 1) Adding Smoke and Nerve Gas grenades 2) Updated smoke / fire for the existing Frag grenade to couple with the new explosion animation. These will no longer generate fire, and the smoke will be thinner than the real thick stuff you get in the larger explosion. 3) There's a problem with the multi-tile rendering so multi-tile objects appear on the wrong layer and sometimes below things they should be (you can occasionally see this with the Chinook walls). 4) Extra art: - Light drone injury and death animations - Updated tiles (painted over versions) for the Town tileset and the new Industrial props, as many of the tiles are still currently 3D guides. 5) We'll add some civilians for the terror map. They're currently there, but don't have sprites so are invisible. 6) If possible, auto-toggle roof off toggle when a unit is behind a building I'm pretty tired now so I'm heading to bed, but give it a try and let us know what you think.

I don't think height levels have been implemented yet, though they're on the to-do list.

The local forces have trouble shooting down the UFOs, not blowing up crashed ones with artillery or whatever. Having to investigate every crash site would be a massive time drain on the player and there's no penalty for not doing so.

Thanks for the screenshots. My monitor doesn't go that big so it's useful to have the comparisons. It's a little strange that some of the text / elements are scaling correctly and some are not, so I'll have to chat to the Geoscape programmer about that. The text should scale up with the resolution increasing in the final. All the UI in the game is still WIP and will have an overhaul before the game comes out so this is likely to be sorted then. It's also likely we'll switch to black text on a light background for most screens, but I'm afraid the SMALL CAPS will remain for the majority of screens. It's part of the game's signature look, although we'll do some work on breaking up big paragraphs so they're easier to read and the Xenopedia obviously doesn't use it.

Yeah translations should be due after the game is released (or at least in beta), and German is one of the languages I'm keen to do it for.

I've updated the tooltip for this in the upcoming build to hopefully clarify its role. However, I still don't think it works fully as intended yet.

Anything recovered from the battlefield that winds up in your stores should end up being used in construction, but right now only money is used for the manufacturing. That'll change before beta though. Yup, there is a research tree.

Fair enough. Providing a PDF copy with the physical copy wouldn't be an issue.

Heh these are a couple of the soldier medal images. The art for them are all done but the code's not done yet (and is quite a low priority at the mo) so I figured I'd use them somehow. The build won't be coming tonight (thankyou Diablo 3 beta!) but I'll release it tomorrow. Major improvements are an updated launcher that remembers resolution settings and has a Quick Battle function that launches a terror site directly, new maps, updated Xenopedia stuff and some other bugfixes. I'm also working on the maps still so we'll have a bit more variety for you guys there. Unfortunately, as I say, no AI bug fix.

Just to tease everyone, there may be an update released today. Sadly the AI bug isn't fixed yet but a bunch of other ones are.

There should be about 80 research projects in the final game I think. There will be a lot more maps too but I'll probably have to hire a level designer once we've got the basic tiles set up because it's just very time consuming to build them.

Both Casino Royale and GoldenEye are worth watching too. The proposed Quantum of Solace theme tune was also fantastic. I'm always astonished they didn't go with it: [video=youtube;h6CoNUE5Zho]

The current system works by the AI having a ticker, which can only tick up. New mission types (research, terror attack, etc) become available as the ticker reaches certain points. Each mission is performed by a certain UFO within a designated ticker range - so from 0-200 it might be performed by a Scout, but from 200-500 it might be performed by a Corvette and so on. With a bit of balancing (which we'll do most extensively in beta) this should provide the right level of challenge for the player, but not have any small and pointless UFOs flying around.

Unfortunately that cuts both ways - to pick an example from Page 1 of this thread, you could get a "Strange Guy Close Assault Shotgun" which sounds more likely to end in a restraining order than anything else.

Why would you want the PDF artbook if you have a printed copy as well? I'm sure it can be arranged but it just seems a bit redundant. I don't think having a "Premium" mod would be a good way of delivering premium content even if we wanted to do it, either. It kinda would seem quite bolted-on then. But we don't want to do it anyway, I don't really agree with the principle of it. And yeah, there's always a danger that if we give higher-tier donators a direct line to me Gazz could buy it and I'd drown in a sea of text (although I think several of your ideas have already made it into the game)

I exactly wouldn't be unhappy if the most individual people gave was $500 for a game that can be pre-ordered for $20

I'm surprised you haven't got the spam award given I don't think anyone has got to 1,000 posts so quickly before. I assume Sathra still has it though...

Well, I guess the same risk is there as with any pre-order. I might get $500,000 in and then decide the best course of action is for Goldhawk to release a semi-finished Xenonauts immediately and drive off into the distance in my new Ferrari. Hosser, I read the word "chips" there as "chimps", which left me a trifle confused for a few seconds.

Just having no prereqs will not make something appear unless it is in _basebuilt. The Jackal / Precision rifle can be taken out of the starting gear by setting it not to be unlimited in items.xml.

Yup, thanks. A lot of these are interface nits we'll have to sort out after the Kickstarter and finish the Geoscape coding, when we bring in the new UI. They're good suggestions but fixing them up now is a bit of a waste of effort given we'll be hacking a lot of the code out again. I particularly like the base information suggestion though, that's a good one I'd not thought of before.

Yeah this all needs some balancing still. The problem is that we can't currently set how many UFOs spawn in each wave and how fast that increases, which is functionality we'll add with time. We'll make the starting waves bigger (maybe 4 UFOs worldwide in each wave) so you'll aways get one near your base, but have the numbers increase much more slowly than at the moment.