Chris

Yeah, the reason there's only one type of assault rifle is that I don't think there'd be enough in-game difference between an M16 and an AK-47 to warrant including both. Their stats would be too similar to be worth the added micromanagement, in my view. So for the sake of accessability, I won't include any additional weapons in vanilla Xenonauts. EDIT - Also, you're aware there is already a pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, machinegun and rocket launcher in the game already? Just to check - your post kinda implies you only think the M16 is available to soldiers. However, I know lots of people are interested in this sorta thing and we've made it EXTREMELY easy to mod in new weapons to Xenonauts. To the point we're deliberately trying to have a few spare weapon tiles for people who want to add more weapons. Like, for instance... (That's basically an example piece we've done for a Kickstarter video, specifically for the Soviet Weapon pack)

Mmmm, we might be adding some friendly AI geoscape forces to act as speed bumps to slow down the aliens for the first couple of months until the player can expand. Until we decide whether or not to roll with that system I'm loathe to try and balance the interceptors too much.

The safe zone is only for alien spawn. There's no restrictions on their movement once the battle starts.

Yup, the new GUI should deal with the selection issues and the persistence of the Reserve setting. Which reminds me, I need to chase up the coder and see how far he has got in terms of implementing it...

Yeah, basically what Amiga said: 1) You secure a UFO by killing all the aliens in both parts of it, and keeping the soldiers there for 5 turns. That gives you a mission victory. 2) You can't build plasma rifles, but if you research the plasma weapons and the rest of the tech tree you can build and manufacture laser weapons for your troops in V9. 3) Laser weapons and Wolf body armour are at the end of the V9 tech tree.

On night missions we'll probably have it lit up. In the normal missions, I'm not sure. It might well be something we do, but mostly because it stops there being any issues with the different tiles in the Chinook not being lit up properly because soldiers can't "see" them (due to quirks in the LOS systems).

I'm not sure actually making Xenonauts multiplayer in combat terms would be as difficult as I once thought. I doubt we'd have very advanced matchmaking - it might have to be properly old-school play by email style multiplayer, but it's possible that we might be able to add multiplayer ground combat missions where one side controls the aliens. And if that's possible, it might be possible to set up a multiplayer campaign where one player has the full game but every time you launch a battle it is against your human opponent. It would take a long time to do, unless we can work out some kind of LAN / direct IP connection method of doing it, but it could be quite fun possibly. It's a random idea. It's something I'd think about adding to the upper end of the Kickstarter funding thermometer perhaps

Yeah, to buy new craft you need an empty hangar slot - you just click on the empty slot on the aircraft equip screen and it brings up a menu allowing you to buy the craft. You should be able to buy dropships now too in V9.

Glad you like it. Yup, both of those things are priorities for us.

The breakdown is that there's usually a pistol, carbine, rifle, sniper rifle and heavy weapon of some description in each tier (ballistics, lasers, two more secret tiers), plus a few more specialist weapons. Essentially you'll upgrade to the next tier as the game goes on to try and keep up with the increasingly tough alien units. But swopping a ballistic rifle for a laser rifle won't have THAT much effect on the role of the troops besides increased damage and the fact he's carrying a heavier gun with a smaller clip. So the weapon types should be relatively intuitive. There's 12 alien races in the game (including support vehicles), but five of the races have multiple variations so they can scale in difficulty as the game progresses. That's what brings it up to about 40. It should be enough to provide variation and a scalable challenge without being overwhelming. On the plus side, almost all that stuff is done now except the sprite rendering so it's not really consuming any of our resources any more!

If we get accepted onto Steam, then this will be possible. I can't see that there's any reason why we won't be, but it's not been confirmed yet so I can't guarantee it.

I'll add this to the future builds so it can be used as a base for other maps in the future.

Yeah, unfortunately we can't roll it back and the V8.9 download is gone now we've updated the manual download on Desura. Sorry.

Bleh, long posts. Lots of them. Here's my quick answers - if I missed any questions, it's because they were obscured by the enormous wall of text! 1) Story - basically, there's an alien fleet in orbit but the aliens are adapting their ships to atmospheric flight. It's quicker for the smaller ones. There's more to it than that but that's the basic logic behind the invasion escalation speed. 2) Yes, the starting missions are intended to be dangerous. In terms of the split between ground combat and the Geoscape, we don't have any hard and fast rules on that and we'll have to fine tune it in beta. But your concerns have been noted. 3) AI - we're getting a specialist AI programmer to do it. Plus each of the alien races has a unique ability or set of characteristics to keep things interesting. 4) Resarch and subgames - no, they're not being expanded. We're actually trying to make the game more accessible rather than adding more complication so having diferent types of scientist to me wouldn't add anything in gameplay terms, it'd just make things more daunting.

There's no way to do this at present unfortunately. Every single submap you see in the game, I manually added the ground by hand, tile by tile. Maybe we'll get a program to autopopulate the maps before release but right now we don't have the coder time spare. The tiles are named appopriately though, as "tilename_<column>_<row>.png" and you just need to paint them in appropriate order (open up one of the maps and check them out for a better illustration).

OK, apparently the game can support Cyrillic - strings.xml (which holds most of the game text) should support Unicode so you should be able to replace the English names in there with Cyrillic. Let me know if it doesn't work.

Yup, thanks for the comments. We're very much aware of both of those issues and we're trying to fix the AI as soon as possible.

Hmm. There should already be a reload sound. I'll look into it tomorrow.

Can you not just download the Desura client? That will download it in chunks. The manual download is there for emergencies really.

Animators take the rigged 3D models and create animations with them performing the required actions they can perform in-game, as you might expect. Exactly how they do it, I don't really know - I'm just interested in the results. If you're interested in 3D animation, I imagine Google would throw up a lot of useful info on the topic if you look through it. A lot of resources out there.

Adding outlines in Photoshop is as easy as adding a Stroke to it. You can automate it for a bunch of files using the Actions control panels and Droplets - that's what we use to process our renders automatically. It's pretty easy and very powerful once you figure it out.

Nice profile pic

Thought you could already do this? If not, then yes, it'll be in the next build. It works in the dev build.

Yeah V9 is up on the manual download branch now too. Sorry about the delay with that.

Hi, thanks for this and the website translation. I'll ask the coders if we can support cyrillic.