Chris

Heh that was perfectly understandable. I'm glad you like the game

Yeah sorry this'll be fixed on Monday. The right aliens aren't spawning at the moment to get you Plasma Pistols, which you need to set off the weapons / armour part of the research tree.

Heh. That's certainly an interesting spin on things. When the other alien races turn up and you play on other tilesets I'm sure the feeling will go away. But changing the basic suit colour would be a lot of effort I'm afraid and we've got better things to spend time on, like the AI or the UI etc.

I don't really see that being viable. There's too many different permutations of wepaonry, particularly towards the end of the game, that I think the best we can have is the average figure shown above.

Continuing with the theme of GUI revisions (see the new Intercept window here), I've been working on the proposed new design for the Research screen. If you've not been around on the forums long, we're thinking about moving to a more immersive UI design for most of the screens similar to what is seen on the Main Menu screen. This has two benefits - it looks better, and we can use 'tabs' on the speech bubbles to fit more in the UI than we can under the current system. Up til now it's been difficult to illustrate exactly how I want it to look as I've just been using words. Now we've got one of the backgrounds done, I can show off a proper concept of how the screens could look. Here's the proposed new Reseach system. It should all be fairly self explanatory. The navigation is the sign in the top left (each board will light up when mouseovered) and you just click on the speech bubble tabs to travel to them. The clipboard will always show three current research projects, but if you have more of them then you can show them by moving your mouse to the bottom of the screen to look down the clipboard. Let me know your thoughts, suggestions and feedback. Concepts below: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/research_intro.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/research_manage.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/research_hire.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/research_advice.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/research_talk.jpg

It's not planned, no. But I hear Laser Squad had it as a feature and it worked rather well. I don't quite see how it would be implemented though - how it would be better than firing a burst directly at the target?

That's looking very nice now. Should be a handy tool once it can edit files - I imagine I'll probably use it at my end too.

As part of the milestone list I'm working on, most of the UI screens are getting a revamp. Often this is just visual or small tweaks, but on the Geoscape there are two windows that have come in for quite a lot of stick because they don't present enough information. I'm redesigning them now with the hope I can get them in V9. The first is the Intercept window, the second is the Launch Interceptors window. Here's the proposed new Intercept window, launched when one of your squadrons closes to intercept range with a UFO squadron: Essentially this just provides more information visually for the UFOs, and gives you more information on whether your ships are up to combat. The combat fuel level being in seconds should be useful, and hopefully we'll mirror this on the air combat UI when we update it. Comments welcome. I'll get the Launch Interceptors screen re-concepted up soon too. EDIT - here's a new version that uses the actual art for the UFOs rather than the top-down art. Anyone have any comments on this? (the top-down art isn't detailed enough on some of the UFOs to be used in this window without the red tint). Better or worse than the previous ones?

The alien ships are unlocked when their ticker reaches a certain score, which is gained by their ships completing missions etc and possibly just over time. If you do a good job, you'll keep their ticker relatively low. If you do a bad job the invasion will start to cascade out of contol and overwhelm you quickly. There's no 'rubber-banding' to artificially speed up the invasion if you're doing well. The only thing stopping you from totally dominating the aliens if you're a really good player is that you're reliant on the new UFOs spawning toget your hands on new tech, so you'll never have end game tech much before the final UFOs start appearing. You just want to make sure you have enough time to research everything and build enough bases to keep ahead of the curve.

I don't think we'll have time to implement this. I understand the reasons why, but it's a very minor request and we've got a lot to do if we want to beat Firaxis to market..

Strange. I just did an air combat in V8.62 and shot one down where I finished it off with guns over land and it seemed to spawn a crash site fine.

In the new build all the troops are Androns so plasma pistols are not spawning properly, and therefore the techtree won't be completable. The upcoming hotfix should sort it out.

Because the training system was originally going to be a much more extensive system, but now it's been streamlined and doesn't require building for it any more. So we removed it.

Yeah I expect it Monday. The ground combat coder doesn't work Sundays, and appeared not to notice my emails on Saturday.

Yeah now if you do more than 15% of their total HP in damage below 0 health, they just explode and don't leave a crash site. If this number is too low, we can tweak it.

I did contact him about us. He ignored me. C'est la vie.

Glad you like it. Some big updates on the way to keep you interested, so sit tight.

As AD pointed out, you only need 5 confirmed kills to be a fighter 'ace' and the US customarily awards Silver Stars or higher to people who become aces. Plus, killing aliens is considerably harder than killing people.

Bleh I forgot to add the updated night combat music (it now has its own). I'll do that in the bugfix update.

And there's a bug we need to fix up - if any civilians are killed on the ground combat, the game crashes at mission end. We're looking at that at the moment, but please be aware of it.

It's now been authorised.

I need to find someone to do a bit of Maya rigging for us, on some of our civilians. It really shouldn't be very much effort (pretty much copy-pasting some existing rigs onto very similar models) but I've no idea how to do it myself. I just thought I'd ask the community before I post it up on some commercial boards. If you're interested, please drop me a PM.

The system doesn't shift anything around. It allows you to use a grenade from anywhere in your inventory for +12AP if you have a weapon in both hands. If you don't have a weapon in your hand, it is free. Your system would allow you to carry a gun and a grenade, but would effectively make the gun useless while you held a grenade. So you're basically just holding a grenade. Once you've thrown it, you're holding a rifle again. Exactly like our propsed new system....except how are people meant to know intuitively that having a rifle in one hand and a grenade in the other gives you an accuracy penalty? Is there one in the original X-Com? If there is, I'm not aware of it because it's never been communicated to me. Also, the original X-Com never really had to deal with single-handed weapons. Or, rather, it dealt with them by making them totally useless. That's not really an option for us.

The only instance I can see us using it is if the player was attacking very large UFOs - you clear the crash site, then you clear the interior. The gain for us would be we'd only have to show the entrance to the UFO rather than the entire thing, which would save the art budget. It's up in the air, though. I really don't know whether we'll do this or not yet.

You don't, that's the entire point. It's a button on the GUI that lets you select any grenade in the soldier's inventory without actually opening the inventory, and then throw it. All without opening the inventory or moving anything to or from his hands. I honestly don't see how anything could be less complex than that.