Chris

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.

Build V8.62 is now available. This contains the Training System plus a bunch of bugfixes. Training System: This allows you to train new recruits. It takes 10 days during which they were unavailable for missions, costs $10,000 per recruit and at the end they should be promoted to Corporal and get +2 to all their stats. This also means that soldier promoted to Corporal through battlefield experience should also get +2 to all stats on promotion. Obviously you can't test this with your starting troops so you'll need to hire additional ones if you want to try it. BUGFIXES: Geoscape: - The game no longer crashes in the month of July. - Random crash fixed when buying interceptors. - Crash fixed after recruiting new soldiers to a secondary base. - Intercepting a UFO with your Chinook will no longer start a ground comba. - Random crash fixed when trying to intercept a Crash Site with your Chinook. - Maintenance cost for vehicles/soldiers/scientists are now displayed properly. - You can now reassign vehicles to a Chinook correctly. - When re-detecting an UFO will play the proper sound for the Pop-up window. - UFOs shot down over water will now correctly increase the funding score for the closest funding region. - Tooltips on the soldier equip screen are now updating properly. - UFO interception should be more successful on the highest time setting (there was a previously unknown bug associated with this) - The night overlay no longer migrates upwards with time, slowly obscuring the entire world in darkness. Ground Combat: - Finishing a mission shoud no longer cause a crash. - After loading a Ground Combat save game, the soldier information (name etc) is now displayed properly. - Destroyed Hunters no longer reappear back at base, safe and well. - Alien corpses are now displayed properly on the battlefield after loading a Ground Combat save. - Fixed crash after loading a Ground Combat save and then completing the mission. - Weapons can no longer be reloaded if they already have full ammo. - Selection arrow is now displayed at the edges of the map. Air Combat: - Random crash on completion of an air combat mission has been fixed. Menus: - Pressing Q on the Main Menu no longer opens the Launch Interceptors window. - Exiting to the Main Menu should now show the background image correctly.

Yup - we're using Mantis, which is similarly free and good

It turns out there was a bug in intercepting UFOs at maximum time speed that made it much harder to catch them than it should have been. This'll be fixed (among other things) in a patch tonight / tomorrow. Hopefully this will ease this issue somewhat too.

The idea is that you slowly gain power relative to the aliens, but then the tech tree ends when you unlock the final mission and the aliens carry on gaining power so you have to act quickly or lose your edge. The final UFO type is more powerful than anything you have, and it spawns in ever increasing numbers. If you wait too long to gather your forces for the final attack, you'll be overwhelmed. EDIT - by 'more powerful than anything you have', I don't mean invincible - I just mean it's substantially tougher than anything you have in a straight-up fight. You should have the numbers to deal with them when they first start appearing but then they just keep coming in larger and larger numbers.

Or you need to learn to drink faster

Should be a major stability hotfix coming out tonight or tomorrow too.

I've had a look at the entire thread, and a few ideas struck me as rather good: - The grenade throw button will now just have a single grenade/flare shown, with right-click opening up a pop-up menu of all available grenades in the soldier inventory. Clicking on it will activate the fire mode with the standard throw cost +12AP if the unit does not have a free hand. - The crouch toggle will fill the spot where the second grenade was. - I like the idea that instead of having buttons for burst and single fire mode of the weapon, there'll be just one and clicking on it will cycle between the two. Saves space in the weapon panel. - The camera level controls are done best in Silent Storm (see here) - it's the column on the right of the GUI with the arrows at the top and bottom. That looks pretty intuitive to me. - The portraits don't look good up all the time. Someone did a UI earlier in the thread where just the bars where shown, plus the soldier number. We'd have the move the soldier number to the left of the bars so it doesn't cover them, but that's all we'd need to show all the time. If you mouseover a soldier's area, their portrait should pop up at that point. If the soldier is killed, his little section should slide down and disappear. - Maybe Crouch and Inventory buttons could replace the soldier stats below their large stat bars and to the right of their portraits? Thanks for the input so far guys, keep it coming.

Well, you don't need a free hand to pick anything up off the ground etc in the current system. You can go straight from ground >> backpack without altering what is in your hand at all, so I don't see the issue there. If we put in the new quickthrow grenade slot, which I'm thinking will let you select any grenade / flare etc in your inventory and throw it (without opening your inventory) at throw cost + 12AP (or something) if you have both hands full, that should get around the crippling problem at the moment. The 12AP cost would not be paid if you have a free hand. The two-hand thing is mostly about making 1-handed weapons useful, and making the system intuitive. How will a complete newbie know that equipping a rifle in each hand is a really silly thing to do? They won't know whether the accuracy is naturally low or not. And even if you got around that problem, then I don't really see the benefit of having a weapon in your hand that is basically useless - unless you want to throw a grenade, which you can do using the above method. So I kinda get where you're coming from but I think the new grenade button will ease a lot of the problems.

Yeah we'll evaluate this in more detail once the AI model is in. I'm ambivalent about you being able to conclude terror sites and base defence missions without killing all the aliens (isn't that the point?) and the kamikaze trigger does seem a bit like cheating. Though, to be honest, I doubt many aliens would have defensive-style AI scripts on missions like that, so hopefully it won't come up. We'll have to see.

I should probably write something up on the wiki. Right now it's not of much use because there's only a single alien race and a single tileset in the game. It'll be much more useful in the beta. In short, though, you just open it up in Wordpad and change the values according to what you want.

Yeah, maybe in beta. Right now if you're worried about that happening, just shoot it down when you first intercept it

Hmmm. The problem I had with blaster launchers was the same as I do with indirect fire weapons. It takes away the fear of having to get up close to the aliens and putting your men at risk, which I think is a problem. The issue is it's impossible to water it down without it becoming just a plain old rocketlauncher with a big bomb in it, which you get by the end of Xenonauts anyway. So that's why I left them out. The psi was slightly tougher, and it could be made less unbalanced with the LOS requirements. But to me Xenonauts is meant to be a desperate fight against time to complete the final mission before you get overwhelmed, which is how the AI escalation has been designed. There's never a point where the aliens fear you, instead there's just a brief moment of opportunity where you can strike at their heart before the war is lost forever. I figured that was more dramatic.

Perhaps in beta. The game already highlights units (but not scenery) that are blocking or affecting line of fire when aiming at a target.

The placement won't be random in the next air combat update, it'll be dependent on the relative positions of the craft and their headings on the Geoscape. Which should add some more tactics to it...

There won't be any penalty for not attacking a crash site. If you don't want to do a ground combat mission, don't do it. @Gauddlike: more advanced UFOs replace early game ones at the moment. That could easily be assumed because the local forces are taking on the earlier UFOs, but its not shown graphically. I'm unsure as to whether we should do that or not.

The base personnel in the Xenonauts base hide in a bunker under the command room (except the soldiers obviously).

This is a good suggestion and one I'm looking at at the moment.

I think the actual reason they are so high is because they were originally meant to be % values, but they were implemented as raw values instead. Given a soldier has 50-60 APs rather than 100 that makes the values quite high. They've gradually drifted downwards with time but arguably they've not yet fallen into line.

The problem here is that EU did its gradients in quite a strange way (we were looking at them recently). In Xenonauts we just overlay a black tile with varying levels of opacity on each square, which gives the night / FOW effect. This is what most games do, because its easy. UFO:EU actually seems to have different numbers of pixels display their colours (as opposed to being black) depending on how far from the soldier they are. So the fading of the tiles is not uniform as it is on Xenonauts, but sorta random. It looks much better for it though. Perhaps we could mimic it by having an overlay for each 'fade level' where each pixel is either transparent or blacked out...

I don't think it'd really fit the style of the game, but more practically it'd involve a lot of new artwork and sprites so unfortunately I don't see us adding this.

This is unlikely really, as I think it might make the game a little complex for minimal gain. It'd be annoying more than interesting, I think.

I'm surprised nobody has noticed the fact that some of the Geoscape Events generated are in fact abductions and crop circles...