Chris

Likely the reason that nobody copied X-Com is it takes a ludicrous amount of effort to produce a game like it. The complexity is a million times deeper than I thought it would be when I started development. Whereas, say, the Frozen Synapse guys can sell their game for the same price and it consists of one main combat screen and one tileset. Commercially, they made a much better decision than we did.

Moonie is only a standard pre-orderer. He won't be entitled to the vast wealth of wallpapers that the lucky Premium pre-orderers will be able to coat their computer desktop in! Poor Moonie.

X-Com's a particularly interesting example of the whole remake thing simply because the first game was such a massive hit, and then nobody ever really seemed to capitalise on it. TFTD was literally just a reskin, and Apocalypse was a sort of half-way house with a graphics style not done by the development studio, which makes it relatively easy for "true" fans to dismiss because it really doesn't bear much resemblence to the original X-Com game. Usually when a game comes out and is successful, loads of very similar games come out - like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were followed by tons of fairly generic rip-offs. Innovation happened once people had had their fill of that type of gameplay, and the genre evolved with time (in the FPS world, I guess you can look at regenerating health and only be able to carry two weapons now). That never really happened with X-Com in the years after it came out, so I think people were left wanting more. Then when the generic clones did start appearing, it was so long after the original game that you pretty much had to have innovations in order to not look deliberately retro (3D graphics, real-time combat etc), so there's this big unsated desire people have for X-Com like games where there hasn't really been much innovation. They never had so many X-Com clones after X-Com that they were able to get bored of the mechanics, like happened in other genres. We're trying to fill that niche by doing the innovation invisibly and keeping all the fundamentals in place. That's my theory, anyway.

Light Scout maps (the first UFO) have been intentionally scaled down to make them about 1/3 smaller than the Scout maps. Given they only have a couple of aliens in them, it's designed to make them less frustrating and generally make the missions quicker and easier. The maps will get larger as the UFOs get bigger. Incidentally, how do you find the size of the terror site?

Kickstartarrrr? Yes, I might just close the Goldhawk blog altogether, I think. It's a bit redundant right now.

Winterwolves, you'll have to wait till the next release for you to get the new animations

I've added the laser precision images for the Jackal now, they should be in the next build. We've not got the alien plasma pistol / rifle sprites rendered unfortunately, so we'll have to go without them for a while yet.

Hmm. That one is because the sign wall tiles are taller than normal tile height. Hmm. Let me think about that one.

Well, you already can. You just click on the grenade picture and then pick which tile to throw at. It's just right now the green square isn't shown if you go off the revealed tiles, and you're also able to throw grenades at walls (which sit in-between tiles).

The plasma cell is set correctly now - if it wasn't, you couldn't open the inventory without a crash. The actual problem is because the /units/ folders contain folders like weapons.AlienPlasmaRifle which contain spectre files but no images, so the game crashes when trying to read them. If you delete those this is fine (and the game just displays an unarmed soldier when you have an alien weapon equipped).

I think it'd be a lot of effort so it's something we might consider after release maybe, but not before

Yes, please post up the spelling errors in this thread. I guess I probably should update to torpedoes now, thinking about it. That is the more commonly accepted spelling now you mention it. It doesn't take long to update the Xenopedia text so I'm happy to do so. Gorlom, I've never seen spell it "Brittish", so you should probably avoid doing that.

Yes. But we're only implementing the new UI once the rest of the game mechanics have been implemented so it's the last thing planned for development pre-beta.

The tiles just weren't set correctly. I've updated them now, thanks.

Hmmm, it's not a bug, but it could be improved. For throwing grenades I think we probably need the green tile. The reason it was disabled was simply because you could use it to "scout" the map as it displays under the terrain items when you move it about. We could implement it differently for grenades though, because grenades should only be able to land on full tiles anyway - it doesn't really make sense to throw them at walls etc. This is a bug, but a minor one.

Yes, you need to press Toggle Roof in this occasion. You likely can't see the alien because it's behind the walls of the building. This should work automatically in the future but that feature is not in place yet.

Yeah, I need to add this. Will try to do so today.

We can't really do that, I'm afraid. The Quick Battle is a bit of a hack so we can't really add too many features to it. It's just to let people get a taster anyway, the research etc is all for the full game mode.

I assume you'd use "bulletType=heavy" to make a weapon heavy, if it's implemented.

It should kick off in about a week and a half. Hopefully we'll send out press builds this weekend and the Kickstarter will follow that Thursday / Friday.

What resolution?

Yeah, it seems to be that if you try to throw a second grenade from the quick slot in the same turn then it won't work. Hmm. One for Matthew to log. Smoke now causes stun damage. If the sebillian turns blue it means it has been stunned (it's a debug feature, won't be in the final). Amiga, the updated grenade smoke will be arriving next build. It's intended that grenades have a visually smaller and different blast than rockets.

Mis-set tiles again. I've updated both, thanks.

Wahngrok - please report that as a bug in the Bug Reporting forums. We have a dedicated tester to test and verify bugs but he only checks that subforum.

Hopefully the AI bug will be fixed in the next 24 hours. That's the major show stopper still remaining. I'm updating a bunch of the missing animations at the moment too.