Chris

I bought that book last time I was in Waterstones because of the excellent cost:page number ratio it provides. Been about ten years since I read it, but I'll pick it up again at some point in the future.

Stik10 - nice work with the site. Hopefully there'll be a translation into plenty of languages around release, including Portuguese. I can't commit firmly to that yet though.

I'm glad someone enjoyed them But seriously, I'm glad it didn't degenerate into everyone getting very upset with each other.

Violent crime and abuse in real life and violent crime and abuse in an anonymised online environment when you can just turn off your PC and walk away if it all gets a bit too unpleasant are not the same thing. The 'anonymised' element is mentioned (an important) in case anyone wants to bring up cyber-bullying, which is generally an extension of real-world interactions between people know know each other in real life. Also, I wouldn't consider the Wikipedia entry on 'griefing' a reliable source of pschological data, as I can pretty much guarantee the vast majority of the people editing and contributing to it will be gamers rather than psychologists. Assuming someone is a sociopath because they were a bastard to you in an online game is not the same as that person being diagnosed by a qualified medical practicioner as a sociopath. There's a reason why you have to do exams and all that to diagnose people with mental illnesses.

No, training will be in the next release. We implemented it a couple of days ago but it's not made its way to the public versions yet.

In retrospect a 3D Geoscape might have been a good idea but it'd be a royal pain in the ass to code it all again (lots of stuff relies on 2D map co-ordinates), so we won't. That's it in a nutshell I'm afraid.

Maybe you'll have to reinstall the client. Thankfully as you mentioned you can just run the game from the directory, but it is a pain. Working fine for me tho.

Putting all the maps, aliens and UFOs in the game and adding the rest of the research tree accounts for a lot of it, but I'm working on a milestone list that I might post up on the wiki in the future. There's quite a lot left to be done, AI being another major thing that springs to mind.

Yup, but not for this game. I agree F2P multiplayer can be rather interesting if done well though.

Not sure buildings actually are moddable. I'll ask the coder when I see him.

Kickstarter fund will likely be coming with this update. This will just make the game look a lot prettier and thus make people more interested, I think

Yeah only the main ship ever gets shot down and causes a crash site. The other ship will just explode. This won't happen yet but it will in the next build.

Yeah, scouts spawn in pairs now after the first week or so. This is not a bug

Handily for you, standalone installer should be released either today or tomorrow.

You'll have to rely on other opinions as I'm biased, but it is playable. The next update coming in a few weeks should make it a lot more fun though - we're adding a second alien race, a second tileset and a significant graphical update.

The population line is probably not going to be in the final game, I'm afraid (sorry for wasting your research). There's too much information there if it is, and the screen ends up too cluttered.

Ugh, all the crouch animations seem glitched. How did that happen?

Yup, you can. You can also hide behind the hedge and fence although they offer a much lower level of protection (the hedge in particular does largely obscure anything hiding behind it and makes it harder to hit). There should also be things like haystacks and possibly feed troughs etc lying around to offer more cover in the middle of a field, which is what I was referring to before. IceVamp - yes, it is possible. It's not our highest priority but there's no reason why we can't do it and I think it'd be cool to have a couple of maps like that in the final game.

Welcome, Edraii. Basically there's no cover in that screenshot because the props for that map haven't been done. Expect there to be more random bits of cover dotted about in the fields, and some of the fields to have tractor garages etc on them. As well as there being the odd barn etc. We're also getting larger 20x20 ground tiles done for the UFO crash site and dropship landing sites, which can have more buildings or cover around them. For the Industrial tileset the Chinook will probably be landing in a car park, and on the Farmyard one it'll be landing on a concrete loading bay or a stone courtyard. There should be 2-3 variations of each to keep it interesting.

I'll look into the double-spawning. That might be a side effect of the fighter fix. Hmmm. Moonshine, the new screenshot is of V9 rather than V8.61 (hence why it is a preview). But yes, this is an example of the new 10x10 ground tiles at work. The improvements we hope to have in V9 are: - Improved ground tiles (these still need slightly better blending and more variation) - Proper walls / hedges / buildings (they're currently unpainted 3D models in that screenshot) - Farmer civilians rather than office workers - Unit shadows - Sebillians as well as Caesans EDIT - also possibly the new GUI but I'm unsure as yet.

Multiple burst fire types is not possible at the moment. It's something we could add, but there's more important things for us to do right now IceVamp - we've changed the way that the images work over the past few months. Right now the game just takes on master image (for the lasers its laser_e.png but you can check what it is by loading laser_spectre.xml or the equivalent for whatever projectile) and then rotates that to face whatever angle the bullet needs to travel at. Thus you'll just need to stretch laser_e.png and update the laser_e spectre width (w=) and height (h=) values to reflect the changes you've made. If you don't update the width/height values then only part of the new image will appear. Anyway, if you do give it a play, again it'd be helpful if you could write up your experiences somewhere on the wiki. I've no doubt someone will want to something similar in the future.

The problem I have with the 4 soldier limit is really that it means there'll be a lot less deaths. It has to. If you lose even two soldiers on a mission, you lose 50% of all of the experience your soldiers in the game have gathered up to then. If you think to X-Com where you'd have an elite team of about 12 guys and losing a couple of them hurt on a mission? Losing even one soldier with a 4-player cap is like losing 3 of them, which is a big blow to your team. Lose two, and you've lost the equivalent of six guys. Because of that, I don't think the insta-death mechanics that X-Com had will make it in. It'll have to be more forgiving than that because the stakes are that much higher - or the game will be incredibly frustrating to play and will really encourage save / loading. But to me that waters the game down a lot, as X-Com was relatively unique as you knew that at any moment ANY of your soldiers could go from full health to a smouldering corpse. Knowing they could definitely take even two shots would make the battle SO much less tense. Also, on squad size upgrades, I wouldn't imagine the squad will scale up from 4 beyond 6 or possibly 8 (my money is on six). I think it'd be difficult to design a control system that works well when you have a squad size that more than doubles. That's just my opinion though, may well be wrong.

Build V8.61 has been released on Desura. This is only a quick hotfix to sort out a couple of pervasive stability issues: - You should now be able to complete ground combat missions on 1280x1024 screen resolution. This was an issue with text sizes that prevented the mission completion screen from loading. - UFO fighters should no longer cause crashes when shot down. Unfortunately this will only affect new games - it was an issue with alien UFO squadron generation where one of the fighters was invisible in game terms and there being problems when half a squadron was shot down. - Sprites: We've corrected the Flare-equipped sprites for all armour types, the Injury animation for all armours, and the Machinegun-equipped Basic Armour soldiers should no longer appear in Wolf armour. - Hidden Movement screen should be back in. That is all. As mentioned elsewhere in the forums, we're working on a major update at the moment. Here is a sneak peek of it (much left to do on it still): http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/farm.jpg

The Fyraxian alien suggestion made me laugh. I've been considering adding a new alien race for a while, but we'll see if I have time or can find an appropriate niche for them. Maybe they'd have unlimited ammo or something.

The air combat isn't turn based so the aircraft heading dot just shows destination rather than speed. At the moment there's no speed setting for aircraft beyond Afterburners on / off. Possibly we should add that, but I'm struggling for GUI space.