Chris

Hmmm. The idea is that if you attack a UFO and it escapes from the battle, it will escape into space and disappear (the idea is you don't get the points for shooting them down, but you've also successfully interrupted the alien mission). I've reproduced the bug where they're not disappearing from the Geoscape after retreating, which I've logged and we'll get fixed. The fuel thing doesn't appear to be a bug though, it seems to be working normally. If you're told a UFO needs to retreat it should just disenage automatically if you press 'Yes'. That needs more clarification perhaps. I might increase the fuel range for the F-17s as it's currently a bit annoying they have to keep disengaging from combat so frequently.

Yeah you're right. I'll have a look at this. We'll need to speed up or slow down the animation play speed it seems.

Yeah I noticed this myself. We'll get it fixed up.

Yeah, the resolution chooser box at the start of the game got cut out of the build. We've put it back in for the next version. Sorry.

Title screen isn't done. If we have the logo on it, it'll be on the screens behind the officers.

Valid points. Putting these on the 'to-do' list.

Alrighty we may release V8.1 earlier than Friday then and just make it hotfix release...I'll start processing the bug reports this evening.

There was an email with a Desura invite sent to the Paypal address you used to pre-order the game. If you can't find it, then email me evidence of your pre-order and I'll get you setup.

Ah yes, I am planning to ramp up the difficulty setting for V8.1. I'll use those values you've suggested for the weapons but I don't want to add more aliens yet...

Heh welcome. Yet another aussie / kiwi joins the ranks. I swear there must be nothing else to do over there but play X-Com.

Yeah it's fine by me as long as you don't pretend it's official!

Just spoken to Scott and got it authorised. You should be able to download it all now.

Yeah it's just gone 1am for me too. I'll call it a day here (the Desura guy doesn't seem to be at his computer) and see how long the standard authorisation process takes. If it's not done when I get up I'll send them an email to hurry it up. But it'll go live as soon as they press the 'Authorise' button.

Let me know if the craziness is still in V8 and I'll get it fixed if is. We've redone the LOS mechanics so they should be much more intuitive than before. Formerly you could see all kinds of walls you shouldn't be able to and sometimes you couldn't see things you should have...

This should be the place where you post missing sprites from the new build. You can tell a missing sprite if the normal animation changes to a Jackal (combat armour) wearing soldier with an assault rifle performing the action - this is the default sprite that is played if the one the game is looking for cannot be found. Known missing sprites: Unarmed soldiers - Basic and Jackal Shotgun-armed soldiers - Basic and Jackal, except for idle animations Stun baton soldiers - Basic and Jackal

ApathyTrigger - we're working on the UFO tiles now so hopefully it'll all be a bit more obvious in the near future! I understand it's probably a bit strange for newbies at the moment. But the 'UFO' is the yellow one.

It's at 80% now.

As V8 is meant to become the Press Build in time, we're going to iterate it several times to fix bugs and add polish. We'll add one or two more features, but the overall focus will be on improving the user experience. The timeframe for each new version is hopefully one per week - these tight deadlines are quite helpful to focus us on the task at hand. What to expect in V8.1: - Bugfixes - Research and manufacturing - Fixes for the missing sprites and some new sprites for the new researched weapons that will appear in V8.1 - Short range radar circle to be removed - Save / Load functionality for the ground combat What to expect in V8.x (ie, things we want done before the press build goes out) - Some UFO tiles - we're working on this now for the Scout. Hopefully it'll work. - A manual /guide of some description - A sub-map editor that runs independently of the game

So I finally got V8 out around the time of the (revised) deadline. It has now been authorised and is ready to download. So, first big news is this - V8.1 will be the one with the Research tree and manufacturing in. We'll be releasing that on Friday, assuming we can get the rendering done fast enough. There were a couple of bugs in the software and it was taking too long to render out all the weapon / armour combinations as we were adding new ones for both, so we delayed it. I figured you guys would rather be able to use the results of the research properly than just have an M16 than fired laser bolts... Other than that, V8 has come out alright. These are the main changes in it: Control improvements: (not an exhaustive list) 'Turn X' screen removed at the start of each turn, as lots of people thought it was a loading screen. Selecting a new troop while another one is in motion no longer cancels the movement of the first. This makes moving troops quicker. Double clicking the icon for a soldier should centre the camera on them, as should doublepressing their keyboard hoykey number. Fire mode for weapons now allows you to target specific parts of the battlefield. If you want to shoot at a wall, you can now shoot directly at it rather than just past it. This makes them easier to hit too, as the soldiers are trying to do so (previously they'd be trying to miss the target, if you see what I mean). Alien head icons for spotted aliens are displayed as normal if the selected soldier can see the alien in question. If they cannot, it it shown at reduced opacity. Soldiers can now vault over waist high walls at double movement cost for normal movement. In this map this is mostly the metal pipes. The line of sight mechanics have been completely rewritten and hopefully should behave much more predictably now. The old ones turned out to be surprisingly buggy. New Kneeling / Cover System: Previously kneeling into cover was done automatically, and did not cost AP. This was unwieldy when combined with soldiers vaulting waist high cover walls. Kneeling now costs 4AP and provides a reduced chance of being hit (60% as opposed to 100% for any shot passing through that tile) and also a shooting accuracy bonus. However, it should also increase the stopping value of all obstacles between the shooter and the target by 50% to compensate for his lower height. 'Leaning' has been entirely removed from the game. It was a pain in the ass. Cover now applies if you are standing in the tile, but is more effective if you are kneeling. Title Screen: There is now a title screen in the game when you first load it up. This has some nice art and music on it. The art is not finished, but is essentially what we want to go for with the 'new GUI style' some of you may have heard me refering to before. More details on that at a future date. The clipboard options allow you to Save the game, Load existing games or customise the options - sound volume, mouse sensitivity and key remapping. There are four difficulty settings that affect the speed of the alien invasion and the HP of the UFOs in battle. These settings have not been balanced yet and will also affect the alien unit stats and weapon damage in the final game. Save / Load: You can now save the game on the Geoscape. This feature needs some major testing. Please break it as comprehensively as you can. Save / Load is not yet active in the ground combat missions. We're working on that at the moment. Radar Changes: Previously the base radar was made up of long-range and short-range detection. Now radars have detection range and tracking range, and there is only one base radar building. The detection range is represented by the solid blue circle on the Geoscape and UFOs have a % chance per minute to be detected when within this. Radar detection chance is now linear with range (we need to tweak this as UFOs are still picked up far too fast). The tracking range is represented by the blue dotted circle beyond the detection range. Detected UFOs within this range will no longer be lost even if they leave detection range. This is to stop the continual detection / redetection issue that occurred when UFOs flew a random path on the edge of detection range. The inner circle (previously short-range radar) is now defunct and will be removed in the next build. This should reduce the Geoscape clutter. New Animations: We've added new animations for the basic soldier and Jackal soldier with most of the basic weapons, the shotgun and unarmed ones aside. I'll create a forum thread to point out broken animations (one where a blue rifle-armed soldier performs the animation). Battlefield Randomisation: The battlefield is now more random than before. There's a couple of variants of most of the sub-maps, although they're not drastically different (I didn't have the time to completely change them) it does illustrate how the randomisation does work. We'll add more different maps in V8.1 or V8.2 I think. The battlefields now have multiple UFO types - or or least, the technology is now there. I've put in 'maps' for both the Corvette and the Scout. These are variants of the Evil Alien Factory (so don't use real UFO tiles) but are differing sizes and layout. There is also some slight variation in the interior layout between the Scout maps to show that this is possible - it'll be much more obvious in the final version once the UFO tiles are done. There might be some more new features than that, but if so then I've forgotten them. Anyway, the build is now at 40% uploaded...

I'm uploading the build to Desura now. It'll take a little while, plus it has to be authorised, but build V8 has now been finalised.

No, we won't see them in V8.1 as they're quite tough to do. We've started to block out the interior ship layouts now, but they'll still look like increasingly elaborate alien factories. We are working on the tiles, but they're quite tough and we're still figuring out the most efficient way to do them.

You'll have to wait till tomorrow I'm afraid. It's taken longer than I thought it would to fix up the maps and render sprites: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php?199-Build-V8-Delayed-to-Monday-split-in-half&p=2522#post2522 Sorry.

Unfortunately, all you guys waiting for Build V8 will have to wait an extra day. There's not enough man hours in the weekend to get all the updated animations in the game and also redo the terrain maps to cate for multiple possible spawn points (plus come up with at least one alternate version of each sub-map to show how the level can be randomised). This means I'll upload V8 tomorrow. We've got all the basic rendering done but just need to add it into the game. Unfortunately, V8 will not contain a research tree. As is frequently the way, my internal testing revealed a couple of issues with the way the Research works (such as it doesn't automatically open the Xenopedia page when a research project is finished) and we need to fix them. Another problem is that the stores are not recognising manufactured armour correctly either, so as soon as is is researched it is available in unlimited quantities. We need to fix these up. There's also sprite problems, as the previous builds only featured the two starting armour types using the starting weapons. The new research tree contains laser weapons and the first manufactured armour, so the available weapon types goes up by 5 and there's an extra armour type. This actually means about 20-25 new spritesheets need to be added, and my PC isn't fast enough to render all the sprites out in time. Hopefully it'll be done by Friday and we can release V8.1 with the research tree on Friday. Even if a couple of weapon / sprite combinations are missing, it won't be the end of the world. So yeah, sorry about that. Can't be helped though unfortunately.

It won't be in the next build but it'll be in the final game.

It's most likely to come out tomorrow evening I'm afraid.