Chris

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.

The air combat will be getting some love in February according to my milestone schedule. I don't agree that the F-17 looks faster than the MiG but possibly it does look less durable (it already is much more agile than the MiG). The problem you'd have with making the MiG the tougher one is that the F-17 is the one with the cannon, and thus the one that would get exposed to the most fire and the one that needs to be tougher. The current setup should play out like this: lone Scouts - MiGs can catch and destroy with light missiles, F-17s cannot catch fighters - F-17s can dogfight and destroy, MiG's cannot engage due to lack of cannon lone Corvette - lone MiG with heavy missiles / multiple F-17s Corvette with fighter escorts - MiG with heavy missiles plus F-17 escort The alien AI needs work, which should even out some of these issues. Btw, in my experience, the Heavy is actually a relatively low DPS class in TF2

I wasn't particularly unimpressed with what they were doing until I read the bit about only having 4 squad members. To me, that'll really kill things. The other stuff was alternative but not necessarily much worse - having a certain number of actions a turn and having units unlock abilities rather than just their stats increasing both seem cool to me. The actions thing is heavy streamlining, but it could work fairly well. It'd make it easy to manage a lot of soldiers...except you've only got 4. Hmm. The one-base thing is a bit of a shame but not the end of the world either. I imagine there won't be standard base defence missions given the base view screen, but there'll probably be a set-piece mission where you defend part of your base on a preset map (I imagine the upper parts of the base have a preset layout). If that's true, it's losing a little something from X-Com but it's not fatal to the game. Hexes? Yeah, ok. Reimagined aliens and setting? Okay, go on then. Scripted missions? Fair enough. Simplified combat system? OK. Ludicrously unrealistic art style? Fine. But put them all together, it does seem rather like death by a thousand tiny cuts. And the big 4-soldier slash across the neck. What they're making may well be a good game, but it's not looking a lot like X-Com any more. It strikes me as a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of what annoyed people about the FPS reboot - basically, that the game wasn't recognisably X-Com. This is much closer to the mark but it does seem to be a very dumbed-down console-style remake (although it may well be a very enjoyable game). But that heralds well for us, because it's just reinforces our core appeal. Also, Cyberdisks turning bipedal? What's all that about?

Welcome all. I particularly like your username, Horrid

You could just resize the laser images in the /projectiles/ folder to make them longer?

I'm tempted to change my title to God-King now.

UFO Extraterrestrials is meant to be ok if you get the Gold version, which is heavily modded by the community to be better. The later Afterlight / Aftershock / etc games are ok, but they're not turn based combat (it's pausable real-time). If you've not already played them, I'd reccommend you pick up Terror From the Deep (it's more of the same) and Jagged Alliance 2, which is another classic turn-based squad combat game.

The speed setting just affects the speed at which the projectile travels between A and B. The projectile image is a static image, not an animated one (though I do have an animated plasma projectile I really should put in the game instead of the recoloured laser) so this will make it harder to see, but might give the effect of a laser beam. Try it.

Actually, I spoke too soon. The 1280x1024 screen hotfix has been done and I'll push to get the fighter UFO bug fixed up tomorrow too. So it may arrive in the next 24 hours.

Sadly the hotfix probably won't arrive for a couple of days yet. We've been busy with milestones and other things, plus one of the coders is from the Ukraine and I think he's busy celebrating Christmas over there at the moment (they do it after new year). We'll try to get it out soon though, we're all just a bit swamped

I on the other hand am delighted. Hell, I'll almost certainly still buy and play the game but it doesn't look like it's stomping all over our niche any more. In fact, them bringing out this game will likely only make people more interested in Xenonauts because it'll get people talking. Re: the one base thing, I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. The guy says this in the interview: "Managing research and development at the XCOM organization's secret base can be done at the player's leisure, and all combat is completely turn-based." I only picked up on it because people have mentioned it previously, but it does sound like a single-base system.

Two different cakes, rather. << Relieved

Wolfy, if you can't get it working despite trying everything we'll give you a refund. Drop me a PM if that's the case.

Hmmm. Missing vault animations, it appears. Thanks, I'll look into it.

Yeah, better formatting would make it more digestable but thanks for your input nonetheless. What resolution were you playing the game at? There are some resolutions where the UI really does not look very good at the moment.

Dunno when the big update is coming quite yet. Difficult to tell so I'm not committing to a date yet.

The flip side of having the AI get tougher as the difficulty setting goes up is that it means you're not getting good value for your development efforts - not many people will see the genuinely intelligent alien behaviour because its only in the hardest game settings. If you have weaker, but still genuinely intelligent, aliens in the lower game settings then everyone gets to see the aliens being smart. But then you get the super-random-insta-death problems you mentioned on higher difficulty settings, which annoy the hell out of me because I always play FPS and strategy games on the hardest difficulty settings these days. The soldier death thing is an okay idea, but to me it is tweaking the X-Com formula a bit too far. It's possible to make the soldiers die less often (vs. being seriously wounded) on the lower difficulty settings, but not allowing soldiers to die at all would be madness even on the easiest difficulty setting.

Well combat fuel consumption is meant to be quite high. It'd be meaningless otherwise. It does need balancing though, admittedly. The values can be changed in gameconfig.xml if people want to do that, and aircraft ranges in aircrafts.xml. I think adding the the intercept course on the Geoscape will ease the problem a lot, though, because aircraft burn a lot of fuel randomly chasing the UFOs when they catch up with them. I'm not going to do the balancing myself until that's in place, as it'll throw everything off when we implement it.

Yes, we're going to try and make the GUI more visual in the coming months. Thanks.