Chris

Yes, but it's lying, the build on Desura is V7.5. That's just outdated text on the disclaimer screen. I'm spending my time fixing up V8 rather than worrying about V7.5 at the mo

The link to the legacy pre-order page should be in the Desura invite email. Email me if you're really struggling to find it.

Hi - not yet. I am working on one but it's sorta been lost along the way. Perhaps one of the more experienced forum users will do a basic gameplay guide to the game on our wiki? That's the sort of thing I put it there for

This would kind of screw with how the basic game mechanics work though (units don't go outside their tiles in any other circumstance), so it's not something I'll really consider until the beta. Anotherdevil - nah, 2 wouldn't be able to see 3. His view cone would be 45 degrees in front of him due to the corner.

Yup this gets mentioned all the time. We'll be looking at implementing some kind of soldier icon or role button that lets you identify which troops are meant to be in which role in the beta.

Presumably the punctuation should have been a question mark? But no, we've not added backblast and I'm not sure we will. I know it's not realistic but I don't see it adding too much in gameplay terms and we've got bigger fish to fry in development terms.

The more advanced scout-type armours have longer viewing ranges.

Last game I played was Battlefield 3 about 2 hours ago. The major games I've played this year are Deus Ex 3, Portal 2 and The Witcher 2, all of what I'd highly recommend. I have Arkham Asylum, Magika and GTA4 sitting on my PC too which I've not yet played and Skyrim is pre-ordered. I don't actually game more than an hour a day on average, and usually less than that. I probably would if I had more time though.

Hi Yevgeniy - if you go to your Paypal account email address there should be an email there explaining what's happened and letting you claim the Desura pre-order. It's a long story. If you haven't got the Desura invite email, drop me an email and I'll sort you out.

Yup, this is in developer debug mode (Shouldn't really be active in that build) so it won't affect the final game.

Ah yes, that's debug mode. That shouldn't be in there - we use it to see how the invasion AI is behaving and what missions the aliens are running when we're testing the game.

The problem that those guys have is that they're a small developer and have all the disadvantages of that, but then they appear to have screwed themselves by signing with Paradox, who are a publisher. Having release dates set in stone is a great motivator but it also means stuff like this happen - and a few people have mentioned to me off the record that Paradox are as bad as any major publisher in taking away your revenue share if you miss milestones. If that's true, they probably just got to a point where they HAD to release the game whatever state it was in. Not a good place to be. The advantage for us of being community funded is that we can get all the community involved in the testing and get you guys to find bugs and point out stuff that obviously doesn't work, so by the time the game is released it will have been tested by several hundred people. I'm sure there will be bugs, but I don't imagine there will be anything catastrophic. And if the game's boring, we'll have plenty of warning about it and time to sort it out. So it's nice being a community-funded indie at this point. Regarding Elemental, I didn't play it, but after a while I found Brad Wardell's apologies a bit annoying. He appeared to be in denial for several days and then came out and apologised, which was fine. And then he seemed to go into full-on "OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE, I'M SO SORRY" mode and it sort of just left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. It came across a bit self-pitying to me. No doubt I'll do something particularly stupid at some point and have to apologise publically for screwing up though, so possibly I should be careful what I say

Sunblinder - I take it it's now linked given your pretty little badge?

Tweakd - this is only preview #1, just so more people get aware of the fact we're a viable project rather than vaporware. We'll make it clear that it's just a work in progress. OzEnglish - did you get a Desura invite in the email sent to you? Have you claimed the game through there?

Yup. Again, this is a debug feature that I should have disabled. Usually it'd be an empty shell with only a Command Centre.

Yup. I'm aware of that one, should be fixed in V8. Thanks.

Oh, sorry - just to clarify for anyone who has pre-ordered the game now instead of being an old-school pre-orderer. To get your forum badge, you just need to go here: http://www.desura.com/games/xenonauts/connect and press the Connect button. That'll link your Desura order and your forum account.

Yup - if you've lost the email from Xenonauts.com entitled "New User Subscribed at Xenonauts.com" that you need (or never recieved it), just send me a mail (Chris@xenonauts.com). It's easy enough for me to drag my copy from the depths of my inbox.

Yeah, I'll play it. I'll have to for balancing and bugfixing at the very least. Whether I'll enjoy it or not is a completely different matter To a degree, knowing exactly how everything in the game works means a lot of the curiousity evaporates though - looking behind the curtains and all that. So probably I won't spend much time playing it for fun, no.

Oh, good spot. This is on the Personnel screen rather than the Soldier Equip screen. When you double click a soldier it is meant to take you to his profile on the Soldier Equip screen so you can arm him, but it looks like it's just crashing instead. Thanks for that, I wasn't actually aware of this one before.

I have implemented some custom BB code to allow spoiler tags. All you do is put the

Crash dump functionality is broken, I'm afraid. Did you just load up the soldier equip screen and double click on the soldier name, or on his image?

That's how it used to work, but people complained. What happens is this: You have a soldier with a rocket launcher, and you run him into a UFO with aimed reserve selected. Then you get a soldier with a pistol to run into the UFO, with snap reserve selected. Then you change back to the rocket launcher soldier because he was facing in the wrong direction, and rotate him 180 degrees. Then you realise that he's not got aimed reserve selected any more and in fact you've just used too many APs for him to be able to use aimed fire. Then you come on the forums and tell me I've made the game wrong

Formations would be a bit unwieldy in practice - they were discussed at length on the previous forums but I was unconvinced. In the new build you can use the soldier hotkeys by pressing them once and that doesn't centre the camera on the soldier. So you can mass move lots of soldiers at once by hotkey selecting them and just clicking a destination, then hotkeying another and clicking the same place. Hotkey selecting soldiers doesn't stop other soldiers from moving so you can mass-move troops quickly that way.

There's no aliens spawning in the exclusion zone around the Chinook / dropship for exactly that reason. But yes, I'm not arguing with the points you made logically but in game terms I don't think it's a good idea. We all know the current X-Com mechanics work extremely well and I don't think support weapons would add to them - the best argument for them so far is that they're more realistic and if implemented won't unbalance the game, but to me that's not really the same as adding to the game.