Chris

Ah, awesome. I'm really glad to see some people are picking up the balancing challenge and making some suggestions of their own. I'll give this a try when I get back to my normal PC tomorrow. A few general points: 1) In the current build there's an issue with the random element of the damage formulae which we only discovered a few days back, which should be fixed up in V9. Basically there's a 20 damage random element for each shot, which can give a bonus / penalty to the base damage of the weapon of anything from +20 to -20. This was meant to be +20% to -20% of the weapon's base damage, but it's been implemented as a raw number at the moment. At present this means that all the weapons will have wildly varying damage outputs right now - particularly the pistol. 2) The pistol is meant to have some utility - mostly it's meant to fire fast and do acceptable damage, but have low armour penetration and not be able to burst fire. Their main advantage will be to leave one hand free for other gear (grenades, combat shield, maybe motion detector if we implement that), but they shouldn't be almost useless. I take your point on reaction fire modifiers. We need to add them in actually. I'll add that to the to-do list.

Back now. Still can't quite face sorting through three pages of bug reports

We actually use Mantis at the developer end (although I've not been very good at keeping it up to date lately) but giving everyone on the forum access to it strikes me as a bad idea - it's necessary for a developer like myself to sort through them all to work out what are duplicates, what are important bugs and which ones aren't actually problems in the development builds and are just as a result of us sanitising the game for public consumption. That's the rationale between the forums / Mantis split.

Just uploaded this and had a play. Nice work, adds a bit of variation here and the layout of the UFOs at the bottom of the map is a good idea. If I was to offer a few points of improvement, it would be these: 1) Might be good having an alternate Chinook spawn point, possibly somewhere more central. It's a pain that the Chinook is facing the same way as the UFO at the moment, so the mission might be improved if you could explore in all directions from the dropship given that heading forward from the ramp reaches the edge of the map pretty quickly. 2) It seems a bit odd having the road along the top edge of the map - I'd have thought having building at the top and then roads between them would be better. 3) There's a few too many open spaces in the level. It's better to have them filled with something if at all possible. Admittedly this can be tricky though. Your sub-maps are very good though. Look nice and believable.

Yup, that works fine, thanks. I'll trust you that these work and update the master files based on them!

It could probably be done (though in beta rather than now). Are you sure you'd want it, though? You'd get a LOT of them and as you can launch aircraft as long as they are over 50% health and fuel it shouldn't be too much of an issue not having it. Is there a particular situation that has arisen that makes you request the feature?

Ah yes, I did actually propose a more informational Launch Interceptors screen just before the Expo build, but we never got round to implementing it. This was the basic layout proposed: www.xenonauts.com/devimages/interceptwindow.jpg It doesn't have a range to target on it, which is the obvious omission (the Heath column a lesser one). The idea is that the aircraft are sorted by whichever base is closest to the target. This could be expanded and improved for the new GUI style I think.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Xenonauts would be in 3D if I had magical future vision, for a start. But basically, this isn't possible in the engine and even if it was it wouldn't be that high on my list of priorities - more interested in getting a fun, complete game first really. There's also the argument that letting people colour their units in any lurid colour they want might spoil the atmosphere of the game a bit too (as well as leading to inconsistency with the Geoscape art).

Not in the normal game. If you load up debug mode there's a bunch of shortcuts in the ground combat - various editor screens and the like. Intended for dev use mostly though.

"Wow, I sure have a lot of blood in me...or I used to." I did quite like the Fallout style stuff, but it might deaden the tension a little. It's something to look at in the beta. The mission end screen should show which soldiers died in the mission though - perhaps it'd be worth making the OK button move the debrief screen to the Soldier Progression screen before it exits to the Geoscape?

Looks nice, I'll wait until the level appears to take them for a spin but it's good to see someone have a go at the mapping. I've not had a lot of time for it myself.

Yeah - it'd be good if you could split them into Fixed and New spectres though. Fixed ones being ones that already exist in the game but you've changed for whatever reason (and therefore could affect other maps) and new ones being completely newly created ones, rather than tweaks (which won't affect other maps).

We're hoping to have some 'safe areas' on the map where there are a lot of civilians in a building and friendly AI troops guarding it. And the aliens trying to destroy it.

There will be desert maps for sure and tundra maps (ie. Siberia etc) are likely. Jungle maps would be a bit harder and is unlikely. Vegetation is difficult to do well.

Merry Christmas, everybody, and a happy New Year! 2011 has come to a close, and 2012 is just beginning. We’re currently winding down for the festive break, but we’ll be back in less than a week! It’s been a long year, and I thought the best way to open this article would be to show everyone just how far we’ve come! You can download a build of the game from the 6th of January this year here – it’s only about 25 mb. This is the earliest build of the game that’s ever been released, as even Build V1 (the very first pre-order build released) came out a month later on February 6th. Have a play for a few minutes, and hopefully it’ll illustrate the progress we’ve made. Yes, that’s right – there’s no air combat or ground combat in the game. Hell, the Aircraft Equip screen hadn’t even been coded then! So even if progress can seem glacial at times, Xenonauts has actually been rattling along at a rapid rate of knots and we will continue to do so. It is worth remembering the rest of the team here at Goldhawk at this point – while I’m the most visible part of the company, there are numerous team members who have been working just as tirelessly on this game, often for minimal pay. The game wouldn’t have come this far if it wasn’t for them, so I want to thank them for their efforts. Thanks, guys. We are hoping to release the game in 2012. The release date of the game has been continually slipping since the project was announced, but given the progress made in 2011 then I think a 2012 release is perfectly realistic. There’s a few things we are working on right now that should kick in in January that will substantially improve the game, which are: 1) Animation / Rendering: Thanks to Dan, our resident animator, we have animated up all of the Xenonaut soldiers with all of the in-game weapons, and about half the alien races too. We’ll probably have all the animations done in the next two months. However, the problem with all this is the sheer number of frames of animation that need to be rendered (over a million). We were looking at render farms who could do this for us, but they’re quite pricey – I actually think the easiest and most cost effective solution would be to buy 2-3 refurbished ex-corporate servers and rig them together to form a render farm that will blow through the renders in a couple of months. We can do this for less than $500 and I plan to start as soon as the New Year comes. Animation shouldn’t be an issue for us in 2012, unlike in 2011. 2) Alien AI: The last untamed frontier in programming terms is the alien AI – everything else is on someone’s “to-code” list. Xenonauts calls for an AI model where the aliens make intelligent use of the battlefield, fulfil mission objectives and use different tactics depending on what alien race is taking part in the battle. We started looking for an AI coder about a week ago and we have some promising leads which we’re following up. Coupled with the render farm mentioned above, we’re hoping to see a dramatic increase in the number of alien races in the current build of the game in the next couple of months. It should also allow us to put the long-awaited friendly NPC soldiers in the game too (also already animated). 3) Terrain Tiles: The biggest barrier to finishing Xenonauts remains the terrain tiles, which are the unfortunate combination of being technically demanding, visually challenging and hideously expensive. Nevertheless, we are pushing forwards. One of the major issues we’ve experienced so far is that the ground tiles in the game don’t look very nice – they’re single repeating tiles, so they can’t have much detail on them. We’ve just hired an artist to try doing the tiles in larger numbers, like 10×10 blocks, which should vastly increase the quality of the in-game terrain and let us finish it faster. We’ll keep you posted on how it goes, but we’re working actively to get more tilesets into the game. We’ve been staring at the Industrial one too long! These are the three main roadblocks to progress on the game, we’re doing our best to bulldoze through them. Over the past month or so, we’ve been spending a lot of time on bugfixes and the like, culminating in the release of Build V8.5, which has proved pretty stable. It’s still got bugs in it, of course, but we’ll be fixing the critical ones and it’s more playable than anything before it. However, our focus is now moving onto adding new features again. We’re currently working on the (eternally-terrifying) night combat, and we’ll be looking at adding some newer weapons into the game for the next build. The gas grenades (smokes, nerve gas) and C4 explosive charges are pencilled in on the list, and we’ll also be looking at the combat shield and possibly a jet-pack equipped suit of armour. So, yes – you should have some new toys to play with in V9. So as we head into 2012, I’m pretty confident that things are on track for us to both hit beta and release the game this year. Let’s hope I’m right, eh?

Alright all, I'm jacking it in for a couple of days (well, I'll probably still be checking the forums but that's my excuse for not looking at the Bug Report forum until after Christmas). Have a great Christmas everybody, and have a happy new year! And watch out for old St Nick!

Print Screen saves an image to the clipboard. You have to paste them into an image in Paint or Photoshop or something.

Press 'M' on the Geoscape.

Plus the GUI may well be getting an update anyway, so the style may change considerably. In terms of the zoom, we're aware that that's annoying problem but it's not an easy thing to fix in the engine at the moment. We'll look at whether it's possibile to fix it up in the beta.

Strange. Single fighters, double fighters? Escorting larger craft or by themselves? There's some odd stuff relating to the air superiority missions that was causing crashes with the saves, so I wonder if it's anything to do with that?

Ah the sprite guy never processed those. I'll get them sorted out in the next few days. Thanks.

Yeah, I thought you could disable retreat by clicking on it again, or retargetting / issuing new move orders to the UFO. Or perhaps it's both you need to do...can't recall off the top of my head.

You can press 'Retreat' again to stop it retreating, unless it's out of fuel in which case it's pretty much the idea that the plane can't be controlled any more and is vulnerable...

Yes, it's unlikely other than that deployable energy shield cover thing. Which is also unlikely, but something I would consider in the beta if I thought there was a persuasive reason to put it in there.

We've deliberately shied away from players being able to order civilians around because I didn't think it fits. However, the civilian AI does indeed recognise Xenonaut operatives as threats (although less serious ones than aliens) so they shouldn't be in the way so much as before - they'll run away from you and try and hide when they see your soldiers. And yes, there should be civilians on most maps.