Chris

You'd think the governments who are expecting them to save their asses might mention them, though.

I'll think about it. It means a lot more artwork, most likely, but I can definitely see the appeal. It won't go in until the beta at the earliest though.

Demo packs will be in the game, and they will have timers. We've got the art done for them, but not the coding. It's on the to-do list tho.

It'd be a nice addition but wouldn't warrant the time we'd have to spend developing it, I think. Frozen Synapse is a multiplayer game, so I think it suits that more.

Site's up now. Desura we're about 80% there (hopefully be up tomorrow), and we'll see what we can do about the Desura / forum integration by the end of the week.

BTW, the Xenonauts are only meant to be secret up until the point the alien invasion starts. After that, they're no longer secret - all the planes and helicopters flying around would give the game away...

Dan, has anyone told you you'd make an excellent Santa?

Everything is running horribly late. We were meant to soft-launch the site last weekend but it's taking longer than anticipated. The new site is now live, but we're still working on the Desura delivery (I think that's my incompetence rather than anything else tho...)

The site originally had image verification, but I changed that to captcha a couple of days back. It didn't seem to slow things down. We now have a question about what type of game Xenonauts is for anyone that wants to register. Hopefully that'll help.

(This news article is copied directly from the News blog on www.xenonauts.com - check it out!) It’s been nearly a month since Paypal shut us down, and the majority of those four weeks have been spent setting up the infrastructure required to take both Xenonauts and Goldhawk Interative forwards from this. The launch of the new Xenonauts website marks the end of this journey, allowing us to finally get back on track with development. Has the last month been wasted, then? I wouldn’t say so. It may seem that little progress has been made on the game, and to an extent it is true that we’ve probably been set back a couple of weeks of development thanks to this eating up all my time. However, there are several notable benefits that have arisen from our new infrastructure. For the community, the most notable of them are the the new forums we have set up at GoldhawkInteractive.com, our corporate site. These forums are powered by vBulletin rather than the integrated Joomla Agora systems we were using before. Consequently they are MUCH sleeker and more usable than before – and they’ll serve us better in the future too, as you won’t have to move forums to keep tracking any games we start producing after Xenonauts is done.We’ve also set up an official Xenonauts wiki, which should provide a valuable resource for anyone interested in modding the game or even just looking for some help understanding what’s going on in the current development builds of the game. The new Xenonauts site is here mostly just to sell the game – I don’t think the previous site did a good enough job of showing the world and the artwork of the game, and didn’t quite reflect the look the game is going for. We’re trying to make Xenonauts appealing to the mainstream as well as the strategy veterans, so the site has to reflect that. I think the previous one could be quite intimidating sometimes. Of course, convincing people to buy the game is useless if they can’t actually buy it – and we’ve now successfully launched our Desura pre-orders, so you can buy the game again! We’ve made a few changes to the pre-order system to mark the move to Desura – firstly, the price of a standard pre-order has fallen from $29.99 to $19.99 and we expect the final game to retail at this price. We’ve also got a Premium pre-order pack available for $29.99, which gets you a custom forum title and some other small goodies, but is mostly for people who want to help the project out as much as they can. If you’ve already pre-ordered the game, we are putting a system in place that will either let you claim a Premium pre-order or take a Standard pre-order and a $10 refund (details on how this will be returned are TBC). Finally, we’ve decided to open out the forums now that Desura are holding our pre-orders. This means the pre-orderers and normal community are no longer segregated, so everyone can participate in the discussions whether or not they’ve pre-ordered the game. I was never happy with effectively splitting the community in two, so now you should all be able to participate whether you’ve given us your money or not!

Mylar - yeah, go for it.

Basically we'll bring the site operational and open up pre-orders so people can buy the game, but not advertise it. That way if there's problems only a few people will be affected rather than hundreds.

Aargh why are there so many massive posts on the forum? I'll have to come back to this one...I've got a load of marketing blurb to write for the new website still...

Yup. The only thing I'd mention is that people have to eat, and there's a lot of very talented people who are very keen to work on indie projects and will do so with substantially reduced rates - but there's a minimum below which a lot of them just literally can't afford to go. If UFO:AI turns out to be a product of equivalent quality to Xenonauts, it will be a much larger achievement because of that.

I don't really like it either, I'm afraid.

Gazz, what you suggest is largely what we're thinking at this end. I imagine the solution will be something along those lines. Regarding the 2-part missions, to be honest the biggest problem with the capital ships would be actually making the outside of them into proper tiles that go on the ground. If we can do that, we'll just do one-part missions on a really big map. Only doing the interior is a quick and easy way around the tile production problem. I actually do think it'll make the game a bit less fun (as Sathra mentioned, lots of base-lite missions), but the current design is for it to work that way. If we get time, we'll do those UFO tiles too...I think there's certainly something very evocative about approaching a massive smoking UFO on the ground with your little team of guys and thinking "crap, that's a big UFO"...but we'd do that after we'd got all the other tiles done.

I see what you mean about encouraging people to post useful posts...

Gauddlike, what I don't like about your system is that it makes moeny too powerful, essentially. Having the training course means you need money AND time to get a more experienced soldier. If you can just hire them straight out, that's the kind of feature that could completely ruin the balance of the game if we get it even slightly wrong - we'd easily just be in a situation where everyone buys only experienced troops and never rookies...

I am *hoping* we can soft launch the pre-orders this weekend, and then officially re-launch the project in about 2 weeks on Saturday. Which would co-incide with Build V8 coming out. Dates subject to change.

I will actually read this at some point, though I've not got round to it yet.

I'll look into this in the future. I've got bigger fish to fry at the moment, as you can probably imagine...you'll just have to try not to be distracted by the pretty colours in the meantime, Gazz

I like the way the Paypal Fiasco has now become a capitalised proper noun. The main advantage UFO AI has over us is that they're free, and you have to pay for us. Oh, and they've got a 3D camera in the battlefield. The main advantage we have is that we're a commercial team, so the overall product will be several degrees more polished than what they can produce. In raw feature terms, we've got better visuals, destructible terrain, a better setting and a better air combat model. There are lots of other small ones but I don't know enough about UFO:AI to comment on them all. I imagine we'll be finished first too. Essentially, we'll just be a better game. I'm not knocking them, but we've got more resources behind us and they're one of the few projects on this Earth that actually have a more outdated engine powering them than we do! EDIT - I probably should clarify that I have a lot of respect for the developers, because I know how hard it is to develop a game like this. Producing a game of this size without using paid contractors is a very tough ask and they'll do well to even come close...

Something like this (click for bigger)?

We need to finish concepting up the new ground combat GUI, I think...

I am actually a big fan of cats. They're a good mix of cool and hilariously stupid. That being said, I am also a big fan of Local Sports Team. I saw their last game and, man, was it good! Particularly when they came back from three down to win the tiebreak with a penalty shoot out...