[[v8.5 ground combat] Negative AP and "green" movement.]

I can't seem to reproduce this. How did you manage to get below 0AP? I find every time I try to do it, it won't let me spend AP I don't have. Perhaps it's something to do with weight allowances? Did you actually drop the sniper rifle (or any weapons) to the ground?

[[v8.5 Ground Combat] Soldier moves without turning]

I can reproduce a bug where LMB clicking around a soldier with less than 4APs will cause him to lose APs but not actually turn in-game - is that the problem you're having?

[[V8.5 Air Combat] Combat automatically paused after aircraft 'return to base' confirm]

The new air combat UI will have a large 'PAUSED' sign on it when it is paused. But I'll get this updated anyway, so that the combat unpauses after you make your choice.

[[V8.5 Ground Combat] Unrecoverable hang during alien turn]

Yes, this is an AI bug. I'll have the coder take another quick look at the wounded part of it, as this does happen to people a lot. The bug will be fixed when we put a new AI model in place anyway but this should help things in the meantime.

[[V8.5 - Ground Combat] Loading battle saves reverts to mission start]

Yeah. It appears the save / load for the ground combat is not as functional as we expected. We'll fix it up.

[[V8.5 Ground Combat] Cannot enter Alien Spacecraft]

Thanks. Yes, just bad map design on my part. Should be fixed in the next build.

[[V8.5 Ground Combat] Able to move through other soldiers]

Ah yes. We'll have to fix these up too. Thanks.

[[V8.5 Ground Combat] Man shoots himself]

Yeah, me too. Please can you keep an eye out for it happening again? I've never seen it myself.

[[v8.5 Ground Combat] Backpack reloads missile launcher]

Hmm. Not an urgent bug, but one I'd forgotten about and we'll fix it in time. I assume it's on the master bug list?

[[V8.5 Ground Combat] Invivsible wall]

This should be fixed in the next build. Basically the issue is that the sprite is displaying correctly, but is incorrectly setup in game so the game thinks it is on the NE edge of the tile rather than the NW one. You should be able to walk into the UFO without opening the door, but there will be an invisible door directly in front of that alien.

[[V8.5 Ground Combat] Game hangs in 'hidden movement' after first turn]

Yeah, it's a known bug in the AI. It'll be fixed when we rip it out and our new AI coder starts work on the proper AI model.

[[V8] - Build V8 Missing Sprites List!]

Ah crap yes the machinegun is still displaying the Wolf. I've updated that at my end now.

[[V8.5 - Geoscape] Pressing M on savegame screen increases money!]

Yeah we'll have to bind this to debug mode I think.

[[V8.5 Ground Combat] Aliens shoot through door]

Yup that'll be the misaligned sprite. It'll be fixed in the next version.

[[V8.5 BaseView] Crash when right clicking in inventory]

Can't replicate this at all in the development build. I spent a good minute or two arming and disarming soldiers, then removed every item in every soldier's inventory and there were no issues. This was at the start of the game though - although AD you seem to be able to get a crash then...

[[v8.5] Ground Combat - "Engage enemies" prompt box persists]

Thanks for reporting it anyway

[[V8.5] Geoscape - Crashsite on Base Not Distinguishable]

Yes, I'll get this feature added in.

[[V8.5 Ground Combat] Missing animation.]

No, there isn't. I'm not sure there will be tbh. It's difficult to animate. Maybe some form of visual indicator would work better?

[[V8.5] Ground Combat - CTD at very end]

Hmmm. Odd. Sandy, your crash happens before the mission is over and all the aliens die? At what point does the crash occur - when you click on a weapon, click end turn etc? Or have you killed what may be the last alien, and then you press end turn and the game crashes?

[[V8.5] Weapon Balance Mod V1.0]

I'm very much open to balance suggestions such as these, mostly because right now at the dev end we're concentrating on getting the mechanics done and game balance is a bit of an afterthought right now. Having some workable stat values for the game would be useful for when we hit beta and we concentrate on the polishing a bit more.

Just to inform the discussion a bit more, I think it'd be reasonable to assume that for the Caesans, you'd encounter the first three ranks of them before you got your hands on laser weapons - so non-combatants, guards and soldiers. Throwing ideas off the top of my head:

A non combatant should probably go down after three/four pistol shots, a couple of shots from a rifle and a single shot from a shotgun or a precision rifle.

A guard should go down after about 6 pistol shots, three rifle shots and two precision rifle / shotgun hits. Given there is 20% of the base damage variation on the weapons, there should be a possibility that a precision rifle hit or a shotgun hit would kill a guard outright if the player is very lucky with their random damage.

A soldier should be a tough cookie. The pistol should be pretty ineffective, maybe 8-10 shots to kill him. The rifle would take 4-5 shots, and you'd be looking at three shotgun / precision rifle shots to kill one. Two even with good damage rolls. I think it'd be the same for a machinegun too (two hits).

You can play around with values to try and get a system that would make that work. It's also worth thinking about the shotgun - it'd be good if that was a very powerful weapon close up but rapidly dropping off in power from beyond say 6 tiles range and pretty useless beyond about 10-12 tiles. I'm not sure if the current mechanics allow this as I don't remember them off the top of my head (they're on the wiki), so perhaps it'd be possible to design something with that effect? If not we can change the code a bit I guess.

[100.000s of sprites; why not realtime render?]

Yes, the sprites are 3D models that are rendered out and post-processed to add a border so they have a slightly more cartoony / stylised appearence. The only advantage they have over 3D models is that they require less processing power, so the game will run on a more basic machine.

The main problem is the engine; it's not a very good piece of kit. Perhaps it would be possible to hack in some features so it can display 3D models, but that would take time. Right now we've got everything in place to do the renders (I even bought the servers this morning) and we know the pipeline works, so it makes sense to stick with that.

But even if you had asked me a couple of months back, the simple fact is that we have excellent coders, but we don't have access to them all the time. Our lead coder was the lead coder on the latest Heroes of Might and Magic game, and he's pretty damn good. But would I rather have him code a 3D engine into the existing engine, or get the game mechanics done so we can get the game finished? The latter makes more sense.

We made mistakes in the beginning when I had no idea what I was doing, and unfortunately you reach the point where you just have to crack on and finish the game despite the fact it's not going to be perfect. You can always make it better if you start over, but you've gotta finish it at some point.

[Soviet Equipment]

There is an improved version of the rocket launcher but it has slightly different utility.

[Anyone tried Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars?]

I've not played it, but it is meant to be quite good.

[Allies]

The local soldiers won't always be professional soldiers, but we won't have civilians grabbing guns and joining the fight mid mission.

[Saving Action Points]

Yeah we need to do this.