Chris
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Posts posted by Chris
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Sounds like a sprite issue to me. I'll have a look at it. Keep the suggestions coming if anyone has them - these are the little things that are really useful for polishing up the builds.
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I don't really want to add things like an alien breakout in your base. I think it's generally a bad idea to put random events like that in strategy games like these, as they'll generally become a chore over time and I think they'll just feel arbitrary rather than genuinely enhancing the mood of the game. The player has no chance to stop them happening, so it's just a bit unfair.
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The problem is the lack of being able to choose the resolution at the moment. If it's still not working then we'll have to fix it up. You should be able to play it again in a few days when we upload our batch of fixes.
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Haven't been able to reproduce this one yet.
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Reproduced, thanks.
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Reproduced. We'll get that fixed up.
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Yup, reproduced. Thanks.
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Yes, it is. I'll ask the coder to add this, plus the 'Tail until over Land' functionality.
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You can change it on loading but that functionality ended up missing from the build for some reason. It'll be back for the next build. Sorry about that.
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Validated the first part, not going to bother validating the second part. I'm sure the coder can find this bug pretty easily
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Aha. I just got a crash doing this too. Took me a while but I did. Hmm. No idea what's causing this - I've logged it. Hopefully we'll get the crash dump setup for the next build and that'll let us identify these annoying bugs pretty quickly, but in the meantime I'll see if the ground combat coder can fix this up.
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Hmm. I assume this means the door tile has been incorrectly set. Can you screenshot the specific door and I'll have a look?
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I'm also not getting this one. Are you only getting it with the standard play version of the game or the _Editor version? I admit I've only tried the latter for reproducing this.
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Not getting the first bug at all. Rearranging works fine for me. I'm getting the second one though. Logged that.
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Yup this is intentional. In the next build the cannon slots should be bigger and we'll have some new cannon graphics.
I think we should probably put a label above the slots to make it plain whether it is a cannon, light or heavy slot though.
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Right, the system is as follows:
Injured soldiers (health above 50%) can be taken to battle but should have their starting HP reduced to the level of their wounding.
Wounded soldiers (health below 50%) cannot be taken into battle. They should have their listing shown on the Personnel screen but not on the Soldier Equip screen if they are Wounded.
How's it actually working, in your experience? Obviously we're going to have to show more information on their current injury status somewhere as it doesn't seem clear as is, but lets just establish if the system is working first...
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On the Personnel screen? Just double clicking their name? It seems to work fine for me - it takes me to their Soldier Equip screen profile.
This was a known bug in V7.5 though, are you sure you've updated your copy of Xenonauts through Desura (the little update icon on the Games screen)?
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Hmmm. The idea is that if you attack a UFO and it escapes from the battle, it will escape into space and disappear (the idea is you don't get the points for shooting them down, but you've also successfully interrupted the alien mission). I've reproduced the bug where they're not disappearing from the Geoscape after retreating, which I've logged and we'll get fixed.
The fuel thing doesn't appear to be a bug though, it seems to be working normally. If you're told a UFO needs to retreat it should just disenage automatically if you press 'Yes'. That needs more clarification perhaps.
I might increase the fuel range for the F-17s as it's currently a bit annoying they have to keep disengaging from combat so frequently.
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Yeah you're right. I'll have a look at this. We'll need to speed up or slow down the animation play speed it seems.
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Yeah I noticed this myself. We'll get it fixed up.
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Yeah, the resolution chooser box at the start of the game got cut out of the build. We've put it back in for the next version. Sorry.
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Title screen isn't done. If we have the logo on it, it'll be on the screens behind the officers.
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Valid points. Putting these on the 'to-do' list.
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Alrighty we may release V8.1 earlier than Friday then and just make it hotfix release...I'll start processing the bug reports this evening.
General Progress Update!
in Xenonauts-2 Releases & Patch Notes
Posted
Hi guys,
I thought it was time to give everyone an update from behind the scenes, rather than just on the topics that are hot at the moment (ie. the things going into Build V8 etc). This is just a random collection of thoughts that I thought I'd put down rather than a comprehensive list, but I wanted everyone to be aware of what we were doing behind the scenes...
Aircraft weapons - some good news, we've had an old team member returning from about a year of medical absence. Kris was the artist who did all the weapon tiles in the game, so he's very talented, and he's generally was a useful part of the team anyway. He was initially responsible for the upgrade to the forum pre-order badge graphics, but now he's started work on the aircraft weapons. These were originally going to be shared with the vehicles, but we decided to stop cutting corners and just do them all seperately. We've come up with some quite cool designs and we're expecting to have all the aircraft weapon art done by next weekend probably.
As you may have seen in the recent build, we've also tweaked the setup a bit. There's now three distinct types of weapon - the cannons, the light missiles and the heavy missiles. The idea is that cannons are short range but excellent at chewing up enemy fighters but weak against armoured targets, light missiles are good general purpose weapons, and heavy missiles cannot hit the agile UFOs but are very effective against large targets. Previously weapons were going to straddle some of those categories, but in fact I think it's a better idea to have the weapons stick in their categories. If we want to mix things up, we'll change the mix of slots on the aircraft rather than changing the weapons themselves.
We've got the art to do for the vehicle weapons after that. Again, shouldn't take too long - particularly as in this case everything is already modelled in 3D so we have references. We've also got the corpse tiles for the aliens coming in the next two weeks - once those are done, that's all the 2D art done for the game (until we redo the GUI at least).
Animation - Animation, another big issue for us in the past, has been ticking over nicely for a few months now. Some of you would have met Dan on the forums - he's basically been doing all our animation work for quite a while now and is full-time on the project. We've modelled up the vast majority of the human weapons with the 'core' Xenonaut armour types, and although we might need to come up with some new animations for the other armour type we're not too far away from completing the Xenonaut unit animations.
We've got some of the animations done for the aliens, but only about half of them are rigged and those that are have only been animated with the basic weapons. We'll start animating them with the more exotic weapons after the humans are done. Then there's the vehicles, which are at the bottom of our priority list at the moment.
In short, though, animation is coming along well and isn't really a concern for me any more. Providing we keep the current pace of work up, we should have most of the animations in place for the beta. The big roadblock right now is the rendering times, but I'm rendering 2/3 weapon/armour combinations a day so these are also ticking over. It'll take some time for the animations to all get into the game in spritesheet form but the process is in place now. This is why it's important to report the missing sprites in our builds from V8 onwards, as the new animations from then on will become the animations in the final game too.
Tiles - As before, the tilesets are probably the biggest hurdle between where we are now and where we want to be. There's two issues; the lack of tilesets full stop and then the lack of UFO tilesets specifically. Concentrating on the first one for now, we've only got the Industrial tileset in the game and I'm sure everyone is getting bloody sick of looking at it by now (I know I am). It also makes our screenshots look REALLY repetitive.
Well the good news is we're working on other ones too. One of our artists is working on the Western Town tileset, which we've got one building done of four and are working on the props for it now. It's looking good, but progress is kinda slow because he doesn't have that much time to spare per week. I'm confident he'll have the one tileset done for some point in the beta, but there's not too much I can show off for that now.
The other tilesets are in varying states of completion. We actually have a Desert (ie. Arab) tileset mostly complete at the moment, which was done by the artist who did the Industrial tileset several months back. The tiles are in the current build actually (/tiles/desert) and we've started work on painting them over with the 2D artist to get them to game standard (not in the build yet) but I'm a bit unconvinced by the tileset as a whole. There just seems something missing in it. I might sit down and make some proper maps with it and see how it looks, but I get the impression it'll need some more additions before we can call it finished. Quite what, I don't know exactly...
The Farmyard tileset we had done waaay back hasn't been converted to the new system, but it shouldn't be that hard to do given that there's guide tiles right there. Maybe I'll recruit an artist to get that done. We've also got the wall tiles done for the human / Xenonaut base tileset, but we've not begun to populate the rooms yet because the supporting code isn't in place yet and also the look will probably be somewhat defined by the new UI style.
The biggest issue is the UFO tiles, though. We all know it's a bit annoying attacking the Evil Alien Shed instead of an actual UFO, but it also means we can't really send the build to journalists in the current form. Thankfully, we've started actively taking steps to rectify this. Kris has been helping me with 3D modelling of the Alien Scout against a tile grid. We've finished the basic geometry for this now, and we're going to carve it up into tiles. The basic plan is that there'll be a 'damaged' and 'destroyed' variant of each UFO exterior, and all the tiles involved will be indestructible. The inside of each UFO will vary based on map randomisation but the exterior tiles will remain the same.
The UFO tiles are out priority so hopefully we'll have a painted UFO hull available to recover in the next 2-3 weeks.
Xenopedia art - Now I think about it, it's not true we'll have all the 2D art done when the vehicle weapons are done. Most of the Xenopedia art isn't done either, but I'm not willing to start on that until the beta as the research tree needs to be tested before we do. I don't want to do art for something and then have it cut out of the game.
Unit Armour - We've done a bit of work on this too. We've now implemented jetpacks and the related pathfinding (although sprites aren't in yet), and armours now have visual cones and sight ranges that can be individually customised in armours_gc.xml so the lighter armours can be given bigger sight cones now.
Money - Things have gone pretty well in the 10 days or so since we launched. We've recieved just under 450 pre-orders since we launched on Desura, which is great and has helped make up for the lost revenue from the six weeks prior. Of course our net income per sale has roughly halved since we moved from Paypal to Desura due to the price drop, the Desura fees and the sales tax they are obliged to collect (we were too small to have to do that before), but it's still helped us out financially. Interestingly, about 45% of our sales through Desura to date have been Premium orders so I'm really glad we added that option - and really grateful to all the people who chose to support us that way!
Overall, things are going quite well. We're all pretty busy at this end, particularly on the coding side, but things are still progressing even if not quite as fast as I'd have hoped. V8.1 may slip back to next week as I'm away all weekend at a wedding in Northern Ireland, or alternatively it may be downgraded to a bugfix and we'll do the full ground combat save / load and Research tree thing next week. I'm yet to decide - it depends how tomorrow goes really.
Happy to take questions if people have any specific enquiries.