Chris

Well all the animations etc ARE done in 3D - that's why they have to be rendered. It's just then that we shrink them down and add an outline in PS to make them look more hand-painted. So we've got a sort of horrible halfway house between the two. Unfortunately the engine doesn't support 3D so we're stuck with it.

If I've not gone to sleep, it's still the weekend!

One of the things those Soviet weapon packs would be connected to is more realistic local forces and civilians based upon where the mission starts. So yes, keep watching this space. It'll probably be a couple of months till we officially announce anything in that regard but it's in the works.

Yeah, the soundtrack will also be released. Chimp, yes, fair point. I'm not sure how we'd implement that but it sounds like a worthwhile idea. I'll have a think.

That's very peculiar. Sounds like a graphics driver issue or something, I've never seen that before. Basically the UI's not displaying properly because the game's running on too low a display setting (although 1280x800 should be playable, I use it for testing builds) and the text is too big for the buttons. The options in the drop-down are taken directly from your video card so I'l try updating the drivers and see if that helps?

Bagsman - Vichy France?

Tutorials are hard to make, lol. The Iceland Incident as a tutorial could work, but it'd require us to have a working Tundra tileset as well as NATO and Russian soldiers to use in the mission. It may be possible but we'll see. Tooltips are an easier and faster way to do it. But we'll see.

Rookie and Squaddie are both forum slang. The actual in-game ranks are Private and Corporal. Maybe we should start using them to avoid confusion?

Tail until over land is a good idea for a command. I'll add that to the list of polishing features.

We're thinking about having a Russian weapon DLC pack. More details will follow in the next couple of months (it ties into something bigger so there's a reason behind it) but basically it'd be a checkbox where you choose whether your starting weapons are NATO or Warsaw Pact depending on your preference. Stats would be the same. So yeah, watch this space.

Strange. Can you screenshot it? What resolution are you running the game at?

Email me. I try to respond to them quickly. If I've not got back to you in say 36 hours feel free to pester me.

Guys - if you've premium pre-ordered and got a standard badge, PM me and I'll fix you up. There's a bug in our script that is causing this, sorry about that.

It's one of the two most time consuming and labour intensive processes in the entire game. Stupidly so. There's either going to be 6 or 7 different Xenonaut armour types in the game, and let's say 25 weapons (for arguments' sake). That alone means 7*25*8 = 1,400 animation sets. There's currently 13 different animations in each set, = 18,200 animation spritesheets. Each one is 5-50 frames long. You're talking somewhere between half a million to a million frames of rendering to get that done, just for the Xenonaut units. There's probably similar numbers for the aliens, plus the civilians etc all have to be done too. Oh, and the vehicles. Plus every single frame is rendered out at 840x840 and then shrunk down and automatically post-processed in Photoshop, which takes about a second per frame. It's not a quick or easy process, especially given we've just had to restart all the rendering because we had to change the cover system...

Ghost - no, not right now I'm afraid. Maybe we'll consider it later. Darkwing - did you get the Desura gift email? That has the details in it and was sent to the Paypal address you pre-ordered with. If not, email me and I'll sort you.

Desura should be back up now - I think the new indie bundle thing they were doing crashed the site.

For those unfamiliar with my timekeeping, a 'weekend release' usually means at 1am on Sunday night Sadly that was not actually a joke.

Adam, you didn't model ALL of the aliens in Xenonauts, just most of them

Yes, tilesets will be chosen based on where the craft are shot down. It's just in the current build we've only got one level in there. For info on the map generation, see this blog article here: http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/12/xenonauts-dev-diary-2/

Ideally we'll come out first. Then every major review will say: "Hey, fanboys, if you want an original X-com game, go play Xenonauts. I'm reviewing this on its merits as an FPS." And that'll be a LOT of publicity. I read this news on this article - http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/08/xcom-delayed-to-at-least-april/ It has two links in it that made me laugh. The twitter one was particularly amusing.

Nah I still prefer my idea. I think it's a lot more intuitive. The only benefit that rank gives is a bonus to morale of the troops around them (and a corresponding morale drop if a high-ranked soldier is killed). I think we're overcomplicating it a bit here. Having a high-ranked soldier is good because he'll steady the nerves of the guys around him and give them a boost to psi-defence. Everything else comes from actual battlefield experience and stat increases.

Plus aliens might not always enter from the hangars. That's the other big thing. I imagine we will probably add a feature to let players customise their original base layout if they want. Connects, not so much. I think that would be a step towards needless complexity

Fighting humans hasn't been confirmed, but the idea mooted was a sort of "Black Ops" mission where you go in and take out the leaders of a nation that had signed with the aliens. Depending on how dark the mission is intended to be, you could either have them as controlled by the aliens or not. I think the missions would be interesting in the sense that you'd get to feel like aliens for a bit - the big powerful guys with amazing guns. I guess you could make the missions interesting by having a timer on it (get the kills, or maybe captures) and get back to the dropship in X turns. It's not part of the core game though so we'll have to see. I'm also not fully convinced it fits with the spririt of the game, much as I like the idea myself. I get the impression it might jar some players a bit.

I don't really understand how controlling the base defences would be any fun given that they can't move and you'd want to be shooting at the main troop carrying ship in the formation anyway. Doesn't sound very interesting to me. For lockable doors etc, they don't really grab me. I don't think you'd have many doors in a base capable of standing up to alien firepower if a battle tank can't do it (why 'hack' anything if you've got a plasma cannon in your hand). For the soldier plaement, what was the question again? I do want to let people place their troops before the battle begins.

I think X-Com had it right - any alien item that's been picked up on the battlefield and not researched is just an 'Alien Artefact'. That's not in the game yet but I imagine we'll put it in at some point.