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Chris

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Posts posted by Chris

    Firaxis Games' XCOM: Enemy Unknown announced!

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    Hmmm, having slept on it and shot some dudes in BF3, I'm a bit cheerier about the whole thing. It's bad news for us that Firaxis are wading into the ring (because they're good at what they do) and it's bad news its only 6-9 months away from release. This is mostly because of the advertising muscle behind them, and the fact we don't have enough cash to suddenly accelerate development to beat them to market.

    It's not the end of the world, though. I doubt we'll make a financial loss on Xenonauts in any case and hopefully it'll focus the team on the task at hom (and me). If we can get a complete beta out before they release their game, I think we've got a good chance of piggybacking off their publicity. Or something.

    It does mean we're going to have to significantly step up our marketing efforts though. I need to sit down and work out what we're going to do on that front.

    Media permission

    in Xenonauts General Discussion

    Posted

    Yup, you're free to stream the game and do whatever you want with the build provided it's clear this is not a finished game and not all the content is in place yet. It's probably not quite finished enough to do a proper Let's Play yet (as there's only one battlefield map) but it's not far off it.

    Weapon Editor - The Quartermaster's Armory

    in Modding Discussion

    Posted

    The only other change I'd make is having the Single Fire Mode shot accuracy levels (of which there is up to four) as seperate lines with checkboxes for each one (although a checkbox can only be ticked if the preceeding one is checked). Then I'd have the AP cost and Accuracy value for each line beside the checkboxes, with them greyed out of the checkbox is not selected.

    Right now the scrollbar-box looks a bit difficult to use. Also, bear in mind some weapons like the machinegun cannot single-fire and there doesn't appear to be a way to manually disable single-fire right now :)

    Weapon Editor - The Quartermaster's Armory

    in Modding Discussion

    Posted

    I'm impressed - that's awesome. It's better than anything we've got at this end!

    One quick suggestion for what might be a useful function - maybe allowing an export file for your data that people can just plug into your editor? That way it'll be easy to exchange weapon balance mods on the forum - Sathra's, Belmakor's, your own custom one etc. Possibly you could have several sitting on your hard drive, and you can update all the related game files with just a couple of clicks in your editor (rather than manually copying across all of the related files each tile). Up to you if you think it'd be worth it though.

    Combat GUI Update (feedback please)

    in Xenonauts General Discussion

    Posted

    We have a new coder joining the team shortly, and his role will be to implement some of the new weapons still to go in the game, and to put the new ground combat GUI in place for us. There's no guarantee that things will work out - even with the best of intentions, somewhere between half and two-thirds of the people that join the team don't stick around long enough to make a meaningful contribution. However, it means we need to have another look at the new combat GUI concept.

    The purpose of this thread is to help us finalise the layout and functionality of the ground combat GUI. It is not meant to provide a final visual appearence as we'll do another iteration with the finished art afterwards (though you can comment on that if you want). This GUI doesn't look very pretty at the moment and it's not meant to.

    If you've played the game and you have some comments about how we can make it easier to control the troops, please post them up here. A couple of suggestions like weapon reload buttons and access to grenades on the belt / backpack have been incorporated into the design, and if there are things I'm missing I'm happy to add them in too.

    Stylistically the final design is likely to a row of computer monitors along the bottom of a large wall-mounted screen in the Xenonaut base, from which the player is ordering his tactical team around. This should tie it into the new GUI style we're working on (as seen on the Main Menu).

    OK, so onto the concepts:

    http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/CombatGUIV3_1.jpg

    http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/CombatGUIV3_2.jpg

    The PSD file is available here for people who want to tweak the design themselves:

    http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/CombatGUIV3.psd

    These are at minimum size. They would scale with the vertical width of the screen until they are about 25% larger, then the size would be capped and they'd just fill less of the screen width as the monitors grew larger.

    The planned functionality is as follows (from right to left):

    AP RESERVE:

    The AP Reserve slider selects the Reserve setting for the soldier selected. The selected setting will have the slider there and will be highlighted in orange. Settings where the soldier does not have enough AP to select will be shown in a darker grey. The number on the left represents the APs required to take a shot of that kind.

    WEAPON:

    As visible in the two screenshots, this box splits in two if a 1-handed weapon is equipped and is a single block if a 2-handed weapon is. The buttons in the bottom left represent single shot and burst fire mode, and the bottom right button allows the weapon to be reloaded without opening up the inventory. The top right number is the ammo level of the weapon.

    GRENADES:

    The two slots next to the weapon are for grenades. This displays up to two grenade types in the soldier's inventory (if more than two, the two which require the least AP to throw are displayed). Clicking on them brings up the fire cursor as if they were the selected weapon. The AP cost to fire includes the cost to unequip the current weapon and equip the grenade, then throw it. Not sure whether the soldier should automatically re-equip their weapon or just drop it on the floor afterwards?

    SOLDIER INFO:

    This is unchanged from before - the three bars show HP, AP and Morale. Colours yet to be determined.

    BACKPACK:

    This button will open the soldier inventory when clicked.

    SOLDIER SCROLL:

    These two buttons allow you to scroll to the next / previous soldier in the squad.

    END TURN:

    This is the red button. It ends the turn.

    MAP:

    This is the green button. It will open the battlefield map when one is implemented. Possibly just having a minimap would be more sensible? It'd take up more space though.

    CAMERA LEVELS:

    The up and down buttons here let you cycle through the battlefield view levels (ie. the levels of a building).

    SOLDIER SELECT:

    The row of soldier portraits along the top of the UI is there to make it easier to see the situation at a glance. All living soldiers will have their portrait in colour and dead / stunned ones will have it in grey. You can also see their available HP, TU and Morale at a glance. Clicking on a portrait would select the soldier, double clicking it would centre the screen on them.

    That's about it. Any questions or suggestions?

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