Chris
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Posts posted by Chris
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Yeah - it'd be good if you could split them into Fixed and New spectres though. Fixed ones being ones that already exist in the game but you've changed for whatever reason (and therefore could affect other maps) and new ones being completely newly created ones, rather than tweaks (which won't affect other maps).
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We're hoping to have some 'safe areas' on the map where there are a lot of civilians in a building and friendly AI troops guarding it. And the aliens trying to destroy it.
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There will be desert maps for sure and tundra maps (ie. Siberia etc) are likely. Jungle maps would be a bit harder and is unlikely. Vegetation is difficult to do well.
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Merry Christmas, everybody, and a happy New Year! 2011 has come to a close, and 2012 is just beginning. We’re currently winding down for the festive break, but we’ll be back in less than a week!
It’s been a long year, and I thought the best way to open this article would be to show everyone just how far we’ve come! You can download a build of the game from the 6th of January this year here – it’s only about 25 mb. This is the earliest build of the game that’s ever been released, as even Build V1 (the very first pre-order build released) came out a month later on February 6th. Have a play for a few minutes, and hopefully it’ll illustrate the progress we’ve made. Yes, that’s right – there’s no air combat or ground combat in the game. Hell, the Aircraft Equip screen hadn’t even been coded then!
So even if progress can seem glacial at times, Xenonauts has actually been rattling along at a rapid rate of knots and we will continue to do so. It is worth remembering the rest of the team here at Goldhawk at this point – while I’m the most visible part of the company, there are numerous team members who have been working just as tirelessly on this game, often for minimal pay. The game wouldn’t have come this far if it wasn’t for them, so I want to thank them for their efforts. Thanks, guys.
We are hoping to release the game in 2012. The release date of the game has been continually slipping since the project was announced, but given the progress made in 2011 then I think a 2012 release is perfectly realistic. There’s a few things we are working on right now that should kick in in January that will substantially improve the game, which are:
1) Animation / Rendering: Thanks to Dan, our resident animator, we have animated up all of the Xenonaut soldiers with all of the in-game weapons, and about half the alien races too. We’ll probably have all the animations done in the next two months. However, the problem with all this is the sheer number of frames of animation that need to be rendered (over a million). We were looking at render farms who could do this for us, but they’re quite pricey – I actually think the easiest and most cost effective solution would be to buy 2-3 refurbished ex-corporate servers and rig them together to form a render farm that will blow through the renders in a couple of months. We can do this for less than $500 and I plan to start as soon as the New Year comes. Animation shouldn’t be an issue for us in 2012, unlike in 2011.
2) Alien AI: The last untamed frontier in programming terms is the alien AI – everything else is on someone’s “to-code” list. Xenonauts calls for an AI model where the aliens make intelligent use of the battlefield, fulfil mission objectives and use different tactics depending on what alien race is taking part in the battle. We started looking for an AI coder about a week ago and we have some promising leads which we’re following up. Coupled with the render farm mentioned above, we’re hoping to see a dramatic increase in the number of alien races in the current build of the game in the next couple of months. It should also allow us to put the long-awaited friendly NPC soldiers in the game too (also already animated).
3) Terrain Tiles: The biggest barrier to finishing Xenonauts remains the terrain tiles, which are the unfortunate combination of being technically demanding, visually challenging and hideously expensive. Nevertheless, we are pushing forwards. One of the major issues we’ve experienced so far is that the ground tiles in the game don’t look very nice – they’re single repeating tiles, so they can’t have much detail on them. We’ve just hired an artist to try doing the tiles in larger numbers, like 10×10 blocks, which should vastly increase the quality of the in-game terrain and let us finish it faster. We’ll keep you posted on how it goes, but we’re working actively to get more tilesets into the game. We’ve been staring at the Industrial one too long!
These are the three main roadblocks to progress on the game, we’re doing our best to bulldoze through them. Over the past month or so, we’ve been spending a lot of time on bugfixes and the like, culminating in the release of Build V8.5, which has proved pretty stable. It’s still got bugs in it, of course, but we’ll be fixing the critical ones and it’s more playable than anything before it. However, our focus is now moving onto adding new features again.
We’re currently working on the (eternally-terrifying) night combat, and we’ll be looking at adding some newer weapons into the game for the next build. The gas grenades (smokes, nerve gas) and C4 explosive charges are pencilled in on the list, and we’ll also be looking at the combat shield and possibly a jet-pack equipped suit of armour. So, yes – you should have some new toys to play with in V9.
So as we head into 2012, I’m pretty confident that things are on track for us to both hit beta and release the game this year. Let’s hope I’m right, eh?
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Alright all, I'm jacking it in for a couple of days (well, I'll probably still be checking the forums but that's my excuse for not looking at the Bug Report forum until after Christmas). Have a great Christmas everybody, and have a happy new year!
And watch out for old St Nick!
(Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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Print Screen saves an image to the clipboard. You have to paste them into an image in Paint or Photoshop or something.
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Maybe Chris could include a couple of 'cheats' for testing purposes? Like you gain $1.000.000 if you press up, up, down, L2, up, up.
Press 'M' on the Geoscape.
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Plus the GUI may well be getting an update anyway, so the style may change considerably. In terms of the zoom, we're aware that that's annoying problem but it's not an easy thing to fix in the engine at the moment. We'll look at whether it's possibile to fix it up in the beta.
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Strange. Single fighters, double fighters? Escorting larger craft or by themselves? There's some odd stuff relating to the air superiority missions that was causing crashes with the saves, so I wonder if it's anything to do with that?
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Ah the sprite guy never processed those. I'll get them sorted out in the next few days. Thanks.
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Yeah, I thought you could disable retreat by clicking on it again, or retargetting / issuing new move orders to the UFO. Or perhaps it's both you need to do...can't recall off the top of my head.
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You can press 'Retreat' again to stop it retreating, unless it's out of fuel in which case it's pretty much the idea that the plane can't be controlled any more and is vulnerable...
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Yes, it's unlikely other than that deployable energy shield cover thing. Which is also unlikely, but something I would consider in the beta if I thought there was a persuasive reason to put it in there.
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We've deliberately shied away from players being able to order civilians around because I didn't think it fits. However, the civilian AI does indeed recognise Xenonaut operatives as threats (although less serious ones than aliens) so they shouldn't be in the way so much as before - they'll run away from you and try and hide when they see your soldiers. And yes, there should be civilians on most maps.
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Unbelievably, not everyone who has purchased Xenonauts has played the original X-Com. This means that occasionally people will try to play Xenonauts and have absolutely no idea what's going on, because right now we're concentrating on getting the mechanics in place before we polish the UI so it has things like tooltips to explain exactly what everything does. In fact, even those that who have played X-Com don't always know about all the features in Xenonauts - up til now, the only way to find everything out was to spend about a year hanging about on our forums.
No longer! There is now a manual for Xenonauts. This will be included in all of the builds, and available for download from our website (link below). Essentially it just explains the function and basic controls for all of the screens in the game, as well as a bit of developer commentary on how we'll be developing the screens.
Of course, the forums (and hopefully the wiki) will still remain the best place to get all the detailed information on the game, but hopefully this will allow all players and journalists enough of an introduction to the game to stop them drowning in confusion....
Download link is here:
http://www.xenonauts.com/devfiles/XenonautsManual.doc
Comments, suggestions etc are welcome.
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Wow, I have never seen that before - was completely unaware it existed:
http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=File:Terrain-mount.gif
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Hmmm yes it looks like this can happen. I'll update the map so it can't spawn there.
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No, the alien AI is currently as thick as a brick sandwich because it's not had any AI coding. It's0 something we're looking at rectifying at the moment.
The SFX etc are more something we'll polish up in the beta, or shift them around so they're more appropriate. They serve their purpose right now, although I admit they're probably not polished enough for the final game yet.
For the grenades, yes, lots of people have commented on how they'd like to throw them from their belt and we'll look at that when we put together the new ground combat GUI.
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Hmmmm. I wonder if this is something to do with the way we've overwritten the default level settings (which is why you get the same map every time). Give me a bit of time to work out what's happening....
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Yup, that's been reported just earlier today. Bit of a strange bug really. Thanks for reporting it, we'll try and get it fixed up ASAP.
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Hmmm. So quitting the GC causes the crashite to escape to space. But loading a saved game with a crash site present also makes said crash site disappear into space?
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Hmmm. I'll try a few things to try and get that fixed up then. Thanks.
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Can you actually see through the walls, or just the cursor turns red? I guess the alien alert icon has appeared...did you damage the walls or anything? I wonder if the wall is incorrectly set up and isn't blocking sight lines...
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Heh. Weird. I'll send this over to the coder and ask him to fix it up.
Quartermaster Maps
in Mapping Discussion
Posted
Looks nice, I'll wait until the level appears to take them for a spin but it's good to see someone have a go at the mapping. I've not had a lot of time for it myself.