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Chris

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    Increase in spam on the forum..

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    The site originally had image verification, but I changed that to captcha a couple of days back. It didn't seem to slow things down. We now have a question about what type of game Xenonauts is for anyone that wants to register. Hopefully that'll help.

    New Xenonauts Site Launched

    in Xenonauts-2 Releases & Patch Notes

    Posted

    (This news article is copied directly from the News blog on www.xenonauts.com - check it out!)

    It’s been nearly a month since Paypal shut us down, and the majority of those four weeks have been spent setting up the infrastructure required to take both Xenonauts and Goldhawk Interative forwards from this. The launch of the new Xenonauts website marks the end of this journey, allowing us to finally get back on track with development. Has the last month been wasted, then? I wouldn’t say so. It may seem that little progress has been made on the game, and to an extent it is true that we’ve probably been set back a couple of weeks of development thanks to this eating up all my time. However, there are several notable benefits that have arisen from our new infrastructure.

    For the community, the most notable of them are the the new forums we have set up at GoldhawkInteractive.com, our corporate site. These forums are powered by vBulletin rather than the integrated Joomla Agora systems we were using before. Consequently they are MUCH sleeker and more usable than before – and they’ll serve us better in the future too, as you won’t have to move forums to keep tracking any games we start producing after Xenonauts is done.We’ve also set up an official Xenonauts wiki, which should provide a valuable resource for anyone interested in modding the game or even just looking for some help understanding what’s going on in the current development builds of the game.

    The new Xenonauts site is here mostly just to sell the game – I don’t think the previous site did a good enough job of showing the world and the artwork of the game, and didn’t quite reflect the look the game is going for. We’re trying to make Xenonauts appealing to the mainstream as well as the strategy veterans, so the site has to reflect that. I think the previous one could be quite intimidating sometimes.

    Of course, convincing people to buy the game is useless if they can’t actually buy it – and we’ve now successfully launched our Desura pre-orders, so you can buy the game again! We’ve made a few changes to the pre-order system to mark the move to Desura – firstly, the price of a standard pre-order has fallen from $29.99 to $19.99 and we expect the final game to retail at this price. We’ve also got a Premium pre-order pack available for $29.99, which gets you a custom forum title and some other small goodies, but is mostly for people who want to help the project out as much as they can. If you’ve already pre-ordered the game, we are putting a system in place that will either let you claim a Premium pre-order or take a Standard pre-order and a $10 refund (details on how this will be returned are TBC).

    Finally, we’ve decided to open out the forums now that Desura are holding our pre-orders. This means the pre-orderers and normal community are no longer segregated, so everyone can participate in the discussions whether or not they’ve pre-ordered the game. I was never happy with effectively splitting the community in two, so now you should all be able to participate whether you’ve given us your money or not!

    Key Differences between Xenonauts and UFO AI?

    in Xenonauts General Discussion

    Posted

    Yup. The only thing I'd mention is that people have to eat, and there's a lot of very talented people who are very keen to work on indie projects and will do so with substantially reduced rates - but there's a minimum below which a lot of them just literally can't afford to go.

    If UFO:AI turns out to be a product of equivalent quality to Xenonauts, it will be a much larger achievement because of that.

    Map Editor

    in Mapping Discussion

    Posted

    Gazz, what you suggest is largely what we're thinking at this end. I imagine the solution will be something along those lines.

    Regarding the 2-part missions, to be honest the biggest problem with the capital ships would be actually making the outside of them into proper tiles that go on the ground. If we can do that, we'll just do one-part missions on a really big map. Only doing the interior is a quick and easy way around the tile production problem. I actually do think it'll make the game a bit less fun (as Sathra mentioned, lots of base-lite missions), but the current design is for it to work that way.

    If we get time, we'll do those UFO tiles too...I think there's certainly something very evocative about approaching a massive smoking UFO on the ground with your little team of guys and thinking "crap, that's a big UFO"...but we'd do that after we'd got all the other tiles done.

    Recruiting soldiers and other personnel

    in Xenonauts General Discussion

    Posted

    Gauddlike, what I don't like about your system is that it makes moeny too powerful, essentially. Having the training course means you need money AND time to get a more experienced soldier. If you can just hire them straight out, that's the kind of feature that could completely ruin the balance of the game if we get it even slightly wrong - we'd easily just be in a situation where everyone buys only experienced troops and never rookies...

    • Like 1

    Key Differences between Xenonauts and UFO AI?

    in Xenonauts General Discussion

    Posted

    I like the way the Paypal Fiasco has now become a capitalised proper noun. :)

    The main advantage UFO AI has over us is that they're free, and you have to pay for us. Oh, and they've got a 3D camera in the battlefield.

    The main advantage we have is that we're a commercial team, so the overall product will be several degrees more polished than what they can produce. In raw feature terms, we've got better visuals, destructible terrain, a better setting and a better air combat model. There are lots of other small ones but I don't know enough about UFO:AI to comment on them all. I imagine we'll be finished first too.

    Essentially, we'll just be a better game. I'm not knocking them, but we've got more resources behind us and they're one of the few projects on this Earth that actually have a more outdated engine powering them than we do!

    EDIT - I probably should clarify that I have a lot of respect for the developers, because I know how hard it is to develop a game like this. Producing a game of this size without using paid contractors is a very tough ask and they'll do well to even come close...

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