Chris
-
Posts
11,797 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
650
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Downloads
Posts posted by Chris
-
-
Ah that's not meant to be in the build. I thought removing it from the vehicleweapons.xml would stop it from getting equipped, but obviously it's just crashing the game instead...
-
I'm going to add a list of bugs here that we've decided are low priority and can wait until the beta to fix. Stability is important but it's more important to get the new features in that fix the relatively minor ones. Sathra, perhaps you can consolidate these into your existing list so we have a big old to-do list when beta arrives?
BUG – If you try to sell a captured item (for instance, Alenium) on the Stores screen, the game will sell an extra unit of it every time you do it. It does not do this for manufactured items.
- Keybind menu has no OK button.
BUG - If a soldier goes into battle with a two handed weapon equipped and is over his weight limit, when the mission ends (if he still has the weapon equipped) on the Soldier Equip screen he has double the weight penalty to his APs that he should have (what he had before the battle). If you unequip and then re-equip the weapon in his hands, it reverts to what it should be.
BUG - If two research projects finish at the same time then the game only loads up one in the Xenopedia. On leaving the Xenopedia the first time, it should load up again showing the next piece of completed research.
BUG - Save game in-game dates are always a month too late – a save game made in June will display the time of August in the save game information.
BUG - If you start a game, exit the campaign, then start a new campaign, vehicles are still getting consecutive numbering from where it ended in the previous campaign (the starting vehicle is Hunter-003).
BUG - If you set one of ‘Select Vehicle’ hotkeys and change it to Control + <number> then when you exit the menu and reload it again afterwards, it is changed to Shift + <number> instead.
BUG - Sorting by ‘Armour’ on the Personnel information screen doesn’t work.
BUG - Clicking on any block of text (for instance a research item description or the Course Data block on the Personnel screen) makes it turn orange for some reason.
Also these two should be fixed now - although its tough to check the latter as the inventory screen just crashes for me when I load it:
- Dropped medipack uses Assault Rifle ground item image.
- Starting mission with AP penalty due to encumbrance, dropping items to reduce weight has no effect on total AP.
-
OK, let's see if we can help you out. Firstly, are you sure it's a crash - the GC is notorious for taking a long time to load because we haven't got a texture atlas yet. Secondly, have you brought a flamethrower to the battle?
-
Also, Uncrushable doesn't necessarily mean the same as impassable. An Uncrushable tile just means that vehicles cannot run it over. I'm kinda using it for the UFO parts in the corners of tiles that don't block movement for soldiers or vehicles, but it would be odd if a vehicle passed through the tile and destroyed it.
-
Yup, it's meant to be troop complement. I've updated strings.xml.
The UFO is a mess at the moment. I'll be looking at it shortly.
-
For the uninitiated, I've had the idea of a funding thermometer floating around in my head for a while. The basic concept is a kickstarter event where people can donate money, and once it reaches certain preset levels then we will add a new feature to the game.
It's partly a marketing gimmick to get more attention for the game, but also a serious way to raise more money. There's a couple of part-time team members who I'd love to bring on in a full-time role, most notably the lead coder and the weapon / vehicle concept artist. Unfortunately this requires a certain amount of upfront capital because they're not going to leave their jobs unless I can guarantee them a wage for at least a year (which is fair enough).
The idea would be to raise about $100k, which would pay for all the items on the list and also give me enough money to hire the lead programmer and the artist for a year. The three of us would then form the core of Goldhawk and would continue to contract out the other work as required.
If we do this, I think it's important that we make it worth people donating, so I'm trying to get a lineup of proposed additions to the game that get people excited. Here's what I've got in mind:
1) Soviet weapon pack - this is a replacement pack for the starting weapons, which are currently NATO weapons, so they are Soviet weapons instead. The player will be able to choose one or the other at the start of the game and they are identical in-game.
2) Tileset Specific NPCs - the civilians would be dressed appropriately for the tilesets they are in, rather than having general purpose civilians across all the maps. I think this will give a better impression of geography rather than the feeling everywhere is somewhere in or around America that often happens in games. This will also extend to the local friendly NPC soldiers, which is part of the reason why we have the Soviet Weapon Pack - you'd want Russian or Arab troops armed with AK-47s and RPGs rather than NATO style weapons.
3) Extra portraits - at the moment we have 25 soldier portraits. These repeat too frequently as is. I'd like to have 45-50 in the final game so there's more variation.
4) Alien Corpse Variations - at the moment we've got a corpse for each alien type, but as each variation costs about $50 each we've not done one for all of the different alien ranks (it'd cost several thousand dollars). Ideally though, we'd like to have a unique corpse for each alien race/rank combination that reflects their model.
5) Medals System - soldiers level up through combat experience at present, but there's no rewards for specific behaviour like getting seriously wounded in action, surving multiple missions or killing a dozen aliens. It'd be good to add a system where there were a dozen or so medals that soldiers could earn that would provide them small stat bonuses and add a little character to the troops.
6) Intro Movie - we don't have an intro movie at the moment. It'd be good to have one. I'm thinking something like the Homeworld one, which looks awesome but would also be affordable for us. It would cover the Iceland Incident and the origins of the Xenonauts, and maybe be 2-3 minutes long. Link to the Homeworld cinematic below as an example:
7) Community Prizes - I want to encourage people to help us out in the beta, most notably with mapping and the game balance. Therefore I'd like to offer a $1000 prize for the best mapper and the best balance patch, as well as smaller prizes for other outstanding members of the community in areas like generally being helpful or bugfinding. I'm hoping that will get a few people involved (as well as get a little press coverage).
8) Animated Ground Tiles - it'd be good to have some animated ground tiles for the ground combat, particularly in the UFO and the alien base. Glowing power cores and things floating in test tubes etc.
9) New GUI - This would basically involve rolling out the style of the Main Menu across the rest of the game. The idea is that instead of a glorified spreadsheet (which is how the game currently looks) we go for a more immersive hand-painted look that puts the player actually in the base. The layout of the screens wouldn't change that much, but I think it'd really improve the presentation.
10) Dynamic GUI - This is an improvement on the new GUI shown above. The basic idea is that your base and the personnel change as you perform in-game actions. As you research new technology, the people you're talking to change (so the head engineer might start with a blowtorch but by the end of the game has an alien cutting laser tool or something) and the backgrounds change too. So the research lab starts off looking pretty old-school but by the end has lots of advanced computers etc in it. I'd love to put this in.
11) Hire our staff full time - as mentioned above, this is the eventual aim. Having our lead coder go full time would help us immensely because he's working more than full time on his normal day job already and we're probably working at about 20-25% of the pace we could be because of that. Our weapon artist would basically be working for us at cost, which is pretty low given his rates for everyone else are about $100 an hour. Right now he's basically donating his time to us for free, which can't go on forever.
Anyway, I'm interested to hear if people have any ideas for other stuff we can add (NOT female soldiers) that would add to the appeal of the fundraising, or any comments on the above.
The funding would hopefully come mostly from people buying Standard and Premium pre-orders of the game on Kickstarter at the normal price ($20/$30), but we'd have a few other levels of commit too. We'd probably have a $2 and $5 'tip' level where you don't really get much extra for your donation (perhaps a wallpaper or something), and then some higher ones.
The higher ones would probably revolve around 'super-soldiers' which would have a 2% chance of spawning when you hire a new soldier. They'd have +5 to all their stats (so they're basically like a starting soldier). One level would give the super-soldier a chance to have your name and nationality, another would let you name it and choose a portrait, and the highest one would let you name it, choose a nationality and have us draw a portrait for it directly from your photo that you'd send to us.
So, yeah, thoughts? Do you like it? Does it come off as tacky? Interested to hear opinions.
-
Hmmm. Looks like there's something wrong here but I can't reproduce it. Is there any way to recreate the problem? Did you only see it once?
-
I've flicked a few switches and hopefully it'll work normally now. You'll have to mark the forums read before it takes effect though.
-
Good spot, reproduced. Thanks.
-
Yup, I'm also getting this crash. Just to confirm, everything here took place in V8.41 and you're not using any save games from prior versions?
-
Yes, reproduced this too. Thanks.
-
Boom, you nailed it. It's reproducable now. This bug has been around since we first started the ground combat so major props for being the first person who worked out what was causing it.
-
The UFO tiles are a bit of a mess really. I'll look at them in more detail and come back to this, but the frustrating thing is that there's often multiple tiles on each tile and that can cause lots of issues (particularly with sight lines, which are also affected by the fact the UFO walls are hollow). But there's a few basic things I can do to stop soldiers walking through walls, which should fix a lot of the issues.
Thanks for the thread though, it's a useful summary that I'll no doubt use.
-
OK, can you specify exactly what's causing the crash then? Amusing writeup but it's not entirely clear.
So this soldier was wounded in the battle, or was wounded before the battle and then just left in the dropship?
And the following actions caused a crash if he was present:
- Selecting him
- Opening his inventory?
- Surviving the battle and then regenerating his health, and then opening the Personnel / Soldier Equip tab?
-
Ah. Yes, that doesn't sound right. It's going to be hard to fix without reproduction steps but the save / load does seem like the sort of thing that would cause it.
-
Hmmm, yeah this should be set to 0 I think. I'll look at it in a bit more detail tomorrow. I think the templates date from before we implemented Pathscore so the two may not integrate properly.
-
I've added some tips on the air combat on the wiki here:
http://xenowiki.goldhawkinteractive.com/index.php?title=Air_Combat_Tips_%26_Tactics
That's the area most people seem to struggle with most, it seems. Feel free to expand it if you want.
-
I've also added some tips on the air combat, as that's where most people seem to struggle.
-
The weapons_.xml file is superfluous - it's just that the weapons file often causes crashes so that was me making a backup and forgetting to delete it.
The number of shots per burst is not settable for each weapon yet I'm afraid.
-
It would be possible. It's all done soldiernames.xml.
You'd add a new nationality for each nation (Canada2 ec), then go into strings.xml and have Canada2 display as 'Canada'. That way it'd look the same. Then you'd add new portraits in a new group (currently there are northern, mediterranean, asian and black soldier portraits) and set the woman portrait group to appear 100% of the time. Using that nationality, you can change all the names to female names too.
Bit of hassle, but you could do it.
-
Could be interesting to have stun batons researchable. The radar research could be interesting too, although it'd be extra coding work.
-
Good post. You get bonus marks for adding captioned images as well too. More feature suggestions should be written like proper blog articles.
I'll post up these images, as they're relevant to the discussion:
http://www.xenonauts.com/images/se1.jpg
http://www.xenonauts.com/images/se2.jpg
These are the basic concepts for how the new Soldier Equip screen would look if we adopted the new GUI across the board. Basically the soldier equip screen works pretty well as is so this is one of the hardest ones to copy across, but the concept is that it's in a folder on a desk.
Basically it means that we're working with a white background rather than a black one, which gives us a bit more leeway. I might also see if we can expand the element to the size that it used to be too. I guess it'd be good to add some bars between the text and the number (and have both of those in black) which would both make the screen a bit prettier and easier to read too.
Thoughts, anyone?
-
Wounded soldiers still crash the game? Please confirm if so and I'll get it fixed up.
Alien fighters shouldn't cause a crashsite, but they still do at the moment unfortunately as we've not got that code in yet - so if you do attack those crash sites the game will crash. Should probably get that fixed up too...
-
I've added a bunch more stuff to the Wiki - the main additions are:
- Finishing the info on how to use the Sub-Map and Level map editors
- Damage formula
- Morale formula and modifiers
- A list of all the importing mod files and what they control
If anyone has any requests for other systems they want me to document, post it up here and I'll try to get it done. I'm on a bit of a roll with the wiki at the moment now's as good a time as any to let me know.
[v8.3 Ground Combat Load] CTD when ground combat loading
in Xenonauts Bug Reports / Troubleshooting
Posted
Odd. Is it a new crash site each time or a save game?
Please try running the game in debug mode - this should automatically load up a ground combat mission after a couple of days of in-game time. See if that loads up OK?