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Chris

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Posts posted by Chris

  1. To celebrate moving to the new forums, I have decided to elevate a moderator from the unwashed masses to help me take care of the forums. Perhaps unsurprisngly, I've chosen Sathra, the only user who managed to accumulate more posts than I did on the old forums. Accordingly, he has now been granted god-like powers to help him in his heroic fight against spambots and people unable to use the forum search function.

    In reality, this isn't going to change a great deal. I'll still be active on the forums, but it just means that there's someone else about who can help with the basic administration on the boards. The forum has been very well behaved over the past two years and unless vBulletin has an inbuilt idiot magnet that I've yet to come across, I see no reason why we won't continue to have an excellent community.

    While he has the power to delete threads and ban people, I've no doubt Sathra will use his judgement wisely. However, if you do have a problem with him for whatever reason, you can get in touch with me about it. But in the meantime, please treat him with the respect he deserves.

  2. I expect many of you will already know each other from the pre-migration forums, but if you're a newbie who has made his way here then by all means please introduce yourself and let us know a bit about you.

    I'll get the ball rolling - I'm Chris, the project lead for Xenonauts, and I'm based in London. I used to be an accountant, but I'm now working full time on Xenonauts. I started working on this game just over two years ago now when it was a labour of love, but I think by now it just counts as a labour...

    Only joking, I'm actually quite enjoying this game development lark!

  3. OK, here's where we'll continue the discussion on manual kneeling. You can see the previous thread here, which contains every post from the discussion going on on the pre-migration forum. It's a long one.

    To help clarify the discussion and kick start the wiki, I'm producing a couple of pages which describe the accuracy and cover mechanics in the game in detail. That should give everyone a framework to work within.

    Accuracy calculation, including cover save - http://xenowiki.goldhawkinteractive.com/index.php?title=Accuracy_Calculation

    Terrain Objects - http://xenowiki.goldhawkinteractive.com/index.php?title=Terrain_Objects

    Cover System - http://xenowiki.goldhawkinteractive.com/index.php?title=Cover_System

  4. As some of you may be aware, we have been having some problems with Paypal. These problems involve them cutting off our only income stream and then freezing the $4,300 in the account for 180 weeks before they return it.

    The community has been very helpful during this period, both in terms of the community around the our project and the indie scene as a whole. There have been numerous suggestions about how we could circumvent the Paypal ban on pre-orders, but I was never particularly keen on going back to them. Fundamentally we were always going to struggle with their rules, I think – I was much more interested in finding a solution that was better aligned with where we were going as a project. This gave us two main options – Desura, or the new Humble Indie Bundle store widget.

    The HIB store widget was effectively exactly what we had before, but with lower transaction fees and the shield of another (better known) organisation between us and Paypal. Desura, for those who are not aware, is effectively an indie version of Steam owned by the people who run IndieDB/ModDB. I think both would have been good partners, but we decided on Desura because it allows us to outsource the pre-order process (saving me time) and will make it easier to actually deliver the final game when it is released – the plan is Desura or Steam keys for each pre-orderer.

    We’re currently working on integrating Desura with vBulletin so pre-orderers can get forum badges for buying the game, but pre-orders should be up again relatively soon, so sit tight. We’re announcing this on this site rather than Xenonauts.com because we’re having problems with that – the frontpage is frozen as it was when the site crashed from the Reddit traffic a couple of weeks back, so we’re migrating over here and will be replacing the current Xenonauts.com with something a bit more snazzy.

    EDIT - All pre-orderers will recieve a Desura key sent to their Paypal email addresses when the Desura pre-orders go live.

  5. Hello everyone, and welcome to our new corporate site. This site is intended to become the new community hub for Goldhawk, while the current Xenonauts site is to be replaced with something a bit more slick and streamlined that will market the game a bit better. Why are we doing this? Well, we’ve had a tough couple of weeks where Paypal have pulled the plug on our account and the resulting story going viral sent so much traffic to our site that it crashed and sadly never recovered. Even now we can’t change the front page, which is pretty crippling.

    The good news is that this has proved a perfect excuse for us to upgrade our infrastructure, so here’s a list of major improvements over the last site:

    Forums:

    We’ve upgraded our forums from the creaky integrated Joomla forums we were using to vBulletin, which is far more powerful and a lot easier on the eye.

    The forums should now support attachments properly, and we’ve put in a few goodies like forum achievements and autopost of news items to the forums etc.

    You’ll also not have to re-register move forums once Xenonauts is released – our future projects will all be based out of this website too.

    The pre-orders will now be serviced through Desura, so the forum is no longer segregated into normal people and pre-orderers. Anyone can read the bug reports and pre-order discussions, although they obviously can’t take part until they pre-order!

    Blog:

    We’ll now have two seperate blogs, one on Xenonauts.com and one here. The Xenonauts one will be much more ‘in character’ and focused on the game than before, whereas the one on this site will be more focused on the team and what we’re up to.

    You’ll still be able to track both from this site, though, as we’ll run everything through the front-page news slider and boths news articles will autopost to the ‘Announcements’ section of the forums.

    Wiki:

    We’ve added an official wiki for Xenonauts on the site, which is the community is free to edit (although we’ll help you get started).

    This is intended to preserve the knowledge of the community – previously people would make long forum posts to explain things, but now we can just write a blog post or link to an existing one.

    This is going to be particularly valuable for the mappers and modders amongst you, as the game can be quite oblique at first but a couple of wiki posts should get everyone going nicely!

    Those are the key improvements over the last site. Our hand was rather forced on this matter thanks to the previous site imploding, but hopefully this new setup should make much easier for us and for you!

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