Chris
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Posts posted by Chris
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Ghost - no, not right now I'm afraid. Maybe we'll consider it later.
Darkwing - did you get the Desura gift email? That has the details in it and was sent to the Paypal address you pre-ordered with. If not, email me and I'll sort you.
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Desura should be back up now - I think the new indie bundle thing they were doing crashed the site.
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For those unfamiliar with my timekeeping, a 'weekend release' usually means at 1am on Sunday night
Sadly that was not actually a joke.
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Adam, you didn't model ALL of the aliens in Xenonauts, just most of them
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Yes, tilesets will be chosen based on where the craft are shot down. It's just in the current build we've only got one level in there.
For info on the map generation, see this blog article here:
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Ideally we'll come out first. Then every major review will say: "Hey, fanboys, if you want an original X-com game, go play Xenonauts. I'm reviewing this on its merits as an FPS." And that'll be a LOT of publicity.
I read this news on this article - http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/08/xcom-delayed-to-at-least-april/
It has two links in it that made me laugh. The twitter one was particularly amusing.
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Nah I still prefer my idea. I think it's a lot more intuitive. The only benefit that rank gives is a bonus to morale of the troops around them (and a corresponding morale drop if a high-ranked soldier is killed). I think we're overcomplicating it a bit here. Having a high-ranked soldier is good because he'll steady the nerves of the guys around him and give them a boost to psi-defence. Everything else comes from actual battlefield experience and stat increases.
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Plus aliens might not always enter from the hangars. That's the other big thing. I imagine we will probably add a feature to let players customise their original base layout if they want.
Connects, not so much. I think that would be a step towards needless complexity
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Fighting humans hasn't been confirmed, but the idea mooted was a sort of "Black Ops" mission where you go in and take out the leaders of a nation that had signed with the aliens. Depending on how dark the mission is intended to be, you could either have them as controlled by the aliens or not.
I think the missions would be interesting in the sense that you'd get to feel like aliens for a bit - the big powerful guys with amazing guns. I guess you could make the missions interesting by having a timer on it (get the kills, or maybe captures) and get back to the dropship in X turns.
It's not part of the core game though so we'll have to see. I'm also not fully convinced it fits with the spririt of the game, much as I like the idea myself. I get the impression it might jar some players a bit.
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I don't really understand how controlling the base defences would be any fun given that they can't move and you'd want to be shooting at the main troop carrying ship in the formation anyway. Doesn't sound very interesting to me.
For lockable doors etc, they don't really grab me. I don't think you'd have many doors in a base capable of standing up to alien firepower if a battle tank can't do it (why 'hack' anything if you've got a plasma cannon in your hand). For the soldier plaement, what was the question again? I do want to let people place their troops before the battle begins.
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I think X-Com had it right - any alien item that's been picked up on the battlefield and not researched is just an 'Alien Artefact'. That's not in the game yet but I imagine we'll put it in at some point.
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Jean-Luc, I've read that article before. It's fantastic, really interesting stuff.
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Elydo - the next build or one after should have the distinction between 'UFO shot down' and 'UFO destroyed'. Fighters are always destroyed.
Sathra - thanks, saved me a lot of typing.
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Yes, it should run on any machine made in the last 5 years. But you really should get a widescreen monitor
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Desura just delivers the builds as naked unencrpyed files into the /desura/ directory. You can happily extract them and do whatever you like with them. It's basically just the builds we had before, but downloading via a third party distribution system. So no, no internet connection required
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You can also press 'M' to get a free million dollars. Debug mode
I'll turn it off for the next build.
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Animated lights are a nice idea and I'd like to put them in, but they're just like any other animated terrain tile - a luxury. We'll add them if we have the time and the money, just like I'd like to add swaying grass tiles etc too.
In terms of base defences, there won't be cameras or sentry guns etc. I think there will be quite a lot of sandbag barriers set up in the corridors and stuff so your troops (and the aliens) will have something to hide behind and it won't just become a shooting gallery.
Although, I guess, cameras could be possible. If they were at some junctions and just revealed a certain area around them, and the AI was bright enough to shoot them out, then they could be quite an interesting touch. But again, very much a luxury.
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Nope, it's not changed. We'd still like to do it but the amount of effort required would be ridiculous. And if we can't get the battlefield models for women, I don't want to add names and portraits for women because it would look like we'd done a half-assed job...
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About the underwater thing - Terror From the Deep was basically just a reskin of UFO: Enemy Unknown set underwater, so we went with the original as that's the game that everyone praises the most. How you feel about TFTD is how I feel about UFO:EU so I guess you know what I mean
We didn't mix the on-land and in-sea elements together because it would have meant a lot more coding and art work and I don't think it'd add much to the game really.We set in 1979 because it makes the world more recognisable. In the original X-Com, on a terror mission I never felt that bothered by what happened to the places I fought in because they didn't seem real and didn't look familiar. I thought it'd be very cool to be fighting in familiar real-world style battlefields with advanced armour and alien weapons, so we went with that. Plus it makes the game a lot more distinctive - every other X-Com remake has been set in the future so we thought we'd be a bit different here.
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I guess officer promotions would have to be based on experience gained as a group somehow, then you choose who to promote. It can't simply be based on buying soldiers because that's not right. Presumably we could do something where all the experience gained by units at Sergeant rank and above goes into a pot and once it reaches a certain amount, you can promote any of your Sergeants or officers by one rank?
Being able to choose to promote NCOs or Officers is an interesting idea. I'm not sure if it's inherently better than just having limited promotions above Sergeant (chosen by you) and then REALLY feeling it when they die. It's more complex, but not necessarily better - bear in mind troops will increase their stats independently of their ranks.
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Yes, we can probably add this in. Onto the polishing list.
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It's possible that they just want to star in a video game... (yeah, I just got meta)
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Then where did you get the Legacy Pre-Order claim from? Were you one of the guys that got an email from me?
Make sure you're checking the email address of the paypal account used to pay for the game. It's not necessarily the same as the account where your forum account is registered.
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Yes the map will be updated and it'll feature some of the parts of the world I accidentally deleted last time round.
How much work is the sprite animation thing?
in Xenonauts General Discussion
Posted
It's one of the two most time consuming and labour intensive processes in the entire game. Stupidly so.
There's either going to be 6 or 7 different Xenonaut armour types in the game, and let's say 25 weapons (for arguments' sake). That alone means 7*25*8 = 1,400 animation sets. There's currently 13 different animations in each set, = 18,200 animation spritesheets. Each one is 5-50 frames long. You're talking somewhere between half a million to a million frames of rendering to get that done, just for the Xenonaut units. There's probably similar numbers for the aliens, plus the civilians etc all have to be done too. Oh, and the vehicles.
Plus every single frame is rendered out at 840x840 and then shrunk down and automatically post-processed in Photoshop, which takes about a second per frame. It's not a quick or easy process, especially given we've just had to restart all the rendering because we had to change the cover system...