Chris
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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.
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(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!
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Mylar - yeah, go for it.
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Basically we'll bring the site operational and open up pre-orders so people can buy the game, but not advertise it. That way if there's problems only a few people will be affected rather than hundreds.
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Aargh why are there so many massive posts on the forum? I'll have to come back to this one...I've got a load of marketing blurb to write for the new website still...
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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.
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I don't really like it either, I'm afraid.
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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.
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I see what you mean about encouraging people to post useful posts...
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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...
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I am *hoping* we can soft launch the pre-orders this weekend, and then officially re-launch the project in about 2 weeks on Saturday. Which would co-incide with Build V8 coming out.
Dates subject to change.
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I will actually read this at some point, though I've not got round to it yet.
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I'll look into this in the future. I've got bigger fish to fry at the moment, as you can probably imagine...you'll just have to try not to be distracted by the pretty colours in the meantime, Gazz
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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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Something like this (click for bigger)?
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We need to finish concepting up the new ground combat GUI, I think...
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I am actually a big fan of cats. They're a good mix of cool and hilariously stupid.
That being said, I am also a big fan of Local Sports Team. I saw their last game and, man, was it good! Particularly when they came back from three down to win the tiebreak with a penalty shoot out...
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The current spawn system is not complete in the terrain editor. You have to paint SpawnTileMap and TargetTileMap, but in reality it'd be much better if you can paint any number of locations for either to occur. That's a planned feature not yet implemented. I think the UFO size category may be incoporated into map size somewhere, so only maps designed for small UFOs are used when a small UFO is shot down etc...
I suspect that for the larger UFOs (capital ships), we're not actually going to have any scenery around them - your team will start just having breached the main doors. It'll be hard to have ships of the correct scale otherwise.
Also we pretty much screwed ourselves tile-wise by creating smooth organic shapes for the UFOs, so the fewer of them you actually see on the ground, the better.
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Well the purpose of the 'basic training' in the system I laid out above is that it stops you having to go to battle with a complete liability in the team if you are willing to lose him for 10 days and pay the fee. Otherwise you can throw him into the grinder and hope he survives, but the training course is the same as running him on his first mission - just without the time spent by the player, the risk to the soldier himself, or the risk to the other soldiers of having a useless / dangerous companion with them on the mission.
It doesn't fully address the quality of the basic recruits later on in the game, I suppose. That's something I'm still slightly unconvinced we need to address, though.
If we did sort it out, it'd either take the form of gradually bumping up the stats of the recruits as the game advances (probably based on the alien invasion ticker) or increasing the stat gain from the training course as Tweakd suggests. I actually prefer the latter, as it would make more sense in the context of the game, I think...
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You obviously missed Egypt/Tunisia/Libya/Yemen/Bahrain/Syria to name a few =p
I think you're doing a disservice to the participants of the Arab Spring if you're seriously suggesting that facing down machinegun bullets is the same as camping out in front of St. Pauls cathedral for a few weeks.
Anyway, we probably shouldn't let this descend into a big old discussion on politics because I've always found there's nothing quite like hearing someone's political views to polarise your opinion of them when otherwise you'd get on absolutely fine. As a rule I tend to avoid making political comments for exactly that reason, but looks like one slipped through the net anyway
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Yes, I want to implement double turning cost when the soldier is crouched. It just didn't make sense to apply it only when the soldier was crouched in cover and not when out in the open.
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I don't even think we'll bother to explain that. I think anyone who criticises the final game for being unrealistic in that regard is possibly expecting a little too much from us
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Well, I can understand where the protestors are coming from, and it's good they've been well behaved...
However, given I worked in the City before I went full time (admittedly as a consultant rather than a banker) I don't think the issues are quite as cut and dried as they tend to make out. For example, saying things like "Tax the rich to pay for xxxx!" is a nice slogan, but if you actually look at the revenues that would be raised from even punitive taxes on the richest 5% of the population, it's usually far below the amount needed to pay for most of the examples quoted. So while I find the logic behind most of their suggestions reasonable, the actual substance of them is often pretty ill-concieved. That's why my tone might come across as a bit dismissive (basically, it'd be nice if they did their research before developing an opinion).
The hippies in tents thing is because the idea of sitting outside a landmark in a tent for literally weeks at a time is utterly alien to me, it's just very...passive, I guess. If I felt strongly about an issue, I'd happily go to a march on it, but I wouldn't cancel everything in my life for weeks at a time to just sit there. I'm sure they could be doing something much more productive to advance their cause.
I guess I've always thought that if you really want something, go and do it. If they really feel strongly about the people left behind by the recession and social inequality, then join a charity and actually go and help people. If that's not on a large enough scale for you, then start a charity and get a whole bunch of people to do it. That would genuinely help people. Sitting in a tent and complaining doesn't do that. Those are my 2 cents, anyway.
Status of Xenonauts and its Release Date
in Off-Topic
Posted
Everything is running horribly late. We were meant to soft-launch the site last weekend but it's taking longer than anticipated. The new site is now live, but we're still working on the Desura delivery (I think that's my incompetence rather than anything else tho...)