Chris
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Posts posted by Chris
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Where's Gazz when you need him?
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OK, so one of the things that will be in Xenonauts is collapsing buildings. It's more realistic, of course - no more floating upper levels of buildings after you've shot out the ground level! We want to implement it in the next month or two ideally.
The problem is, I'm struggling a little to find a method of doing this in formula terms. I need to find a formula that marks ground tiles as 'collapsed' and destroys them if they have insufficient support from the level below, but this is harder than it looks.
In game terms, floor tiles fill a full square and wall tiles fill the lines between different tiles. Generally a floor is strong enough to survive the wall directly below it being destroyed, provided it still has walls around it to support it. My basic assumption was that it a floor tile on the edge of a building had any wall tile in an adjacent tile on the level below, then it would remain standing.
The only problem with this is how to account for all the tiles in the centre of the room. Obviously the walls only run around the outside of the building in many cases, and we don't want a situation where a couple of outer wall sections are shot out and the entire floor collapses - but niether do we want a situation where shooting out 4-5 wall sections next to one another only causes a collapse of the tiles immediately next to them. Ideally it'd form a sort of V-shaped tapering wedge of collapse going into the centre of the floor.
But yeah, I'm a bit short of ideas here. If anyone's got some ideas for basic logic underpinning the tile / building collapsing, then post them here!
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The reason why I've always said no to this in the past is it kinda detracts from the core game, I think - which is your interceptors shoot down the UFOs. Once you start having multiple ways of dealing with certain types of enemy in game terms (shooting down UFOs with missile bases, using local AI forces to attack crash sites for you) it becomes hard to balance and I'm not sure it really adds anything. I'd prefer to play safe and keep the core mechanics as is rather than risk screwing the balance of the whole game by adding something that's interesting but not ultimately necessary.
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Hopefully in the next two weeks we'll have a standalone downloader for you guys to use anyway.
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No. We need to redo that tileset I'm afraid. There will be one in the game but the style isn't consistent with the other ones and the tiles aren't pixel perfect in there. I imagine the replacement one will be fairly similar but it won't be quite the same.
Or maybe we'll be lazy and just repaint a few of the tiles. I dunno, we'll have to see.
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Well all the animations etc ARE done in 3D - that's why they have to be rendered. It's just then that we shrink them down and add an outline in PS to make them look more hand-painted. So we've got a sort of horrible halfway house between the two.
Unfortunately the engine doesn't support 3D so we're stuck with it.
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It's really not. Sometimes it even means 11:59pm (1 am is technically Monday Chris) the sunday after the week it's supposed to be released! But we always forgive him, because he always delivers
If I've not gone to sleep, it's still the weekend!
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One of the things those Soviet weapon packs would be connected to is more realistic local forces and civilians based upon where the mission starts. So yes, keep watching this space. It'll probably be a couple of months till we officially announce anything in that regard but it's in the works.
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Yeah, the soundtrack will also be released. Chimp, yes, fair point. I'm not sure how we'd implement that but it sounds like a worthwhile idea. I'll have a think.
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That's very peculiar. Sounds like a graphics driver issue or something, I've never seen that before. Basically the UI's not displaying properly because the game's running on too low a display setting (although 1280x800 should be playable, I use it for testing builds) and the text is too big for the buttons.
The options in the drop-down are taken directly from your video card so I'l try updating the drivers and see if that helps?
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Bagsman - Vichy France?
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Tutorials are hard to make, lol. The Iceland Incident as a tutorial could work, but it'd require us to have a working Tundra tileset as well as NATO and Russian soldiers to use in the mission. It may be possible but we'll see.
Tooltips are an easier and faster way to do it. But we'll see.
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Rookie and Squaddie are both forum slang. The actual in-game ranks are Private and Corporal. Maybe we should start using them to avoid confusion?
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Tail until over land is a good idea for a command. I'll add that to the list of polishing features.
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We're thinking about having a Russian weapon DLC pack. More details will follow in the next couple of months (it ties into something bigger so there's a reason behind it) but basically it'd be a checkbox where you choose whether your starting weapons are NATO or Warsaw Pact depending on your preference. Stats would be the same.
So yeah, watch this space.
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Strange. Can you screenshot it? What resolution are you running the game at?
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Email me. I try to respond to them quickly. If I've not got back to you in say 36 hours feel free to pester me.
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Guys - if you've premium pre-ordered and got a standard badge, PM me and I'll fix you up. There's a bug in our script that is causing this, sorry about that.
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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...
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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:
How much work is the sprite animation thing?
in Xenonauts General Discussion
Posted
Nutts - that's only for the Photoshop post-processing. The actual rendering takes about three times that long, plus all the setup time of the render scripts...