targetbsp

Pleased to say that Desura installed the update no problems.

As many people get upset if you tell them nothing than if you miss a deadline to be honest. You can't win.

It's not out yet is it? The subject says planned rather than released and the post says "we'll be releasing an update to V17 next week" (now this week)

I don't have anything close to Xenonauts 80,000 but Steam can verify a game I have with 14,000 files (Ceville) in under 10 seconds on a normal (non-SSD) hard disk.

You should keep it on your SSD if possible. It's a relatively small game and dealing with lots of small files is what SSD's absolutely thrive at!

I'm basing my views on having seen a lot more of it than the tutorial. Whereas people saying there's no inventory or there's nothing to think about, I suspect are basing their views only on the demo. Or they had their eyes closed whilst watching/reading the tons of readily available other sources of information about the game! Now it is the demo's fault for giving such a limited impression of the game but you should bare in mind the fact that there's a lot that the demo doesn't show you. It doesn't allow you much freedom at all. Heck even some of the things it does include it then cripples the functionality of (such as the base). I think it's going to be very good. I may be wrong. I don't think that some of the people declaring it bad have seen enough of the game to reach that conclusion (from what they are saying is bad) Also, unless entry requirements to be a fanboy have lowered, I'm not sure my complaints about the camera, the UI and the implication that xenonauts will probably be better qualify me as an XCOM fanboy?

No way. A 60 member team of Firaxis' calibre working on the game for 4 years and you think they did things to make their lives easy? Everything they've done is to simplify entry to the game for new players. And one of their goals was to make it playable via a joypad. You can tell when a UI is limited by the programmer making life easy for himself - and this isn't one IMO. You're basing your view that there's little to do on a scripted tutorial. There is by definition little for you as a player to think about in that. I stand by my opinion that all that is wrong here is that the demo was too short to leave a good impression on those who haven't already seen lots of the game in action and so don't know what the demo is missing.

There is when it goes pear shaped early on and you have to try and do the whole level with one guy or something. You raise a good point there. I've played every Civ since 1 on the Amiga. And I liked Civ V. I didn't see the changes as ruining the game. I saw them as making a different but good game. The same with this, UFO is my favourite game of all time. The fact they've changed it means the new one is unlikely to become my new favourite game. It may not be exactly what I want (which would be a HD remake of XCOM with some UI improvements) but that alone doesn't make it a bad game. And frankly, we have Xenonauts to fulfil those conditions.

It's great! The camera seems a little cumbersome, probably due to mouse smoothing or something. And I suspect you'll find yourself using shortcut keys for your most common actions rather than the GUI. Apart from that, it's really impressive IMO. If anything, their mistake is that the demo is simply too short to get used to the controls. Inventory wise, I'm not sure what people who complain there is none are expecting? You do get to choose the weapons and equipment your soldiers use. I was under the impression there was unlimited ammo? So what use is in combat inventory management? There's not much point in scrounging weapons off dead people now...

I would give everything I own for a HD remake of XCOM. And yeah, I think this is going to be as close as we're ever going to get, with improvements here and there where they were needed. Firaxis are doing the whole redesign thing if you want a version unlike the original.

I guess the alpha vs beta debate won't be that relevant as taking into account 'valve time' this will be pretty much beta by the time steam sees it anyway. And i suspect that might be a good thing. You'd want to be a bit careful with Steam. It's obviously a huge market for indie devs but I hang out on their forum a lot and it can get nasty. If you were going to go the Endless Space route of sticking it on the store as a pre-order and get access now then you'd want it pretty darn stable or it might be damaging. If you were just providing keys as an alternate download to existing users without yet promoting it on Steam then that's obviously not an issue. Paradox did that with Warlocks beta test. I personally fell in love with the game after playing the kickstarter build for all of 2 minutes but I'm not sure long term you'd want the steam forum for the game holding posts of the kind of issues that'll get dealt with on here during the 'alpha deluxe'.

Nope alpha. http://store.steampowered.com/news/7881/

They do. I told you about one when you first posted that they don't Endless Space was alpha funded on Steam. You got it at a discounted price and you got to vote on changes made during the development.

They do actually. Endless Space was alpha funded on Steam. Company of Heroes 2 and Fallen Enchantress pre-orders get you the beta's. And there's a whole list of betas you can join here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2646885 It doesn't need greenlit though as it's already going on Steam. Perhaps just need to ask valve nicely to put it on early.

Nah, desura errors often enough on anything. See their forums! I guess you're just far more likely to encounter it here due to the number of files. In any case, a download service should be able to handle serving anything. There shouldn't be a limitation to what they can reliably supply.

Are you after this? http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/145-How-to-claim-your-Pre-Order-forum-badge%21

Also check out The Two Sides. Though it was pulled for copyright reasons, it was almost complete from the playing as the humans point of view and you should be able to find it in google.

It's been iffy for a couple of weeks but Desura is completely wrecked today. Overloaded I guess. Loads of posts about it on their forums. If you keep retrying it will get there. I've got a 40mb connection but it's taken me 6 hours and many, many clicks of 'try again' and I've only just finally got Xenonauts installing. And I've got 3 more games to download yet ;'(

I can't get it to behave at all today. And I use it for more than this. I've bought a few games on it.

Even the big boys, Steam, only release games Monday to Friday when they are in the offices (pacific time).

Yeah the client has been delivering MCF errors for a couple of weeks on various games about being unable to reach servers (I assume overloaded) but no-one seemed to be mentioning it on their forums (until now!) so I assumed it was just me until you guys all had trouble with the latest Xenonauts.

I think there's only 2 maps currently? From one of the kickstarter stretch goals they hired a map designer so we should see more. Here's some info about how the maps work if you're interested: http://xenowiki.goldhawkinteractive.com/index.php?title=Mapping:_Creating_new_in-game_battlefields

Having the game on an SSD if you have one helps quite a lot with the update speed. But you're still kind of stuck if you catch it at a time when the servers are busy and it spams MCF errors at you.

Desura has been rubbish for a couple of weeks downloading any game.

@raidsoft: there's an explanation of how the level layouts are handled here: http://xenowiki.goldhawkinteractive.com/index.php?title=Mapping:_Creating_new_in-game_battlefields My understanding from that is that they're 'semi-random' in that a maps overall layout is fixed but various sections of it are chosen randomly from a subset to add variety.