Gijs-Jan

Hmm, yeah that would explain it. I'll check if I can jury-rig something that'll make sure that you can get to the basic elements at that resolution.

The (Unity) Quality settings at the start mostly affect the Texture quality and Shadowing at the moment. (It reduces texture sizes, anisotropic texts, etc; it also affects the number of applicable lights, but with this scene that wouldn't affect things as much.) The smoothness is probably the result of the VSync being turned on at the higher qualities. (Although we do force it at start through code at the moment; it could be overridden by the Quality Settings) We haven't adjusted the Quality settings yet for the scene or game. They'll need to be to properly take advantage of the camera distance and other things. Some of the bigger performance hits (post-processing) aren't controlled by those settings, but changing the Quality Settings will certainly have effect.

-Snip- apparently we disabled it in the final build

You discovered the debug AI visualization! It's enabled/disabled through "O", scrolling through the layers using Page Up/Down, and a simulated trigger to an AI Character turn using "L". (Which starts the computation of the values) Definitely. There are some very clear things we can still do to up performance, and in the next build we'll add in options to turn of various effects. The performance numbers I'm seeing seem all over the place, with seemingly comparable hardware having very different performance. In the next build we'll introduce a crash & performance reporting service (opt-in) to help us pin point where things are going wrong. I'm currently working on a playback functionality that players will be able to push along with bug reports to help us determine where things went wrong. This is not planned as a feature, but intended to help us in getting to the root of issues more quickly. (I fondly remember the days trying to reproduce your issues for X1 :D)

Can everyone with performance issues also post their machine specs? That'll allow us to get a better idea of where the issues may lie.

I suspect the freeze will be solved in the next minor build (tomorrow or so). There's an issue with the animation system in Unity that doesn't play nice with repeated calls per frame (AI work). There's a tonne of things to improve in the performance section of the game. I've mostly ensured that we didn't make any irreparable choices there and setup everything such that we could easily deal with it later on. (I expect that we'll have a performance fix for level load times in the next major build) With unsmooth I expect you mean the overall animations?

> I hope to see in Xenonauts more variety of maps and buildings, or even procedural maps. I'm quite confident that the community will find that the Map Editor this time around will be a lot easier to use, and more powerful.

Monday's release is really just a sneak preview; the AI is rudimentary at best. This time around I've planned quite some things, some of which I'll need the help of the community to succeed in. :-)

Just so you guys know; I'm not even installing Civ 6 until after the release date so we can make it.

Hah! > Edit: Thank the lord, no.

Let's see if everything migrated over correctly. Testing 1 2 3...

No need to preface your comment, all critique is welcome and with such a diverse community looking at the thought behind the post instead of its literal text is pretty much a requirement ;-) I suspect that with ' lack of direction' you mean the lack of distinction in the art. Distinction in the sense that nothing necessarily 'stands out'. Again, this is intentional: It is meant to emphasize the atmosphere, to make it more realistic.

Do you mean in the sense of integrity as a whole or a distinguishing aspect? I'd disagree with both of those points :-). The point of the art (music, visual, atmospheric) was to emphasize the time and setting in which the game was set. The cold war was a very bleak and hopeless time in human history. Combined with the idea of global destruction through alien invasion it is very much "grimdark". Xenonauts has a lethal playing style, and death is grim. Units are not meant to be one-man chrome-finished murder machines. Every aspect of the art direction emphasized and, more importantly, aligned with this overall design principle. The style just seems to be a very polarizing opinion-wise. Could the artwork be better? Sure at times, but I wouldn't dare call it directionless.

Looks quite interesting!

Apart from what Chris already mentioned; the way the codebase is setup this time around will make it *a lot* easier for the modders to fundamentally alter the game.

Hi! I'll leave the strategizing to some of our more senior forum members, but to get an edge in on the air combat you could take a look at Taskus youtube videos that show you how to get the maximum out of your planes:

Welcome back :-)

Just a heads up; I'm a huge fan of Arkham Horror / Mansions of Madness.

Great to hear/read that experience!

The initial AI design was based around Monte Carlo Tree Search; however, all the logic in the game didn't lend itself for simulation environments. (Procluding GA's as well) At some point I do want to make a model of the Xenonauts game mechanics; and work from there. Once I get some downtime, I'll most definitely look into it again. (Note though that once I go that route; I'll probably go with MCTS as the basis for the AI, instead of behavior trees. AIProps values will become less important then though.)

Heh, maybe I'll release a build showing why not. :-P (It seems fun at first, till you release the AI will find the nastiest corners and make sure you can't cross without some Close Encounters of the Seventh Kind.)

Just be glad that I didn't make them camp around corners, full of TU.. (evil)

The moment one of the alien units engages you; it will call in back up. They will all also move towards locations where they think you are. Which is the most I can obviously do without people calling me a cheater for that as well .

This is an excerpt of the document I wrote on the AI of Xenonauts: So; yes, increasing the HP will probably ensure a lower value of the target. This due to the fact that the relative damage done decreases.

The AI takes the "effectiveness" of a weapon into account; and it does prioritize based on "value". Value being a pretty long formulea; which I documented in aiprops.xml!