Skitso

Hey guys! I've been away for ages and this is my first experience of X2 since the last demo years ago, so naturally a lot has changed since. I'll start playing and just type random things here as soon as I find something to report: - Nice looking main menu! I'd love the geoscape to look in-game like the green screen back here. I like the new subtle background scrolling effect - Love the music - A bit low resolution images for my 27" 1440p screen. (main menu and loading screen) - quite a long loading time... you shouldn't have the loading bar stay at 100% and have the game still load for 15 more seconds. Feels like the game has crashed. - Ooh, the game looks nice! Really sharp! And performance is top notch too! Nice job here! - UI looks nice and modern overall. Soldier portraits look amazing. Things I don't like UI wise: I'm not quite sure I like how the TU and health bars are dispayed below weapons. Attack style buttons and top right menu buttons are too big and obtrusive. For my playstyle, I don't need them at all. Hopefully this will be customizable in the final build. (See my second post below for my quick UI idea) - I'd like to open inventory with "i" - I'd like to be able to switch soldiers when inventory is open (from top portraits or number keys). Inventory close button is ugly. - Music is still awesome! - AI turn is bit of a visual mess: camera jumps around too much, hidden movement screen blinks annoyingly again and again. You should try to make it so that the AI turn starts by showing all the visible activities first, and only after that, fade the screen darker, display the hidden movement image and THEN run all activities that happen out of sight back to back without blinking in and out of hidden movement. Right now it looks a bit broken and way too erratic. - AI turn ends with a camera centered to a completely black screen. Annoying... should center to my troops at the beginning of my turn instead. - Trying to order a unit to move into the fog of war... and the cursor (the square pulsating one on the ground) vanishes under the black shroud. That doesn't feel right... - Hmm, a civilian got killed somewhere, I think. human injury/death sound effects seem to be same bad ones as in X1? - Roofs on/off should have an additional "automatic" setting which should also be on as a default. Meaning that helicopter roof should be always visible as long as there are no troops inside. You have really nice visuals here, don't hide them if you don't need to. This is also true to all tree tops, building roofs etc. They should always be visible unless there're troops or aliens in/behind and in Xenonauts' sight. EDIT: Related a bit to the roof thing above, (going by the youtube videos, as you don't have ufo's in this demo), you should have similar cut-out look with the UFO's as you have with the helicopter. Removing the hull completely has always looked a bit odd and unfinished to my eyes. The cut-out look you've done with the Chinook looks so much cooler! - Hmmm, info pop ups are starting to annoy me already on turn three. I know already what the end turn button does. Give me an option to turn these off or at least up the time it takes to appear. - Got an alien overwatch shot from the fog of war. The unit was revealed though - the alien just stood alone there in the middle of blackness. It was on top of a container i presume. Looked odd nevertheless. - Targeting line made of small green squares looks really dated. Disappointed seeing it's taken directly from X1 - should be something a lot nicer looking. - There's something odd going on when selecting units... It's not as intuitive or easy as it could and should be. Firstly, the target reticle cursor should be clearly different looking when you have nothing selected. Now it's pretty much the same with only a bit of a different color. Second, you can select the tile where the unit stands without actually selecting the unit and that makes targeting feel a bit messy. THIS IS A HIGH PRIORITY TO GET RIGHT! - Hah, a lonely alien seemed to run away. If so, nice AI. - Huh, MARS went through a concrete wall. Doesn't feel right for such a small machine? - Storage room with tons of shelves with cardboard boxes looks bland. Should have more detail and variation. - Still really pleased how good and smooth this game looks. Top notch animation. - LMG feels overpowered - I have my sniper on top of a container. When I select him, clicking the portrait, the camera won't center to him but just rise to a correct level. A second click to a portrait centers correctly. (is this intended behavior?) - Would like to reload with "r" - Smoke and fire animations looks ace. Broken ground after explosion - not so much. A grid of red/brown squares look terrible to be frank. - SFX balance is a bit off I think. Some sounds are too soft, others too loud. (Breaking a prop with explosion almost made me deaf!) - Cool looking blood particles when troops are hit! - Man the alien overwatch is deadly - Alien reserved everything to overwatch while it had two of my troops in sight. Should have been more aggressive, move to a cover and shoot? - A camera zoom could be nice. - Uh oh, I just realized one of my troops was bleeding. It's told at the beginning of the turn in a pop-up, but the effect icons could be more visible... Maybe have them on top portrait icon and left side of the big portrait, under the kneel icon? The current location seems a bit random... - Had one alien standing in a corner of two containers doing nothing for several turns until I killed it. Overall a really nice demo with great visuals, music and SFX. I love the overall polish and you are clearly going in the right direction! Keep it up. And @Chris, I'm still available for mapping if needed.

While it doesn't look visually equally interesting, moving TU's and health below the middle portrait could make things more easy to read. This would also free some space under the weapons so you could move attack mode, reload, grenade etc icons there so they wouldn't float on top of the main playfield area.

'Nuff said. This is compatible with pretty much any version. Installation: Download Unpack to /assets/soldierimagesfemale/armour.basic/ -folder. Overwrite everything.

Over 5000 downloads already! Thanks for all the praise and feedback. I truly appreciate it! WHAT IS IT? The pack contains more than 70 new high quality maps for desert, industrial, farm and middle east tilesets. In addition to these new maps, I've completely remade tons of vanilla maps and also made some smaller modifications to some of their ufo division to minimize the chance of dublicate maps on course of a single playthrough. All lightscout maps are now unique instead of just smaller versions of scout/corvette maps. All vanilla farm maps have also been more or less redone as I have always thought they are not quite up to standard and they also now contain forests to some degree. I've also included my improved tree stumps in this map pack as the vanilla versions are kinda ugly. The maps include lots of custom buildings and other props, random elements and multiple spawn point variations for both ufos and dropships. I've also added new forest tiles, (farm tileset), highway tiles (industrial), oasis tiles (desert) and walkable shipping container roofs with makeshift stairs to reach them (desert and industrial) and used them in several maps to give some additional variation in those tilesets. This map pack has now also merged in the Xenonauts: Community Edition (X:CE) So if you are using it, there's no need to download this separately. COMPATIBILITY This pack is 100% compatible with practically any release of Xenonauts. Also compatible with FitH and other major mods and is designed in a way you can overwrite everything when installing. Some of these maps have already been approved by GoldHawk's project lead, Chris, and are added officially in the game, but this pack has the definitive versions of all of them, so you can safely overwrite everything when installing the pack. These can be used mid campaign too with 100% save game compatibility. IMAGES Click the spoiler button below to see screenshots. HOW TO GET IT? V1.62 (Last updated 20.03.15 DDMMYY) >DOWNLOAD HERE< INSTALLATION Download the map pack Head to your Xenonauts install directory Backup everything in case something goes wrong. (Or for some bizarre reason would like to play the game without this pack ) Copy the content of the zip into the /assets/ folder in the Xenonauts directory overwriting everything. Install the stair patch (read this) Play the game! Acknowledgements: Special thanks go to Kabill and Khall for providing me several additional maps for industrial and middle east tilesets. These maps also gave me lots of inspiration and new ideas. Thanks guys! Thanks to khall for the great inspiration to my new rural factory map. (winning idea in the "I'll realize your map idea" -thread)

I hope a visual redesign for geoscape will look something like that new art in the @Chris' post above. Striking green background, big bold yellow pulsating rings for missions and slowly fading long yellow lines behind ufo's and aircraft. I'd love to see visual flavor like that! Looks exactly like a strategic map some military organization would use. Good luck with the baby and congratulations!

I'm quite disappointed with how simplistic, empty and sterile the maps are looking AGAIN, with too few claustrophobic close quarters opportunities, height differences and larger buildings. Most maps that are in at the moment look like game maps, not lived spaces... and it's the same issue X1 had back in the days. Especially FARM maps don't look like real places at all, but more like shooting galleries with random props sprinkled here and there with no rhyme or reason. I'm still available for additional mapping if the new engine and editor makes it possible and@Chris still wants me. The other thing that really bugs me are the new tile based UFO's. I love the gameplay benefits it grants, mind you, but at least at the moment they just look silly sheet metal rooms that are standing in the middle of a map. There are two main issues: The most important is that they don't have any hull what so ever - only thin metal walls. Where are the engines, cannons and stuff? In X1 the black area between outer and inner walls created just enough hull space that they felt believable aircrafts. Now the UFO's seem like just flying rooms. Second is that the UFO's don't look like they've landed/crashed there only moments ago. I'd love to see a difference between crashed and landed UFO's: landed UFO's should not be flat on a ground level, but rest on their landing gears above ground on level 1. Crashed UFO's should be on level 0 without landing gears with tons of smoke, fire and debris around them. I really, REALLY hope Goldhawk can do something about the UFO's on tactical maps as ATM they just don't look that hot. On my opinion raiding the UFO's is the number one thing in XCOM- styled games and to make them feel alien, imposing, mysterious and threatening, you really need to put some effort in it. EDIT: uhhh, after writing this rant, I realised this might not have been exactly the right thread to put this in, but...

Yeah, one of the biggest issues I had with the original was how sterile everything looked, sounded and felt. I'd love to see crashed ufos surrounded with fire, smoke, broken houses, fallen and cut trees, debris, alien corpses and random bits and pieces scattered around. Also, landed ufos (at least at the moment) look like stationary buildings that are part of the scenery rather than some otherworldly space craft landed there... It might help to rise the landed ufo half a tile up and add some landing gear beneath them maybe? Landed ufos could also have some alien machinery set up around them or something to differentiate them from crash sites as if the aliens are performing some tests and calculations or what not. While I don't miss full voice over for the marines, I agree that their death screams need to be brutal and varied. I find the old FPS game called Blood has pretty much the right idea on it's cultist voice over how it should be done:

Great to see you again kabill. Hope to mod with you once again.

I'm highly sensitive to variable framerates and it causes eye strain, nausea and headaches during and after longer gaming sessions. I have just recently upgraded my computer to i5 7400, GTX1070, 16GB RAM, SSD etc. so it's pretty up to date and powerful. With fantastic graphic settings my FPS alters between 29 and something way over 100. With vsync enabled it's 29-60, so it doesn't help that much and i just can't stomach playing the game. I need to set the graphics setting all the way down to fast to get even close to locked 60 fps performance - and even then the game drops few frames every now and then. This I can tolerate, but the game looks... well not that great anymore. As we all know, the game is still very much in developement and often the engine and graphics optimisations are done much closer to the release. What I'd like to know, I guess, is that can I hope the performance to improve before launch and if so, any idea how much? Also, it would be interesting (and maybe helpful to Goldhawk) to see peoples performance metrics with different systems. So please post your specs and FPS with different graphics options. (you can see the FPS using software called FRAPS) P.S. Is there a way to enable AA with this game? P.S.S. is it normal that the transparent windows and doors are dithered?

Congrats! Havea great honeymoon!

I'm not sure if the kickstarter demo mission is meant to be a night mission, but it really needs a more brooding atmosphere. I'd like to know if reduced FOV, darker tiles, flares etc. are still planned. An example from my X1 Oppressive mod what I want:

Yeah, I hear you. Turn based geoscape could be a solution to force people to take night missions. (Missions could expire before morning/day turn)

Because of suspense? This is kinda same subject as view cones. I just like the additional horror element it gives me...

I rather enjoy the claustrofobic feeling that restricted vision cones give. It's not just a gameplay topic, but a fundamental thing that changes how the game feels.

Nice work with the illustration. For my tastes, it's wayyyyy too cluttered and busy though. I like my games clean and simple. The less intrusive the UI is, the better. As long as all the relevant information is still available, of course.

Smartest, most efficient and logical AI isn't always the one that offers the most fun game play experience. Sure, it should offer a hard enough challenge, but I feel that a "good AI" requires a lot more than an opponent that does all the right decisions in every combat scenario. AI should have varied, fun and unexpected reactions to players actions so that a player could never be 100% sure what an opponent does, even if the "right action" was obvious. AI can and should do wrong moves every now and then. Stupid mistakes are fun, as long as there's some logic why the enemy does what it does. Moving back and forth between two covers burning all the TU's and not run away or shoot a Xenonaut standing in the adjacent tile is wrong kind of stupid behavior. Don't want that.

Current UI is place holder though...

If I remember correctly, rushed end game was because of budget reasons. There simply wasn't enough time or money to test, balance and polish the game beyond corvette. I'm sure Goldhawk won't make the same mistake with X-2.

How about this: the minitabs are minimalistic on default, and when mouse hovering, it displays more info? Minitab could also be removed while details are displayed so there's no duplicate information on screen.

Nice idea, but for me that looks way too busy. I'm really struggling to find a solution that looks clean but also displays all the relevant information. Better place for flag is next to the name in the main UI, it's a bit too much in the minitab I think.

@Gijs-Jan @silencer above has even more powerful graphics card and still even lower fps than what I have. The game seems to be a bit CPU bound too, maybe? If you have better performance than me or silencer, maybe it's your CPU? Do you have a modern, 8xxx i5 or i7?

@Gijs-Jan Does the game run a lot better with your 1070? If so, it must be something at my end. Drivers or something... I do get a decent performance in other games though. For example Far Cry 5 with 2560x1440 and ultra settings runs locked 60 pretty much all the time. Same with Doom and say... Mad Max for example. And everything maxed. I need to check the AA situation again then...

Yeah, been missing the numbers. I'd love to have additional info when hovering cursor over minitabs. Something like this: You could also add the nationality like in the community edition. I kinda liked that. There could also be status symbols like bleeding, stunned, mind controlled etc.

@Chris A quick test: Camera on top of the building left from the starting position so that the roof is removed. Fantastic - 29fps Beautiful - 34fps Good - 37fps Simple - 44fps Fast - 68fps Fastest - 68fps As you can see, even with my relatively powerful gaming rig, the only playable (60 lock with vsync) settings are the 2 lowest.

Actually no, I need to drop graphic settings all the way down to fast (or whatever the second lowest one is) to make the game run smoothly (~60fps). It's the setting where dynamic lights are completely off I think.