Quartermaster

What you are saying makes sense to me at least. I am going to attempt to break down what I think you mean into the logical structure of how the transparency would be determined. For each soldier the transparency for the objects on the soldier's tile and neighboring tiles would be determined, by the following: 1. If the same tile, any of the tiles spectres (except the ground tile) that are oriented SE or SW would be transparent. 2. On the tiles that are SE and SW of the tile the soldier is standing on, the walls that are NW and NE, respectively, would be transparent. 3. On the tiles that are SE, S, and SW of the soldier's tile, if there is a spectre that takes up the whole tile it would be rendered transparent. It should not be necessary to check tiles beyond these, because the isometric view should prevent them from overlapping the soldier.

Just got a chance to look at this. It looks really useful and I have been worried that folks have not been downloading the most up to date version of the weapon editor when new versions of Xenonauts are released. It will be nice to have a website that would prompt them when the new version is up.

The game can handle semi-transparency already (at least it does so in the sub-map editor which uses the same engine). It does so whenever you have a soldier inside a room on the southern facing walls. I'm guessing that changing the dynamic so that semi-transparency is determined by the proximity to a soldier should be possible at this point. Edit: Never mind... I read the first page and didn't notice there was a second page to the thread.

Kettle hats are too unrealistic . I would prefer that my soldiers be able to wear aluminum top hats like the one Abraham Lincoln wore during the alien invasion of 1861 to ensure that the president was never mind controlled. That seems like a more historically accurate use of human technology in our war against the new alien threat.

The main reason for not having more weapons is that the existing ones are meant to fill certain "roles." The concern is that adding a bunch of weapons to the game that have very little attribute differences to distinguish between them does not add much to the game. With that said the game is being designed to be very flexible so we will be able to add weapons to the game by modding (like the ones you have mentioned). The game files actually already include some soviet and alternative NATO weaponry that can be added in via modding.

What seems to make this difficult is that we are trying to use rank for two purposes: documenting soldier progression and a mythical Chinook chain of command. Maybe it is necessary to have two sets of descriptions. The first would document the soldiers advancement in ability over time. Lets call it Experience and it would follow a structure like this: Rookie -> Squaddie -> Veteran -> Champion -> Hero. The second would document what the soldier's rank is on the Chinook which should be a competitive system with the most veteran/experienced troops serving as the higher ranking officers. On an 8 man Chinook there would be 2 Sergeants, 2 Corporals, and 4 Privates. On a 12 man Chinook there would be 1 Lieutenant, 2 Sergeants, 3 Corporals and 6 Privates. On larger craft you might add in a Captain rank. Although this is a little bit unrealistic in that soldiers don't have a rank when not on a craft these terms make the military ranks actually useful in combat because they indicate ability and would avoid the 10 Colonel problem.

I don't mind the tags coming up, but as Gauddlike mentioned it could be a bit much. Maybe an intermediate step could be added. Essentially if a unit has a "tag" regarding something pertinent, there could be a small light popup over that persons info (something visible but about half the height of the current icons). Whenever the mouse is moved over it, it pull up onto the screen with the icons that are pertinent to that soldier between it and that persons info.

To properly balance the weapons I think we have to look at the properties for the aliens a little more. With a kinetic armor of 25 a sebillian soldier is going to take a heck of a lot of rifle rounds to drop one with the current values (it only gets worse if you look at Androns). I suppose the question is, should Xenonaut Rifleman need support weapons to deal with alien soldiers and guards at the ballistic tier or does the ballistic rifle that need buffed a bit to have more utility than simply suppression? Sebillian Guards more resilient to damage than Andron Guards for example and Caesan Guard armor becomes paper thin (they could be dropped in a single burst if all rounds hit). After looking at this a My feeling on it is that it is could use a little bump, but after looking at the parameters for the aliens it would require an increase in the parameters values for the other races (Androns especially). If the rifle is increased it would be necessary to modify the other a lot of other aliens to keep the differences in the number of shots consistent with how they are now. The 5 mitigation increase ends up making little, if the Assault Rifle is to get a buff it will need to be in the accuracy and range department OR possibly making the burst fire four rounds (I believe the M16 was still issued as a fully automatic in 1979). By the way the resilience of the Sebillian guard might currently have incorrect values unless Sebillians are supposed to be super tough. The Sebillian Guard has a resilience of 80 compared to the 60 for Caesan's and 50 for Andron's. So I would not use the Sebillian Guard as the measuring stick for different weapons. This is giving me the idea that adding a graph to my modding program that shows the accuracy, damage per round, and the expected number to death would be quite useful.

I was looking at the spectre for the power core, and I am thinking that the engines are in the "damaged" state which looks like the undamaged version, but does not give you loot on recovery and you can walk through them.

The code is up to date with the current version of the game. It can now handle the isMelee and isHypervelocity tags for weapons. Everything is up to date and seems to be working fine. Please let me know if you are having any difficulties. As per the usual, replace the current files with those in the fixedfiles zip file. The files are coordinated with one another unlike the vanilla files (names match between weapons & weapons_gc, etc.). Downloads Installation Files: Installation Files Fixed Files: Fixed Files Code: Raw Code (For those that are interested) Also is there any way to change the name of the thread so that it reflects which version of the game it is updated with?

When decreasing the AP per shots try to bear in mind that the shotgun replacement in later tiers is the carbine. Primarily, the carbine fires more shots for a less AP at the cost of range at the moment. Obviously that can be balanced at a later time, but it might be difficult to drop the number of AP per shot at that tier.

Open levelsetup.xml in the Xenonauts assets folder Notepad. Edit the following line so that it goes from this: <Map tileset="Industrial" mapname="industrial_scout1" /> To this: <!--<Map tileset="Industrial" mapname="industrial_scout1" />-->

I kept getting just the 'industrial_scout1' map and thought it was odd so I looked in the levelsetup.xml file and that map was not commented out like the other ones. I commented it out and I started to get other maps.

Holy Crap! The hypervelocity tag is amazing. I just shot a sebillian non-combatant through two walls and two units of shelving with an AP rocket. Why should I even bring fragmentation rockets anymore?

I was just doing a Quick Battle and an Andron took a shot at one of my soldiers and then stepped into a burning fire. The Andron died and the game stopped taking the alien turns. The FPS counter in the top left was still changing so the program was running, but it seemed to be stuck in the loop that controlled whose turn it was.

Uploading the update on Desura right now!

If an "autoresolve" feature were to be added that was essentially "let the world forces take care of it", it would be interesting to have the results be somewhat monetarily negative for Xenonauts, but positive in the long run for those nations. Essentially as nations defeat the aliens they will be capturing the technology and decipher it themselves thus becoming personnally stronger and needing Xenonauts less (and thus giving less funding). Based on their level of strength it would influence the likelihood of their alien ship assaults going well. This is going on a bit of a tangent from the purpose of the thread, but along with this idea maybe nations could be made more dynamic and interesting by allowing negotiations with nations and establishing infrastructure with them. For example, maybe you could make a $200,000 investment in the USSR to tie their radar installations data in with Xenonauts' with the effect of a 5% chance / x amount of time of detecting UFOs over their territory. Another idea would be negotiating with nations about what responsibilities each organization has in the defence of that region with say Africa handling Scout class ships in their region in exchange for Xenonauts prioritizing the defence of their region (higher penalties for failing to deal with terror sites and large assault craft).

Thanks Chris!

United States Army Reserve as a Quartermaster. One year long tour in Iraq 2004-2005. Left the service as a Sergeant.

We have been discussing game balance, design, and mechanics a lot in some of the more recent threads (e.g. suppression) and I thought it might be interesting to put up an article from a couple of years ago about how video games can be addicting. This article is particularly interesting to me because my research is very behavioral (the figure between the hamster and the guy happy at the casino is the type of data we work on). It is really interesting to contrast more modern games with X-COM and the difference between how the virtual environment is designed to make gameplay enjoyable. X-COM has a lot of delayed gratification mechanics on the global scale, but has some really nice immediate punishers (losing soldiers) and reinforcers (killng aliens) during ground combat. Not to mention the great feeling of coming up with winning strategy and tactics. What do you guys think of the article and what are your thoughts on ways we can look at the mechanics for Xenonauts to make it more fun/addicting without becoming too repetitive? The article is here: 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

Adding an entire set of underwater tiles and maps, not to mention plausible underwater weaponry (superheating water while you are near it probably isn't the best of ideas) would be a lot of work that is not integral to the game being good. However this could be an interesting project for modders after the game is completed. There would be a lot of interesting concepts and battle methods that could be explored. Maybe something more realistic than TFTD for underwater combat would be more interesting.

Looks like a nice solution! Hopefully they will add a parameter to the config file that will allow you to set the ratio between the two sexes.

Whenever you make changes to spectres to affects all of the items in the game that use that spectre. There are currently a lot of typos in the spectres which results in weird situations in the game (especially with the Scout). I would not be shy about correcting them. There was an instance when I went through an entire set of spectres for some of the old buildings and fixed them. I uploaded them and Chris implemented them which fixed many of the spectre problems at that time (since then the tiles have changed and I haven't fiddled with them again). At this point they are simply adding tiles and will be going back and fixing them later.

I think the changes are a dramatic improvement on the original version. I have only played one game with the new expansion, but it seems to make the game more interesting and strategic.

This is mainly for Chris, but if anyone knows I would like to know the answer to this so that I can correct it in the program. So I have realized that I missed a tag for updating the program files that affects the function of melee weapons (just the medikit right now). This is mainly for my information, but does anyone know why there is a "isMelee" tag in properties and also a melee weapon type? It seems repetitive and I am wondering if the purpose for the isMelee tag is for any weapon that has a melee attack (for example pistol whipping an alien) or simply repetitive and I need to have it included for any "Melee" weapon.