Solver

New entry buttons? What do you mean?

Because XNT is very outdated It's for old versions of X:CE, doesn't really use the modular mods system in the best way, and suffers a bit technically for that. It's definitely fairly close to vanilla though despite all the new guns. Then he asks on Reddit or the Steam forums, and you say the best mods to start with are X:CE and X-Division. Even if the X-Division loading tips not say to play vanilla X:CE first. Well, that has improved. X:CE is now advertised prominently as a Steam news item in the Xenonauts section. X:CE being after all unofficial, I think it's now getting advertised to the best extent possible. I try my best, among other places in the X:CE introduction thread, to explain what X:CE is, and underscore that it is not a mod.

I think you X-Division guys are too negative towards the vanilla experience. It's a lot of fun. I've put way too many hours into vanilla or lightly-modded vanilla, and it's great to me. A lot like the original X-Com, but with some very nice additions (like suppression), and an interface that isn't 20 years old. You also seem to think of X-Division as something that can replace vanilla, which I don't agree with. Say, I wouldn't recommend X-Division to a first-time Xenonauts player. It's much harder, it starts slightly harder than the vanilla game and gets much harder from there - and let's be honest, the default Xenonauts game is hard enough for most players, especially those who didn't start with X-Com 20 years ago. Basically, my question here is, what is the optimal vanilla-like experience in Xenonauts, with slight tweaks? We have X-Division for a major overhaul. My personal opinion is that the best vanilla-like experience is with Dynamic UFOs, Armoured Assault, and a few more minor tweaks I've made on top of those. It is quite possible that it's impossible to get something much better out of vanilla without changing the design fundamentally - that limitation of what vanilla can do has to exist somewhere after all.

I am not sure if I remember right, but I think landed UFOs give the bonus even in vanilla!

@Charon It's like I said, my ideas are of a much smaller scope than X-Division. Sure X-Division started as a small bunch of tweaks, but by now it's no longer a tweaked vanilla game. It's a game with a different design, and it adds stuff because it's a different game, not just to fix some vanilla balance issues. All the new weapons, enemies, manufactures, etc., it's a major rework. Not a "let me fix the Hunter" type of mod. Or you may be right and perhaps vanilla really cannot be taken any further without changing the basics. And I did read that Tried some of them before, even. Still unsure. Let me be more specific: Maintenance costs, more loot money: already wrote about these. Makes more grinding. Increased landing chances and types dramatically - tried that. Some improvement but not very much. Largely because of the shootdown danger. Even the landed UFO can shoot you down if it happens to take off just as you're next to it! Improving dropship speed could be helpful in combination with that, though. Buffing UFO interceptors in strength or numbers isn't productive. This is because we cannot launch dropships with escorts. If we could, it would be much better. But yes I do like your thinking

You're right, it's very difficult to change the Geoscape a lot without massive new content like X-Division. But that's something I am interested in. X-Division is almost a different game, and it's massive. Vanilla/XCE could still improve though, I think. Largely because the current Geoscape balance is not intentional. Chris didn't want for air combat to be so much more important than ground, he didn't intend for players to build extra bases with 6 interceptors in them, and he also didn't intend for players to grind 80 crash sites for cash. UFO disassemblies in X-Division are a good way of making a second strike team more important, along with adding a new element to the economy. But that's a pretty dramatic change. The issue in vanilla is that where you get missions is very closely related to your base locations and base ranges. Most ground missions are crash sites and therefore typically occur within the radius of your bases - and always occur thanks to air combat. There are very few missions that pop up for other reasons, and you generally want to prevent them. Hence my thought with local landing detection - it's a way of providing missions that are not tied to air combat, and that don't carry the disastrous consequences of terror missions if failed. The difficulty for me of course is that I don't want a huge change to the game. There's already x-Division for that, with its own design. I am looking for something that improves on the basic vanilla design of Xenonauts. At the same time, it creates problems for economic solutions. Increasing airplane maintenance and/or ground loot sounds good (I've done the latter, slightly). I've made more UFOs land. But all of that will just lead players to grind more missions for the maintenance money. I want ground combat to be important, but I don't want a grind where you have to do every mission. Even in vanilla, people typically do many crash sites exactly as a result of high maintenance costs for airplanes, which were introduced pre-release to try and counter this very problem. Difficult stuff

Hardly. I found the issue is more that it's very unsafe to fly during a UFO wave because of the possibility of your dropship being shot down. That is suboptimal. Really the whole feature is silly. I like your mindset I think there's room for a "community expansion" mod that changes the game in ways beyond what X:CE does (which is very closely related to Goldhawk's intentions) but is not a dramatic overhaul of the game in the way that megamods like X-Division are. I don't have many plans in regards to actually modding the game in a traditional way now, but I'd be very interested in giving some feedback on your ideas, and then if you discover that you cannot implement some things because the modding framework doesn't support that, I would possibly expand that via X:CE.

Fair enough, though it's an extremely long shot. Difficult to see how PF could be persuaded.

Tracking down the people isn't the problem. The issue is that the engine is property of the company, even if they've abandoned it, so there's no chance the individual devs could help in any way if they're no longer at the company.

What specifically do you think could be done? The company (PlayFirst) still exists and still makes casual browser/mobile games but I'm sure they don't care about the engine anymore. I've been involved in one successful effort to get a source code release before (over 10 years ago), and that was quite challenging even though the source was available. With the Xenonauts engine, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even available anymore. One more reason I have to add about why having the source would be nice is, it would be an improvement just to recompile the engine with a different compiler. Currently Xenonauts only compiles with MSVC2008, and I know even llunak wasn't able to make it compile with another compiler - even VC2010 - due to some issues with linking, and he's more competent at this than I am.

It's also on Mobygames in a more readable, and cross-referenceable, format: http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/xenonauts/credits

@Charon, I will make a note to try something with the ambient sounds when GC ends (can't hurt at least) but I think your attempts to add hundreds of sounds will just be a stability disaster no matter what.

I'm playing with this mod, so yes, landed detection is in 0.34.2, although it's perhaps not optimal. More disappointingly, I've implemented most of the changes I wrote up here, and they're really not having the effect on the game that I had hoped for (and this is why I haven't posted the mod). The Chinook is so slow that attacking landed UFOs outside radar range is still often impractical. The higher resource costs I've implemented just make the grinding problem worse, as you need to do more ground missions in order to get equipment, and that in turn means you need to dominate air to get enough crash sites... not something I intended. One change I've really enjoyed out of these is that Quantum Centres also act as a radar. It's a subtle but very good change when it comes into play. The ability to retake lost bases hasn't had any actual effect. I'm very much looking forward to your expansion ideas, it seems to me that your preferences regarding gameplay are quite similar to mine. Maybe there's something we could cooperate on, with X:CE features or otherwise. Or you can just get hop onto a train, buy me a burger and then I'll owe you some X:CE coding

Quoting Chris on the subject: And:

That's right, neither the X:CE developers nor Goldhawk have the engine source code. Geez guys, why do you think X:CE is the way it is? Half of the things that suck in this game could be fixed by coders with engine access. And a lot of the code - original and X:CE - consists of very creative ways to work around the engine's limitations. The choice of engine was the biggest mistake in the development of Xenonauts. The engine is intended for games much simpler than Xenonauts (and is quite suited to that), it's also a free engine with no licensing costs or such so it could be used on a low budget, but that means there's no support for the company. And the company abandoned the engine and all support for it some 2 years before Xenonauts was even released. If we had the engine source code, we'd be able to fix issues like this with sound, further improve loading speed and performance, and fix things such as UI scaling or those stupid bugs with upper UFO floors.

There's not an issue in the actual ambient sound code as far as I can tell, but the few related problems I have seen do point to the engine being stuck somewhere in its sound system. And that's where I get stuck as well since I don't have the source code.

Why would a missing shadow cause a problem when the bullet hits though?

But that means it's not an X:CE bug, right?

Yes, that seems to be the general pattern. I've noticed the game has some difficulty playing sounds, of course, but this is engine territory - with it being as bad as it is, large amounts of sounds is just one of the many things that it cannot properly handle.

Two or three weeks ago when investigating this, I probably tried this 15 times I'm sure there's something wrong with the ambient sounds though. Perhaps instead of cutting music, I should forcibly terminate all ambient sounds as combat ends?

I have never experienced a crash-on-load while playing by myself. I do have some saves that crash on loading, but there my attempts to disable all sound when ending GC didn't improve anything, as reported by you guys. So I am still unsure as to whether there's a specific improvement to be made.

Yes, they'll keep spawning for as long as possible.

Once you go past a couple dozen Reapers, it's hard to predict exactly how many will spawn, so you can have numbers differ like that.

Needs someone like Draku who wants to do a UI...

There used to be an option to allow nested quotes. They decided to remove that...