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I'm running win 7 64-bit, but can't run the demo for more than about 10 mins before it causes a BSOD. It's just the standard ailien recovery mission. I know the game version is up to v17 or something but if this is happening to those that have come to see what xen is all about I think it may just put them off. Is there a more up-to-date version that you can play/test to make sure it works on your PC before comitting to buying the game? I'm already on-board, but many may not take the risk if they are given a demo that crashes with alarming regularity. And if there is, would you consider replacing v10.2 (from the KS page) with it as that's the first point of contact for most 'nubies' with xenonauts?

when there are new maps? is frustrating play with only two maps

Hi guys, every once in a while I search the interweb for news on my favorite game of all times (guess what -> X-Com ). I'm not really a gamer so I tend to not get the latest news... This time I was really glad to see that so much is going on in the X-Com-Sphere: Two official games, UFO:AI gaining traction again ... and then I found Xenonauts! I think I had this on my radar a while back but now this had become a real playable game... And with a successful kickstarter (will support asap ) there's a real chance of actually getting a fully playable game. So much for the introduction, now here's my 2 cents on the kickstarter demo: 1) It's fun to play Sounds strange, but I think that's one of the most important things. I just plain enjoyed playing the game, which I can't say for every X-Com "successor" or "clone" out there. While I understand that you only stuck with the tile-based architecture due to engine limitations, I think it captures the whole X-Com experience rather fantastic. The graphics aren't too realistic but they have their own style and imo are very well done. You don't need a high-res polygon 3d model to get attached to your soldiers. Sure, the AI needs some improvement, so does the interface, but even in the current state it's fun to play (specially the tactical). 2) Underwater missions would be fun I started X-Com with TFTD when I was a kid so I'm a bit biased, but I would love to see underwater missions. I saw that there was a heated discussion about this and I fully understand that it might be out of scope for (the first release ) of Xenonauts. Noone says that there can't be a Xenonauts: TFTD though . 3) Add some suspense One of the great thing about X-COM was that some missions were borderline horror shows. You'd only see a few tiles because it was deep underwater or night and then along comes a Lobster Man and cuts you in half... 4) The "hidden movement" screens tend to be a bit too lenghty for my taste 5) Air combat It's already a great improvement over the original, however imo it's not using the full potential... Would be nice to have more control over how your planes fly/attack and have more fighters in the air (e.g. 5 vs 3). I'm still in the beginning stages of the demo, however most fights just tend to be "fly to alien vessel and shoot your rockets". 6) Civilians I would love it if the civilians could get a bit more "realistic" ai... E.g. a typical unarmed civilian would run towards the nearing Xenonauts and then seek shelter near the helicopter. And while they're running by, Xenonauts could "question" them, which would result in approximate positions of the aliens that the questioned civi saw while he was running for his life. Soldiers could fire around for no reason (cause they panicked). Some other things I loved How you can move your soldiers from cover to cover How your soldiers "jump" over fences The jeeps The animation of fire bursts The animation of explosions The graphics of crashed ufos and the landing helicopter I might throw in a few more ideas/suggestions/comments when I played a bit longer, for now just keep on the great work!

Hello, I became interested in xenonauts because of paulsoaresjr. I remember him saying something to the effect of 'after the kickstarter finishes they are going to release a new beta version for everyone'. Does anyone know when this release is going to be? I apologize if my post has been answered elsewhere, I'm new here obviously. This game is awesome so far!

I've been following the comments quite closely on the Xenonauts kickstarter page, and comments made by people who have come here since the kickstarter began, and there seems to be a common thread throughout them - that people are treating the released alpha like either a late-stage beta, or a release-candidate demo. Now, why is that? (this isn't a retorical question. I have spent too long playing the alpha to think of it as anything else other than an alpha. I don't know how people could see it as anything other than an alpha, but comments lead me to believe that they don't think of it like an alpha. Anyone cleverer than me got any ideas?)

Generally favorable comments, though a few people are grippling. http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=58869&page=14 I've tried to explain (as i understand) the confusion over stretch goals and how/why it works. I hope i didnt make it worse. FYI I'm davidf there I do think that this project has some extra challanges that most others dont, in that some people think this is simpply a reskinned X-Com and dont understand its a completely seperate game! I think in this way Xenonauts has been a victim of its own success. To some (and even me) it feels so much like the original, its hard to aknowledge that their is actually a delta.

playing the kickstarter demo shows a game that still needs a lot of work but is coming together nicely and shows some serious potential. If I tried to play it any longer though, I probably would have thrown my laptop out the window. enemies can apparently shoot through closed doors. trying to right click anything in the combat UI menu will cause you soldier to look towards the spot on the map behind the menu spawning reaction fire and getting him killed. I did have an enemy fire at one of my soldiers and miss, hitting a the now dead soldier i just mentioned causing him to scream "Argh!" as if he was still alive. It was awesome. Biggest gameplay issue: the unarmed chinook should not be able to attempt to intercept a ufo. if you send it out towards a grounded ufo and it takes off, it should lose it's target, stopping time and prompting the player to select new orders. otherwise when you send it out and hit the fast time button the ufo will take off and the chopper still intercepts and is instantly destroyed and you've lost your whole strike team. game over. I hope the final game will be much harder. You should be getting slaughtered initially. after several missions on veteran i had only lost soldiers due to issues i mentioned earlier. I am glad to see you guys using kickstarter. I have a feeling this game will be very successful there. as i'm writing this it is very close to being funded already. Any idea what will be considered if you raise, say, 100k? 250k? 1,000,000? people will want to know these things if you want them to fund past 100 percent. keep up the good work and good luck in your kickstarter quest!

I know this will likely be taken poorly, as I am 'new' to you and forums have an unspoken protocol that new visitors should speak when spoken to and keep their opinions to themselves until they have read everything... I am one of those, the x-com junkies from the 80's, who played that game more than any other in my life. What was it about that game, that made it so unique? It was a number of things, which I will list. 1. Atmosphere. The game had it in spades. It is the only game I have ever turned off the lights on at 2 in the morning to find some greys in a farmer's field in the middle of the night, and it creeped me out. Signs captured this with the midnight cornfield scene. 2. Multiple levels of game. From the strategic world fighter interception interface, to the squad level battlefield, which was made extra fun because it was destructable, this game had so many facets that were unique. Base building, customization, and a super nice geo-globe to rotate around. 3. Backstory. X-Com drew on the wealth of alien knowledge and literature, some amusing, some real, that made it so interesting. From cattle mutilations to alien abduction to moth men, it was in there. I have been waiting for years for it's rebirth. Terror from the deep was pathetic in comparison (I'm not sure who thinks they can throw hand grenades under water but apparently x-com programmers do...) And 3 need not even be mentioned, as it was an abomination. Finally you guys are bringing it back! Fantastic, I am excited. My ultimate dream (as for many others here) was that one would come out that allowed you to play the alien invaders. Go try Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds as an example of this. Brilliant artwork, story, and plot make it believable. Some lines for you to draw inspiration from: (taking place shortly after the military hunta stages a coup d'tat on Mars, taking over the peaceful government and setting the path to war with Earth...) [video=youtube;Mfd95Lo_Ni4] Your comments on an alien version are misguided. It would not be 'too easy', that is what game design is for. You would be forced to carry out numerous complicated missions while under attack from hostile humans and the x-com interception team and fighters. It would, in short, be awesome. But that can wait for a future date and future project. Now on to what you have built so far here. You seem to be trying to carbon copy x-com enemy unknown. Except for the blaster bombs, which you judge 'unbalanced' even though they come in late in the game and are used against incredible powerful aliens. They were also incredibly fun to use. Simply upping the cost into prohibitive levels would balance the weapon. No, I think you didn't want to bother designing the pathing tool for directing the missile in flight. Your comments about not including women are valid, given the complexity of the chore you see it as. I am glad you have finally relented to overwhelming pressure from the people paying for this project and are including them. The strategic map is ok. I understand again the programming limitations you are fighting with. A 3-D engine would have been far better but far costlier. The interception game appears broken in the demo. It is extremely frustrating to have fighters follow a ufo all day and finally run out of fuel, even when a head on pass interception is not rewarded with an engagement (as it was in the original) this should be fixed. Alternatively and a much better idea, which is straying into where I'm going next, USE YOUR IMAGINATION, STOP COPYING X-COM!!! Allow the player to research slight mods to various pieces of equipment in the game, starting with the fighter engines, armour and weapons and fuel range, as well as the chinook. (setting the game in 1970 poses obvious problems solved by the near future setting of x-com which allowed a believable jet powered drop ship able to travel vast distances. A chinook just doesn't cut it...) Another item you seem to have left out is the fact that the ufo's were doing something. They were not just wandering aimlessly and then generating some random (insert weather disruption, train strafe, ship attack here) they actually LANDED, and performed missions. This needs to be added back in, it all goes into creativity and believability. The UFO's need to slow down when they get over land, begin their scout mission, start hunting for juicy ripe cattle, whatever. Right now they are flying around doing laps out at sea pretty much wandering aimlessly. It get's boring after an hour, and this is trying to copy a game I would literally stare at FOR HOURS, with the clock in real-time (yes, I am that insane...) Secondly, you appear to be either carbon-copying x-com, or are at a loss for creative writing. There is a WEALTH of UFO knowledge out there, a lot of it since X-Com came out! Why are you not drawing on it? Do you even know about Whitley Strieber's dedicated site 'Out There' on this? Which contains hundreds of articles for your creative genius? Did you know he wrote The Day After Tomorrow disaster movie, from a conversation he had with an alien/angel/demon/robot...thing he met in a Toronto hotel room? The message from the aliens is that we offed too many scientists in the Holocaust, and now rather than inventing anti-gravity atmosphere vehicles (which is what UFO's are) we are stuck with jets in a gravity well on a planet that is dying and about to experience a rapid onset new ice age. Not to mention some of the aliens coming here like to grow alien-human hybrid thingys, just for the shits and giggles. Or that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is pretty much historical fact. Two of the transferred humans chose to remain on the alien homeworld, btw. All of this stuff is out there, just waiting for you to draw on for inspiration! It's ok! You CAN change the tech tree too! We don't really need to make laser rifles, just 'cause! Add a whole schwack of new stuff!! You can do it! It just takes some imagination! Not a lot of programming really! Just CREATIVE WRITING. I'd love to help you out with that, but I detect a kind of arrogant tone to your responses, in short, you'll take these fine folks' money but you won't listen too much cause you know what the game is your designing, and that's what your building. I offer an alternative. Use your imagination and draw on the creative talents of the fine people who have generously given you their hard earned cash. Make this game more than X-Com. And bring it into the modern era of UFOlogy, where so much more is now known. Apparently most of our souls do not die, for example! Neat. I have downloaded the demo and played it all night. In order to play it a second time I am already forced to hack the fighter stats to make it possible for them to overtake a ufo. This should be just another research arm, as there is a shortage of cool things to research in the beginning anyway. If the player chooses to simply make earth completely impregnable from UFO's but never goes after the main base (please don't tell me it's at Cygdonia again!!!) then so be it! Perhaps make the ending more along the lines of Day After Tomorrow, and we will all die unless we find a way to get to the stars.

So I've heard that three alien species are in demo, sebilians, greys(forgot in game name) and androns. But I've played demo several times and I've never encountered them, even before time demo ends. Are they actually in game, if they are, does anyone have pics or autopsy text for them? Unless those small flying drone things are actually androns I have assumed that they are just drones since you can't capture them because they explode and because they are called "light drones" in one patch at temporary name. That and "Andron" sounds like android.

I think it could be a really good idea if you guys were able to release a new demo build before the Kickstarter runs out. If you give it a few more maps (new tileset) and features, I'm pretty sure the release will be covered on gaming sites like RPS and social media like Reddit. More exposure would mean more Kickstarter funds. The big question of course is how much is release ready at the moment? A map pack shouldn't be too hard though.

With the stretch goals poll up, I think it's time to get another bit of public interest. Reddit, specifically r/gaming is great way to let people know about Xenonauts kickstarter, but it's kinda hard to get noticed there, especially if your post is not zelda/pokémon/mario/EA bashing related. I've seen few attempts to get Xenonauts noticed there, but only succes was in r/games, which is more Xenonauts target demographic, but it has much much smaller population. So I propose we get a few (the more the merrier) people together to upvote a post quickly so it can get the much needed inital impulse to get noticed. Favoured reddit posts are funny or informative, so if anyone has some cool videos from the game or pictures of a mission going horribly and hilariously wrong, it might do well. Other than that, the kickstarter stretch goals are ideal topic, so we could set up a post titled Xenonauts Kickstarter successful in 3 days! Try out free demo & vote for stretch goals like Mac/Linux port, Female soldiers and Reaper/Chryssalid hive tileset or something along these lines (suggestions welcome, I'm not much of a reporter). So, umm.. who's with me?

We're coming up to 2 TB of bandwidth used by the Xenonauts demo (I'm not really hosting anything else on the server, just a bunch of little images) which means 2,000 downloads! (See lower right corner of image for upload bandwidth usage). I can't wait to see the total traffic once the Kickstarter has ended.

In case you missed the demo links on the kickstarter page http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69341191/xenonauts They are Primary Download Link (Xenonauts.com) Download Mirror #1 (Courtesy of a kind KS backer!) Download Torrent (please seed once downloaded!)

I pre-ordered via Paypal due to RPS coverage, and have played some previous builds, but it's meatier now. Thoughts follow: * Assault Rifles aren't really clicking with me (oddly, I'm usually a total rifle guy). I tend towards two groups of 2x shotgun and 1x sniper w/ a heavy seems likes a better starting balance. Subjective, yes. * Add in a grenade launcher to replace the classic auto-cannon? Make the RPG a little more accurate / higher range and have the grenade launcher be a gamble in terms of results, but toss out 3 40mm grenades or something. I <3 autocannon! * Weapon stats on the soldier screen are too small on a 1680x1050 monitor. Also burst details would be good. * Female soldiers please (portrait/name/scream), I'm fine with no ground combat sprite changes until post-release. Soldiers in armor are soldiers in armor. * I like the weight balance between weapons and armor, also infinite non-researched items. Being able to assign roles (sniper, assault, support, etc) and have pre-built kits of gear would be great to further streamline the process as people die. Having some kind of smart weight response (i.e. this is my core kit, if it doesn't overload stick in these optional items - extra ammo, grenades, etc) system would be great but perhaps a little too handholdy? * Is reaction time bugged or do all enemies just have much better reactions than my soldiers? Even explicitly saving time units and clicking the appropriate shot, I can never seem to get a shot off. Had an enemy walk right past a soldiers face and fire on comrades. If it's not bugged I'd tweak it so reflexes are a bit more useful. * I like the little events you have that show the world beyond radar range (or the effects of letting a UFO go), but on fastest speed they often blip by before I can read them. Perhaps a little tickbox to sticky them so they stack up? A longer lasting presence on the map, maybe have them fade over time. These will get repetitive over time in terms of content, but I like the impact they make. * Tooltips/descriptions that make it clear alenium aircraft weapons don't need to be reloaded from crafted materials. * Perhaps a little too late, but while I like the idea of getting information from but not being able to use alien tech directly, the plasma weapons look a little too unexotic - make them more organic/alien seeming, not just futuristic. * Description of power core = alenium is good, power core around it is useless. Yet I couldn't just research alenium on its own before that. Odd. * Posting some bug reports now. Great work, and I do truly hope you find a solid niche and a boost in sales due to the Firaxis relaunch - people wondering what the real xcom was like and buying xenonauts because they can't go back to DOS graphics etc. The new tileset changes are very nice! Going to restart now that I know of the save/load bug... wants progression.

Overall -Normal is to hard because it costs to much to build new bases. Geoscape - Returning to base after mission results in equipped 2-handed weapons having weight doubled/counted twice. - Core topics (plasma tech, laser tech, etc) sometimes not showing up for research even with pre-requisites complete. Belived cause realated to saving or loading. Ground Combat - Forced flares during night missions weight to much. These are things that i find make the current game very unenjoyable... Mainly the fact that I have NEVER been able to research laser weaponry and wolf armor even after having researched everything I would recomend that you fix these problems before you send them to journalists to test.

Hey all, just purchased the alpha. I'm a big fan of x-com so this was a no brainer purchase for me. Just curious if victory conditions are in the game yet? Taking out the alien bases, going to mars etc. Thanks in advance,

Would it be possible, when selecting the 'Quick Battle' option, that the game would already start a new game, select a difficulty (say, normal or veteran) and place the base for you on the Geoscape? All of this could be done without user input and would not need to be shown on screen. Basically for instance when I click on "Quick Battle," the game would automatically create a new game, select "veteran" difficulty, and place a base for me at the southern tip of South America (or wherever) named "ALL YOUR BASE" (or whatever). The end result being, when the user clicks on "Quick Battle," it throws them directly into the Terror Site mission without having to navigate through the game menus and place/name their base on the Geoscape before getting into the action. Just seems like a good idea for the press/kickstarter release if it wouldn't be too difficult.