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hi all, how can i test my maps? i havent the quickbattle luncher. if there is a way to get the quickbattle luncher, how to use it? should i extract the community map pack or stinky map 2 to the assets folder or to the xenonauts folder? when i extract to the assets folder, i have the assets folder in the assets folder. there are black regions in the industriel maps (stinky maps 2) regards

I have a small problem with my grenades, specifically the flash-bang (FB). I am assuming these are holes in my understanding and not bugs. So I am testing away with: suppressionValue="100" suppressionRadius="5" But what I am seeing is that the radius does not appear to be in squares. When used on a Sebillian non-com (is the second mission of a new game), with two FBs dropped 1 square away from the target, it reacts to both but is not suppressed. So a third lands two squares away, and the alien ignores it (or at least did not react with the animation of being hit, or the standard hiss), and is still not suppressed. So the first question concerns the radius, and to how it is actually handled. The second question is if the weapons_gc.xml values are stored in the save game, or are they read when the game is launched? If it is the latter then they can be modified during a tactical mission, and a restart will adopt the changes. Otherwise the mission must be re-launched to test alterations. My last question concerns Suppression and Bravery. My understanding from the forum is that Bravery is the value that gets reduced when Suppression fire comes in. With a Bravery score of 40 and the FBs having the standard 100 Suppression effect and range of 5, how can two FBs landing 1 square away not have suppressed the Sebillian? It has a Resilience of 48 in case that it taken into account. The only special thing to note is that I have added 5 points to all types of armour. Even should the grenade effects have a cubic drop-off, I do not see it being the explanation unless armour rating is categorical instead of linear. Cheers!

There are obviously going to be far more people in early parts of the game testing around. For a number of those, there are some bugs that mean they don't really progress much further than that. Others do persevere. Would it be worth posting up save games for others to test out later parts of the game, before the next experimental build comes out? format along the lines of [bUILD NO] - DATE IN GAME + some comments if the poster felt like it, just a thought.

Welcome Xenonauts! (I do believe that would be the most appropriate term denoting a member of this community, no?) Having watched a few let's plays of the game on YouTube I'm pre-hooked (that is, I am very eager to play the game... just haven't exactly bought it yet). And I am not going to ask you whether it is worth to buy (and I am conscious of the various implications of beta). My question isb of a different sort: How far along is the game, how much more work, feedback, testing, brainstorming, etc. does it actually need? The reason I am asking is that I have recently found that I cannot quite immerse myself in an SP game, and I'm thinking that providing my humble player-side assistance to a project such as this, might actually be quite engrossing. But: how much more of that is it needed? Is there still sufficient time for me to enjoy testing an unfinished product before I morph into just another consumer of a complete experience? Thank you in advance for your replies .

So we're playing with the new launcher, and one of the issues I'm having is the animated video - for me, it just looks horrible and distorted. I want to know if this is a widespread problem, or an issue with my PC codecs. Can a few people download the following zip file and run the program inside, please: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26290309/launcher_test.rar (10mb) Once you've done that, look at the text and see if it looks sharp or not. If it looks sharp then cool, please post that up here. If it looks warped, like in this image, then that's bad - again, please let us know. Basically it's tied to the codecs available on your media player. I can run that video fine in VLC but in Windows Media Player it is all distorted. If it happens to anyone else except me, we might have to look into how to bundle a codec with the game...but give it a test to see! Please let me know your OS and whether you're the sort to have installed a codec pack already too!

So, I'm thinking of implementing a level testing programme in the near future. One of the things we've not iterated are our maps, which seems a bit silly in hindsight. Now is pretty much the ideal time to start doing it, though. The idea would be that every few days we'd release a map scenario for testing (not always a new map, perhaps an iteration of an older one instead). It would take the form of a zip that contained a map and an updated levelsetup_quickbattle.xml, so you'd unzip it into your directory and then just run Quick Battle. This would contain a specific map, a specific crashed UFO type (if a Crash Site mission), a specific crew of aliens and a squad of soldiers to tackle the mission with pre-set weapons and armour. It's more than likely the UFO exterior would just be blocked out rather than having actual graphics, allowing us to test different UFO interior configurations without worrying about graphics. You lot would play the mission and then give us feedback on it; in particular we'd be looking at this sort of info: - Did you win? - How long did it took you to complete / lose? - How many soldiers did you lose? - Did you feel the map was too large / too small / about right? - Were there too many / too few aliens? - Was the tactical use of destructibility in the map good? - Does the map look convincing artistically? - Which parts of the map needed more / less cover etc? - How was breaching the UFO? I think that's probably the best way to come up with some good map designs. I'm guessing quite a few people would be interested in this sorta stuff, but please post here if you'd be interested in taking part. Finally, GJ needs to implement the decision layer of the AI before we can do this, and we'd also need to add support for specifying the equipment of the soldiers used in the Quick Battle, so this might take a couple of weeks to rustle up....but it could be very useful to normalise things like map sizes, alien stats, the size of the Xenonaut starting squad etc.

Hello folks, I have a binary patch that will take you from V16 to V16.1 , and is only 45MB in size!. This is for Windows ONLY and is 100% not official or supported, but with those caveats Chris has no objections to my sharing. I have used this for my own system, both at home and at work (: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/px48nnlmrcqzzaj/0X8yhxdxvL Grab the V16_to_V161.exe binary , doubleclick and follow the prompts. There are MD5 checksums there as well for the paranoid. Hopefully this works for Windows folks, but I'll try to help as I can.

I think I can safely say for everyone who has pre-ordered this game, we all want this game as bug free as possible on release. And, I suspect most of us want this game bug free like now. Having done some research into how professionals go about writing bug reports and how developers like bug reports, it seems that there are styles and forms of writing which make finding bugs in the code easier for a developer. The easier it is for a developer to find a bug, the easier it is to squash it. Now, not being a professional QA or tester (any professional QAs/testers among us other than Matthew?) what I thought I'd do is post some links to sites which talk about writing up bug reports so that those among us who write bug reports can have a look and see if they can use any of the advice and guidance in writing their own bug reports. Here we go! An essay on writing bug reports in general. Can get philsophical, not all of it useful. Very detailled, most of it useful for here, but quite formal. Too formal, perhaps? This is from writing bug reports for World of Warcraft, but you can take a lot from it to apply here. An example taken from generic software bug writeups.

We need testers for the Mac version. These builds will be less stable then the regular alpha builds, due to less testing so far. I would be most interested in OSX 10.5 (leopard) and 10.6 (snow leopard) users since I currently have only tested on 10.7 (Lion). Let me know what model mac you have, OS version and what gen (ie mid-2011 imac with i5 proc running 10.7) You need to be willing to get your hands dirty with terminal and chat with developers on any mac specific issues you find. Edit: We have enough testers to last until V13 is released, thanks.

OK, I'd like to test a few of the newly-ported Linux builds out, but I don't have Linux - so we need some volunteers! I'd like to get together 5 or 6 regular Linux users with a variety of different Linux distros so we can check the port works before we upload it on Desura. So, if you're interested in helping us, please post in the comments thread with what distro you can test it on. If nobody before you in the comments has posted up that particular distro, please drop me an email at chris@xenonauts.com and I'll hook you up with the correct build. If someone above you has said they'll test that distro, we'll be in touch with you if they're not able to test it for whatever reason!