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Found 17 results

  1. I bought the game a while ago. I was just wondering roughly how long we are looking out til release. Some time in 2014?
  2. I think it’s time to give a quick update on what we’re working on at the moment and our future plans. As we've mentioned before, we're aiming to have the game completed for the end of December. We're still unsure if we'll hit that deadline, to be honest. Delays to any part of the game, or even complications due to Christmas holidays mean that we could miss it. Ultimately it is an internal deadline that we can move if we have to…we just think it’d be nice to have the game done this year! You can probably see from the changelogs that we’re making fairly rapid progress these days. The artwork is progressing well and is likely to be finished for the end of the year, as the tiles are nearly all done and we’re working on the alien analysis / interrogation images at the moment that are the only remaining part of the Xenopedia. On the coding front, there’s not really any massive features left to implement. It’s mostly bugfixes, cleaning up systems that aren’t working correctly and balancing what is already there. GJ is working hard on the AI at the moment and just today put in a big update. Most interesting is tweakable AI variables for each AI race and rank, accessible (and documented) in a text file anyone can edit. We’ve also partially implemented AI grenades, which they should now be using to trash your base in Base Defence missions. Provided we don’t encounter any major bugs in it, that’ll all be in V20 Ex.6. We’re working on clearing up the bugs in the rest of the game. There’s quite a few of them and some of them (aliens shooting through floors) are quite major, but our ground combat coder has been busy writing his end of the AI interface recently so he’s not been able to fix them all yet. There’s quite a few little features or tweaks to make in the combat still, including testing out a sight system that only reveals what is currently in a unit’s line of sight - so if a unit turns or is killed, vision is immediately lost on those tiles. I suspect this will make the missions feel a bit more claustrophobic and reduce the effectiveness of long-range sniping (both good things) but we’ll see how it works in practice. If we don’t like it, we can just revert to the old model. Aaron is balancing the AI and plugging away at the maps at the moment, leaving only the Terror missions (Soviet and Western) left to do now. General game balance seems in a good place, but there are still things for us to fix up there too. We’re still hoping to add some Tundra tileset maps to the game, and some Abduction missions too, but we’ll see. It's probably unlikely to happen unless we're delayed into January. At my end, I’m mostly working on the new UI at the moment. There’s a lot of pop-up windows to reskin in our nicer style, and there’s still a number of usability issues with the new UI. A lot are to do with screen resolution and we’re looking into fixing them. I’m also working on the 48-page Xenonauts Art Book for the Kickstarter backers. Unsurprisingly it is proving to be a lot of work, but it needs to be done. It’ll make a nice memento for the project for the team, and also we’ll probably make it available for sale to anyone that wants to buy one once they’ve been sent out to the Kickstarter backers. Overall, progress remains good and I expect us to get another three weeks of solid work in before the team starts to dissipate for the festive season and things become patchier. If the game isn't finished by the end of the year, we won't be far away!
  3. Hi guys, I was just wondering what with each major release having so much added, what is actually the list of features left to add or things to fix before you consider the build to be out of beta? I did have a trawl through the forum messages and there are various disparate references, but nothing up to date or consolidated. I know that there are loads of things you probably want to add and will do even when released, but I am interested in getting an idea of specically what you are hoping to accomplish for full release? If you could add this as a stickied list to the forum that would be even better ;-) Also, I want to add that I am not asking for any dates here at all Cheers Dan
  4. Ohh Snap looks whos back! I been reading the Bugs section and it looks like this game is still suffering from serious bug issues. I was wondering what the NEW players think of the game and which bug is the one that has broken the game for them if any? Can you go through the entire game yet, or its not complete yet? Thanks inadvance. Please rate the game from a 0-10. I wanna get an idea of where the game is from NEW players. Thanks.
  5. It's about time for another development update. Probably the most interesting news is that we've decided the next V19 Experimental build will be the last one to add new features, so once that arrives we'll go on another bug-fixing drive. Once we've fixed all the major bugs affecting play, we'll release it as V19 Stable. The next build is going to include the new Geoscape alert style, which matches the new topbar style and is quite a bit more attractive than the current "black box" style we use (the content remains the same). It will also contain the air combat auto-resolve, and improvements to the alien bases and final mission. What it will not contain is the updated UI for the various non-Geoscape screens. Progress on that has been slower than I was hoping (largely because the programmer responsible for it has been on holiday), and we still need to do the new Base screen and then fine tune all the other ones that have already been done. We're continuing to plough through the remaining art that needs to be done - hopefully all of the autopsy art will be done by the next build etc. I need to finish off editing the Xenopedia, as that's slightly fallen by the wayside recently but needs to be finished. Aaron is continuing to work on the balance and improving usability. Once we start working on the bugfixing, I'll also review the community maps and probably build a few new ones too. So I'm not sure V19 Stable is going to blow anyone's mind, but it should be a steady improvement over V18 Stable. After the next experimental build we'll be posting up some threads for people to report the bugs that are annoying them the most, and we'll start prioritising fixes for them. I've also started work on putting together this art book for the Xenonauts Kickstarter - once I finished drafting that, we'll be getting that and the T-shirts / posters printed out. So if you're a Kickstarter backer, we've started the wheels moving on getting the physical goods going. That's been hanging over our heads for a while now, so I think it's best that we start to tackle that sooner rather than later. In terms of general updates, things are going well here at Goldhawk. We're in the middle of a heatwave here in London (apparently it's meant to be 33 degrees Celsius today), which predictably means it is incredibly hot and stuffy in a room full of computers, and catching the tube is much like standing fully clothed in a sauna with a bunch of sweat-drenched strangers for half an hour. It's even reached the point where Aaron is no longer wearing heavy black jeans every single day...he turned up in (camouflage) shorts on Friday! Quite something. Oh, and I now have internet access again. I have been moving house again recently, and two of the people I lived with moved out a month earlier than everyone else - and helpfully cancelled the internet when they did so. My new place has teh interwebz though, so I'll probably be better at answering emails or checking the forums etc than I have been over the past month. So overall things are good, and hopefully V19 Stable will be along soon.
  6. Time for a development update. Firstly, Steam: you probably noticed we launched on Steam Early Access a couple of weeks ago. We're pleased to say that the game has sold strongly on Steam, and it's nice to see a number of people who weren't previously aware of the game finding it. The reception generally seems to have been good from the people who have played the game, so all in all I think it's been a successful launch. It has, however, been an enormous amount of work. Lots of customer support and marketing stuff to do, as well as the technical work involved in a launch (I've also been enjoying having a life outside the office over the past week). In the meantime, Aaron has stepped up his work on the balancing of the game. This seems to be working pretty well - the first Experimental build was released yesterday and there will be more of those coming in the near future. You can see most of what we've been working on in the Experimental build, but in addition to that we've been working on updating various parts of the UI. The Hidden Movement screen is getting an overhaul, because people were complaining that the full-screen pop up was a bit jarring. However, we didn't want to get rid of the HM screen entirely, because it is very X-Com, so we came up with a compromise that you can see here. We're also working on getting the Soldier Inventory screen to be a pop-up rather than a full-screen window. That would make loading it up much less jarring, and generally improve the experience. Regarding the long-awaited Geoscape UI updates, that's coming along OK. We're finishing off the updated Soldier Equip screen at the moment, after which there's only the Base screen and the Geoscape to go (so we've done the Research, Workshop, Stores, Vehicle Equip and Aircraft Equip screens already). Giovanni has already started work on the Geoscape, although that's a BIG job, so that'll take a bit of time. Also, even when actually released I'm sure the UI will need several iterations to tighten it up...but we're getting there. We'll keep you posted with how things go, but here's a possible spoiler for you - as the game advances, new background screens are unlocked for the important screens. Here's the final one for the Research screen, if you want a preview. So it's been a good couple of weeks and V19 is marching steadily closer!
  7. I know most regular forum goers and likely devs will cringe at this, but I feel it's a valid question. Paid my money for the pre-order, and trying to convince my friends/gaming buddies to do the same. Is there an indicative time that I can tell them? Not going to hold anyone to anything, but in the interests of having folks part with $$, some sort of timeframe would be helpful. Thanks!
  8. 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 .
  9. Hi Chris and team! I know you hate to give dates so I'm not asking for that. I adore this genre and Xenonauts (from the 4 hours I have invested into the beta) very much! I don't want to burn myself out if there are still a lot of bugs, or a bunch of content missing I'd like to wait to play until we're at least 85% or so complete. Would you be able to give us a rough estimation on how complete you feel the game is at the moment? Maybe not as a raw number, just anyway you feel says it best. I know the safe option is 'just wait for the final release' but damn, you're making this game well and I am sorely tempted to just throw myself at it anyway. If you tell me 'its only text & some optimisation of the engine' to go I'd be in for it immediately. If you say 'the AI still needs a bit of work' I'd rather wait. I'm all about the gameplay, flavor text isn't going to bother me. Thanks a bunch!
  10. A development update to go with the new build, because it's been a while since I've done of these. Right now we're concentrating on the Steam release build. Ideally I want to have V18.5 locked down at our end by the middle of next week so it can get a couple of days of testing on the forums before we port it to Mac / Linux and start uploading it to Steam. V18.5 will have only minor improvements over V18.4, it'll mostly be bugfixes to get it as stable as possible (we'll also create a new demo from it). If we (that's the royal we there) can get the Xenopedia finished and GJ can get an AI update done, we'll probably add those into V18.5 too. Taking the project forwards, we've decided to split out some of the responsibilities on the team further. Previously it was my job to do pretty much everything, but currently I'm in the process of handing over the project management and beta balancing to Aaron. This means that he'll be the one checking the Beta forums and doing the task management for the coders. I'll be focusing more on the creative side of things. In the short term, that means getting the Xenopedia finished. There's still art to do on it and only about 2/3 of the research descriptions have been written. I want to get at least the writing done in the near future. After that, I'll be working on the air combat auto-resolve and getting the new UI done. Oh, and probably maps. The split will therefore be that I'll be designing the systems / content and getting them implemented, and Aaron will be in charge of polishing the overall project along the guidelines that I've laid out. This is basically because I have far too much on my plate at the moment and project management is something that requires your full attention. Honestly, the community shouldn't see too much different except that it'll be Aaron posting in the beta forums instead of me!
  11. OK, time for a quick update. We're still planning to make a release next week, though it's still up in the air as to whether it will be beta or not. If it is not beta, it will still probably be the biggest update we've made since we joined the Geoscape and Ground Combat together. The reason it may not be beta is I'm not sure we'll have time to get the final mission working properly and we probably won't have the final two UFOs in the game in time. Also there's a whole bunch of niggling things we need to do, but the coders are busy with more important things to do them. We'd like to have the following in the next build, whether it is beta or not: New launcher: will look much better and be platform independent (so it'll appear for Mac users too), have a built-in RSS feed for the forums, stat tracking disable, let you change save game location and will contain Crimson Dagger novella Improved AI: GJ should have another AI update for us. Wall Transparency: Humans and visible aliens should have an aura that turns nearby walls invisible so they no longer get "lost" behind them. Tile Rendering: This should fix those pesky rendering issues where things were incorrectly rendering on top of other things. UFOs: the UFO maps should be done for 2/3 of the UFOs, though this is just their undamaged landed state thus far. Research Tree: Most of the research descriptions (re)written, new research art added (including the first few autopsy images). Maps: I've added 2 new maps for the Light Scout for every tileset now, I'm hopefully going to add the same number for the Scout / Corvette by next week too. Usability Fixes: Too many of these to list here, but we've fixed a LOT of the little things that have been annoying people for months. Game Balancing: Again, too many to list here. The game will be heavily, heavily rebalanced in the next release. The meat of the update will be in the last two bullet points. The new features are all well and good, but from next release onwards we're going to be paying a lot of attention to the user experience rather than just saying "leave us alone, we'll fix that in beta". I'm not sure when the release will occur next week, but there will be one.
  12. I can't believe February is nearly finished already, but apparently it is. Time for another development update. In short, we're really gearing up for beta now and V18 should be beta. As V17.6 seems mostly stable, I don't think we'll be releasing any more builds prior to V18. Happily for Mac users, our porter David (ko2fan on the forums) has managed to get around the texture issue with the new version of OSX and it now seems that the game will remain natively compatible with Mac. Anyway, we've already got some nice improvements in the dev version compared to the public version. Giovanni has merged his new launcher into the code and that seems to be working rather nicely, as well as being much more visually appealing and cross-platform capable. There's also some further improvements to the level editor, which now has a pop-up level viewer window in it. You can see the map you're building appear in real-time now, so building new levels is really easy. We should have plenty of maps in the beta, although at the moment they're a little constrained by the UFOs. The UFOs are coming along well. We've completed the first three, and are working on the fourth of the eight UFOs that appear in the combat map. "Completing" them involves testing the internal layout until we find something we are happy with, then doing the final textured UFO model and painting the ground tiles for the craft. It's a bit time consuming, but I think it's going to work really well with the final game. You can see a couple of examples of final UFO models here: Light Scout: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/UFO1.png Scout: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/UFO2.png This has been a lot of work, not only in art terms but in game terms. We've had to implement a system of swopping out ground tiles and changing the line of sight properties of tiles when troops go inside UFOs (which causes the walls to vanish). It's working pretty well now though, aside from ongoing rendering order issues that I'll discuss below. The only problem is that until the UFOs are finalised, we don't know how big they will be, which is why we can't make maps for the big UFOs until the UFOs in question are finalised. Next up, game balancing. For the first time ever yesterday, I sat down and played the game as a game without using any developer cheats. As a result, I've drawn up a long list of balance changes and usability fixes to make the game more playable. Up to this point I've not really cared much about the gameplay because the focus has been actually building the systems, but I think having the game roughly balanced for beta is going to be important. The changes are things like: Major boost to alien accuracy Alien non-combatants made significantly more dangerous TU reserve toggle for whether it will allow you to spend reserved TUs on shooting (by default it will) Better communication of KIA soldiers after battle (portraits greyed out if killed) Chinook only carries 8 soldiers now, with the Hunter filling 2 slots if taken (squad size with final dropship still caps at 16) Starting squad has better equipment selection At start of game player only has $1m and one Hunter, but building / base construction cost reduced There is longer between each UFO wave, so you should have time to get your MiGs built before the Scouts appear Alien Invasion research is already in progress when you start the game Adding a "Research Completed" pop-up with "Go to Research Screen" button and "New Projects Unlocked" list. There is a massive list of changes to be made but once they're done there should be a quantum leap in playability. Lots of little things that together should make a big difference. I've also continued my work on the research tree. There is a description in place for pretty much every research project that I'm confident will be in the final game (there's about 60 of them) and there's about 10-15 more liable to be shifted around. I've created images for about half of them, and we're starting work on the remaining stuff like the autopsy art for the aliens too. The new UI is also proceeding, but slowly. The new Research screen is nearly done now. Once this done, the Workshop screen should be very easy to do (it's basically the same). Once those two screens are done, we'll look at the speed of progress on this and see if it's too slow. Finally, there are a few problems we're looking into. One of the biggest is the multi-tile rendering, which is causing all of these rendering errors you can see in the game. We're looking into this and we'll fix it up as it's giving us major display issues with the new UFOs, as well as cropping up in random areas in the game. Hopefully it'll be resolved before beta. There's also work to be done on the night mission LOS system and things like the Hidden Movement and shooting between different height levels. We've got plenty to be fixing up and improving...but I can't really think of much that hasn't been implemented yet. Turning Xenonauts into a fun and challenging game is now the order of the day, so I guess on reflection we've had a pretty good month!
  13. Time for a quick development update! It's approaching Christmas but we've all got another week or so to work until we disappear off. What've we been up to recently? We've been working on a variety of things. I guess the biggest change has probably been the level design system. This has become far more point-and-click, making it much easier to generate levels. Previously, props and walls and buildings were set at the sub-map level and this meant that moving them around in the Level Editor meant editing the submaps (which had to align perfectly to look correct). It was very time consuming, and not exactly user-friendly. Now we have a layer system, with the Ground tiles and then the Wall, Prop and Building layers on top of that. The game can deal with transparency - so if a wall sub-map has no ground tiles painted on it, it will draw the information from the Ground layer below it (for instance a field). You can see how this is much better than having to paint all the walls and props on the field directly, as you had to in the previous setting. Naturally this has both caused a lot of bugs and meant we've had to redo a lot of our maps, which has taken up quite a lot of time. This hasn't been helped that our ground combat coder has had workmen in his house for the past week and hasn't got much done in terms of fixing up the bugs. We're getting on top of them now but it's been pretty slow on the ground combat front for the last few weeks. For the Geoscape, we've done a bit of work on the balancing of the invasion and the research tree but that will continue in more detail once the ground combat missions are all loading up properly. We've also started work on implementing the new UI, but unfortunately we didn't fork the code before we did that so the release of our latest build has been delayed. The new topbar is in the game, but the graphics need to be reworked as we were experimenting with image scaling. Having an unusable topbar is not something we want in a public build, obviously! Aaron's been busy on the Xenonaut base tiles, and has now completed all of the starting rooms. You can see a few previews of them dotted around on the main news blog or on other sites; basically they look pretty awesome. They're also animated (consoles etc), but the animated tiles aren't displaying properly for some reason. We're trying to get that fixed up. He's also been working on the big brothers to the little Light Drone that you can see in the terror missions, also animated. Rendering has also been going fairly well. All the Xenonaut vehicles are now in the game, an entire new alien race has been rendered out and the Light Drone big brothers are also ready to go into the game this weekend. I think there's only one major alien race left to render...a rather annoying glow effect I can't quite figure out how to get rid of is giving me trouble with them, but I'll fix that up soon no doubt. The new UI for the ground combat is finished and in the game thanks to Giovanni. Again, this took a long time - there's issues with image scaling in the engine, so we've been scaling the images perfectly in Photoshop now and it means they don't appear at all warped. The image clarity for the pictures of the weapons and the various icons should be much sharper than before, unless you happened to luck into the right resolution before (actually a couple more icons still need to be updated but 99% of it is done). So, yeah - it's not the biggest thing in the world, but the visual quality of the game has increased another notch. We're now working on the new launcher too, as the existing one doesn't work on Mac and looks horrible. The new / final one will be much nicer and hopefully will have an animated background (of the same image) too. That'll be arriving in the New Year though, I'd have thought. Finally, we've had GJ over in London for the last couple of days to talk about the AI. Progress on the AI has been a bit slow recently, partly because GJ has been busy with his masters studies and also just because the AI is hard. Anyway, we've chatted through at length the sort of feel we want for each type of mission, the different AI behaviours we need for the various alien / friendly units in each mission type and good ways to generate that. I know we've been promising a better AI for some time yet and it's not quite materialised, but I'm hopeful it's not too far away now. I think that's about it. Not sure when V17.5 is coming out, but hopefully soon. Beta is coming together too, but we have to get the new level system working better before we can really get to grips with testing and balancing the research tree (though we have done some of that already). Thanks for your patience. I'll do another update before Christmas too.
  14. Development update time! I hope everyone is excited. I've spent most of the week working on UI designs and am about ready to throw myself off the nearest bridge. Interface design is the WORST POSSIBLE job in the universe, I've decided. That's why I'm typing this while munching on a ready meal by myself in the office at 8.30pm on a Friday night, something that one would hope I'll not be repeating in the near future. Possibly because I've been working such long hours this week, it's been very productive. I've had the final UI design hanging over me for literally months, something I never wanted to start on because it would require at least a week of working 12-hour days to get all the screens done. It's not really something you can do in short bursts because you need to ensure consistency between all the screens and that's something that is lost if you don't do them one after the other (you can even see the different between the screens I did three days ago and those I did today). Also, these will be the final UI designs so they have to be pixel perfect or they might be implemented wrong - I can't just be lazy and use placeholder stuff any more! The good news is that I've completed eight of the ten concepts (subject to the odd tweak to improve consistency) and only have two left, the Geoscape and the Xenopedia. The Geoscape one requires some more art done before we can finish it but I think we've finally worked out how we can improve the usability and make it more immersive / consistent with the other screens at the same time. I'm pleased with how it is turning out, and I'm very pleased with how the completed UI screens have gone too. The combination of the new immersive style and the old-style topbar with updated art seems to have preserved the best of both ideas. I'll post them up for you guys to look at tomorrow, possibly. Next week holds the joys of slicing up all of the graphics for all of the UI screens and writing a document that details all the dimensions of the graphics in / the eventualities of how the player can interact with every UI screen in the strategic part of the game. Yessir, that's what I got into game development for! Though it won't be particularly interesting, it does let the Geoscape coder get to work on finishing that part of the game. I honestly think it'll probably be the most exciting change we'd made to a public release since we joined the Geoscape / Ground Combat parts of the game together. They'll simultaneously look much better and convey much more information, so everybody wins. It also means we'll finally start fixing up the UI issues, rather than just saying "we'll do that once the new UI is in place". With me refusing to answer emails for most of the week, the rest of the team have got less done than they would usually, but we've still made progress. Most notably, Aaron is continuing to power through generating all the Xenonaut Base props and we'll have all the starting buildings done early next week, which means we can do some iteration of the base defence missions. You'll like the base tiles - they look really nice. Speaking of iteration, we've got good feedback on the first map we posted up, so thanks for anyone who helped us with that. We'll release more next week, though the new UI takes priority there. Good news, though - we can now support custom Xenonaut squad armour and weapons for individual missions, so we can do the scenario testing we mentioned a few weeks ago now (read: testing the flooplans of all the UFOs and the alien bases). GJ is also committing some improved AI code shortly, but whether it turns the aliens into deadly combatants remains to be seen - but they should be better than before at least. He's also coded the online stat tracker for the game, which records information when you play the game and sends it to a modified version of Google Analytics so we can crunch (anonymous) numbers to analyse the game balance. Essentially it means we can get feedback from anyone playing the game, even if they can't be bothered to post on the forums - which stops us producing a version of the game tailored only to the super-enthusiastic / capable crowd that tend to be overrepresented in the forum community of a game. Apparently we need to do a bit of work with a code library (or something) to get that working, but it's 99% done. I'm looking forward to that. There's probably been other stuff, but I forget it. It's been a busy week and I'm going home. Enjoy your weekends, everyone - I know I will!
  15. The "project status" on the website hasn't been updated since 23 Dec 2011. I'm aware you can get all the news and new developments on the forums but people who are just browsing the website may not go to the trouble. Just thought I'd mention it.
  16. Thought I'd post something up as I've been a bit more distant than normal in the past week or two. Basically, we've been working really hard on the new build. Overall, it's been a mixed bag in terms of results. The majority of my efforts are being sunk into adding the two new mission types - the Xenonaut Base Defence missions and the Terror Sites. These are both cool setpieces compared to normal UFO crashsite missions. If you've not played the original, fighting a base defence mission takes place in an exact replica of your Geoscape base and a Terror Site is an alien attack on an urban population centre. The base defence mission has taken up the lion's share of our efforts, for obvious reasons. This mission needs quite a lot of co-ordination between both our Geoscape and Ground Combat coders to pass the layout of the base and the consequences of a mission (if structures have been damaged etc) to one another. More time consuming, though, is the coding that detects whether a structure has adjacent structures within the base or not, and adds walls / doors accordingly. If we didn't add that, there would be lots of doors opening onto bare rock etc in the game. As of about an hour ago, this code is basically operational but requires some extra work to deal with the 2x1 tile buildings which can be rotated on the base building map and built in two possible orientations. There's also a few miscellaneous features for the mission type - the map starts revealed etc - that we need to add. I think in about three working days (mid next week) we'll have the coding side for the base defence done. What's been holding us up, though, has been the actual tiles. We've got about 80% of the basic tiles done for the starting game rooms, but these are guide tiles to be painted over afterwards. We can set them up in the game and play with them, but they don't look very nice. Painting over them is going to take a while, unfortunately, and I'm not sure I'm willing to show off the tiles in the current state. I might get the walls and floors painted up for the starting rooms and then use the guide tiles for the props until they can be painted over. Problem with that is that the artists are busy working on the terror site at the moment. The terror site missions are meant to be a bit more like proper warfare than the crash site missions. There's a Town tileset that is only used for terror sites, and there are no alien non-combatants on the map (nor do any start dead). So basically it's you against a large force of aggressive and well-armed enemies. The maps are designed for this - there's a lot of buildings, and we're going to have quite a lot of cover in the maps too. The terror site is coming along. I've been working on the map (just one map for now) for three or four days on and off and I think I've found a relatively convincing layout. We started painting the ground tiles today and we've nearly finished the roads and pavements, so again hopefully the ground tiles will all be done next week. We've got two buildings in the tileset at the moment and are working on 2-3 more, but again these are just base tiles. They're quite good ones admittedly but I doubt we'll have the whole tileset painted over before the end of the month. There's going to be a lot of tiles in it. Hopefully we'll be able to show the tileset off as soon as the ground tiles are done though. The other big thing that's been going on is Kickstarter. It is looking possible for us to get on Kickstarter, although it's going to involve incorporating a US subsidiary of Goldhawk and setting up a US bank account for that. Everything I've seen so far suggests that this will work and cost about $300, so is probably worth it. It'll be a lot of time for the person helping us set up the account though - I'm speaking to someone about it but I'll ask for volunteers if he decides he doesn't want to be involved for whatever reason. My new camera should also arrive next week, so I can think about starting working on the video then. In hindsight, trying to generate two full tilesets in as many weeks was always going to be a bit hopeful and predictably we've not succeeded at that. We've made overall good progress, but it's been split across both mission types and that means I can't show either off right now. Really I should have just concentrated on the Terror Site from the beginning, but it's a bit late for that now. So, yeah, we've made progress but unfortunately no Build V9.3 this weekend.
  17. I was just going through the progress update thread and saw where Chris talked about what had been added so far. What I'm wondering is, what still needs to be done before the game is ready to release? I haven't played much of the alpha (beta?) but when I start it up what I see is a game that pretty much looks complete. I'm not an X-COM expert so I wouldn't notice the missing details. The only thing I notice is that I'm playing on the same map every time. So what else needs to get done?
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