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Hiya I saw a while ago that the mission brief screen may be to go? I hope it stays, because I love that artwork. Something that would be useful on the screen would be the UFO type. You shot it down, so you know what it is... and for a landed UFO the troops would be able to look out the window. I often have several charlies inbound at once, so I would find the info helpful. I really like the new debrief screen. One more bit of info would be great: the number of kills each soldier got. It is one of the things I like to know. Oh, also: the medal graphics need a bit of tidying up, as they look a bit ugh on the debrief screen at the moment. Anyway, love the game. Great work Goldhawk!

The Briefing Screen doesn't really provide much in the way of useful information, so I'd like to remove it entirely and replace it with a display in the top-left of the screen that provides more useful contextual information. This will display the victory conditions of the mission, including alternative victory conditions like taking and holding the UFO or destroying the base power cores. If people don't want to see it, a click will minimise it and just show the icon. Another click will bring it back. It will also display information to help the plot advance - i.e. "Capture Alien Leader (Optional)" or "Capture Praetor (Optional)". The intention is to help players unfamiliar with X-Com to understand what they're meant to be doing, so they'll at least know that capturing a particular type of alien is possible on the mission they are playing. It can be difficult to identify the leaders / officers on the first play-through, particularly if you're not even sure if they are present on a mission or not. I'm not particularly set on the current presentation, so I'm willing to listen to suggestions on alternate styling. Here's what I have so far: Open 1: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/option1.jpg (transparent background) Open 2: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/option2.jpg (no background) Closed: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/shut.jpg PSD files, in case you want to have a go yourself: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/overlay.rar

I feel the briefing screen before ground combat is a bit unfinished, but can't really come up any great ideas how to flesh it up. I think the upcoming and immersion breaking loading screen should atleast be merged with it to have a better flow and to keep players in the game. The screen should have more variable text and intel information though, as for now, I don't even bother reading it anymore. Maybe some kind of random text generator to stitch up a wall of unique intel text. In addition to current ufo condition stuff, it could also tell expected rough alien numbers, current mission goal (capture alien alive), time of day, possible civilian and local force numbers, crashsite location from lz, tileset etc. I won't type an example of a briefing here as I'm not a native english speaker and it'd end up terrible, but you get the general idea? loading the gc would go almost unnoticed while player is reading even semi intresting intel of the following mission. Just add a small rotating loading icon that changes to deploy button when ready. Any ideas to make the briefing screen more intresting? Do people prefer the seperate loading screen? Other thoughts?

It's mostly just an immersion thing, but it's kinda weird how you don't know where the crashed UFO is when you start a ground mission (unless it's on fire and throwing up a lot of smoke or something). Even after the briefing screen tells you something like "After preliminary recon, the alien craft appears to have suffered minor/severe/whatever damage". At the very least, you'd think the Xenonauts could spot it from the air flying in... I don't think it would be a big deal, because even if the UFO's location was revealed at the start, you'd still have to use caution moving towards it, since you still wouldn't know exactly where the aliens are on the map. If you don't want to have quite that level of info given to you, it could be toned down, too - for example, a pop-up message at the start that says "The UFO crashed somewhere to the NW" or whatever.