General Progress Update!

[Chris]

Hi guys,

I thought it was time to give everyone an update from behind the scenes, rather than just on the topics that are hot at the moment (ie. the things going into Build V8 etc). This is just a random collection of thoughts that I thought I'd put down rather than a comprehensive list, but I wanted everyone to be aware of what we were doing behind the scenes...

Aircraft weapons - some good news, we've had an old team member returning from about a year of medical absence. Kris was the artist who did all the weapon tiles in the game, so he's very talented, and he's generally was a useful part of the team anyway. He was initially responsible for the upgrade to the forum pre-order badge graphics, but now he's started work on the aircraft weapons. These were originally going to be shared with the vehicles, but we decided to stop cutting corners and just do them all seperately. We've come up with some quite cool designs and we're expecting to have all the aircraft weapon art done by next weekend probably.

As you may have seen in the recent build, we've also tweaked the setup a bit. There's now three distinct types of weapon - the cannons, the light missiles and the heavy missiles. The idea is that cannons are short range but excellent at chewing up enemy fighters but weak against armoured targets, light missiles are good general purpose weapons, and heavy missiles cannot hit the agile UFOs but are very effective against large targets. Previously weapons were going to straddle some of those categories, but in fact I think it's a better idea to have the weapons stick in their categories. If we want to mix things up, we'll change the mix of slots on the aircraft rather than changing the weapons themselves.

We've got the art to do for the vehicle weapons after that. Again, shouldn't take too long - particularly as in this case everything is already modelled in 3D so we have references. We've also got the corpse tiles for the aliens coming in the next two weeks - once those are done, that's all the 2D art done for the game (until we redo the GUI at least).

Animation - Animation, another big issue for us in the past, has been ticking over nicely for a few months now. Some of you would have met Dan on the forums - he's basically been doing all our animation work for quite a while now and is full-time on the project. We've modelled up the vast majority of the human weapons with the 'core' Xenonaut armour types, and although we might need to come up with some new animations for the other armour type we're not too far away from completing the Xenonaut unit animations.

We've got some of the animations done for the aliens, but only about half of them are rigged and those that are have only been animated with the basic weapons. We'll start animating them with the more exotic weapons after the humans are done. Then there's the vehicles, which are at the bottom of our priority list at the moment.

In short, though, animation is coming along well and isn't really a concern for me any more. Providing we keep the current pace of work up, we should have most of the animations in place for the beta. The big roadblock right now is the rendering times, but I'm rendering 2/3 weapon/armour combinations a day so these are also ticking over. It'll take some time for the animations to all get into the game in spritesheet form but the process is in place now. This is why it's important to report the missing sprites in our builds from V8 onwards, as the new animations from then on will become the animations in the final game too.

Tiles - As before, the tilesets are probably the biggest hurdle between where we are now and where we want to be. There's two issues; the lack of tilesets full stop and then the lack of UFO tilesets specifically. Concentrating on the first one for now, we've only got the Industrial tileset in the game and I'm sure everyone is getting bloody sick of looking at it by now (I know I am). It also makes our screenshots look REALLY repetitive.

Well the good news is we're working on other ones too. One of our artists is working on the Western Town tileset, which we've got one building done of four and are working on the props for it now. It's looking good, but progress is kinda slow because he doesn't have that much time to spare per week. I'm confident he'll have the one tileset done for some point in the beta, but there's not too much I can show off for that now.

The other tilesets are in varying states of completion. We actually have a Desert (ie. Arab) tileset mostly complete at the moment, which was done by the artist who did the Industrial tileset several months back. The tiles are in the current build actually (/tiles/desert) and we've started work on painting them over with the 2D artist to get them to game standard (not in the build yet) but I'm a bit unconvinced by the tileset as a whole. There just seems something missing in it. I might sit down and make some proper maps with it and see how it looks, but I get the impression it'll need some more additions before we can call it finished. Quite what, I don't know exactly...

The Farmyard tileset we had done waaay back hasn't been converted to the new system, but it shouldn't be that hard to do given that there's guide tiles right there. Maybe I'll recruit an artist to get that done. We've also got the wall tiles done for the human / Xenonaut base tileset, but we've not begun to populate the rooms yet because the supporting code isn't in place yet and also the look will probably be somewhat defined by the new UI style.

The biggest issue is the UFO tiles, though. We all know it's a bit annoying attacking the Evil Alien Shed instead of an actual UFO, but it also means we can't really send the build to journalists in the current form. Thankfully, we've started actively taking steps to rectify this. Kris has been helping me with 3D modelling of the Alien Scout against a tile grid. We've finished the basic geometry for this now, and we're going to carve it up into tiles. The basic plan is that there'll be a 'damaged' and 'destroyed' variant of each UFO exterior, and all the tiles involved will be indestructible. The inside of each UFO will vary based on map randomisation but the exterior tiles will remain the same.

The UFO tiles are out priority so hopefully we'll have a painted UFO hull available to recover in the next 2-3 weeks.

Xenopedia art - Now I think about it, it's not true we'll have all the 2D art done when the vehicle weapons are done. Most of the Xenopedia art isn't done either, but I'm not willing to start on that until the beta as the research tree needs to be tested before we do. I don't want to do art for something and then have it cut out of the game.

Unit Armour - We've done a bit of work on this too. We've now implemented jetpacks and the related pathfinding (although sprites aren't in yet), and armours now have visual cones and sight ranges that can be individually customised in armours_gc.xml so the lighter armours can be given bigger sight cones now.

Money - Things have gone pretty well in the 10 days or so since we launched. We've recieved just under 450 pre-orders since we launched on Desura, which is great and has helped make up for the lost revenue from the six weeks prior. Of course our net income per sale has roughly halved since we moved from Paypal to Desura due to the price drop, the Desura fees and the sales tax they are obliged to collect (we were too small to have to do that before), but it's still helped us out financially. Interestingly, about 45% of our sales through Desura to date have been Premium orders so I'm really glad we added that option - and really grateful to all the people who chose to support us that way!

Overall, things are going quite well. We're all pretty busy at this end, particularly on the coding side, but things are still progressing even if not quite as fast as I'd have hoped. V8.1 may slip back to next week as I'm away all weekend at a wedding in Northern Ireland, or alternatively it may be downgraded to a bugfix and we'll do the full ground combat save / load and Research tree thing next week. I'm yet to decide - it depends how tomorrow goes really.

Happy to take questions if people have any specific enquiries.

[hosser]

You mention three specific aircraft weapon types - cannons, light missiles and heavy missiles. Does this mean there will be no exotic, beam-type weapons? Or do they come under the Cannon category? I'd be real sad if I couldn't strap some kind of energy weapon to the F-16 ala Enemy Unknown. Incidentally the different types work really well - I armed all three of my interceptors with Avalanche missiles the other day, and was unable to down a Scout. I thought the Avalanches were better overall as in Enemy Unknown but after reading your post above, this makes sense and is a nice addition.

Thanks for making this post by the way - it's great to have a general "sitrep" (hehe) every now and then.

Oh and finally, I can't put into words how much I love the new title screen. The menu music/background ambience too, is flawless. The game has more atmosphere than most finished games I've played recently, and it's not even beta yet.

[iamkyon]

Thanks for making this post by the way - it's great to have a general "sitrep" (hehe) every now and then.

Oh and finally, I can't put into words how much I love the new title screen.

I'll just be lazy and echo the above sentiments. I and my second-in-command were blown away by the look and feel of the main menu.

[Jean-Luc]

Thanks for the sitrep.

Having specific roles for different weapon categories is a great idea imo.

[Lobster Man Commander]

Excellent status rapport! Thanks for letting us know where you're at, and where you're planning to go.

I like the game so far, agree with hosser on the Title screen and music, -its truly outstanding!

Hope everything works out with the UFO tiles. Can't wait to see how this continues to evolve.

[GrumpySage]

Thanks for the update

In regards to the tilesets, since you mention that you feel the Desert set is missing something - would it be possible to show what you have so far and use the forum as input for additions to the set?

[anotherdevil]

good to hear everything is going well! Can't wait to get all my research in Canberra over and done with so I can try out build v8!

[gobyfly]

About the "money" part.

If there was an option even higher then "premium" preorder , i would have gone for that for sure.

A retail price on PC game in norway is around 70 USD (with the current exchange rate) , and for xenonauts i would gladly have paid "norwgian" retail price.

[hosser]

About the "money" part.

If there was an option even higher then "premium" preorder , i would have gone for that for sure.

A retail price on PC game in norway is around 70 USD (with the current exchange rate) , and for xenonauts i would gladly have paid "norwgian" retail price.

I'd buy a Xenonauts T-shirt or something. Hell I'd buy eighteen. Could offer stuff like that in an ULTRA-FANBOY edition.

[Moonie]

Is there a way of setting my own resolution in one of the games .ini files so that I can play?

[anotherdevil]

It should work off your graphics card, I believe...

[hosser]

It should work off your graphics card, I believe...

Hmm? He's after a way to change the game's resolution. V8 doesn't have the same opening dialog to set that. ALT + Enter is an option to get fullscreen but apparently it cuts off a portion of the game. Sorry if I've totally misunderstood.

[Moonie]

Hmm? He's after a way to change the game's resolution. V8 doesn't have the same opening dialog to set that. ALT + Enter is an option to get fullscreen but apparently it cuts off a portion of the game. Sorry if I've totally misunderstood.

This is correct. And the window that the game first starts in is tiny, I can't read the text or see more than a few feet around my characters.

I have found that most games have some sort of config fine that you can alter, forcing the screen to start in the resolution of your choice and was wondering is there such a file in Xenonauts.

[anotherdevil]

oh right, sorry, only have a mac in canberra. Damn uni computers!

[HomeBoy]

will we be able to research new interceptor ships and new ships that carry soldiers in the game? I mean after researching

alien destroyed ships. Or after cathing an alien navigator alive. I just loved the Leviathan from X-com Terror from the deep

[Jean-Luc]

will we be able to research new interceptor ships and new ships that carry soldiers in the game?

Yes, of course.

[anotherdevil]

It'll be just like in X-Com, but with a longer research tree

[Elydo]

Offering some advice about the initial craft autocannon, they come in two main variants; a revolver cannon used by predominantly european forces (single barrel but rotating cylinder containing multiple chambers) and the american rotary cannon model (multiple barrels, the entire barrel assembly rotates). I won't go into the relative merits of the two types, but they're roughly the flavours craft guns come in. If externally mounted, they're typically in aerodynamic pods too, but I'm not certain that's especially important.

[anotherdevil]

Is this like wanting both an AK and an M16 variant in the initial starting options? 'cause I'm sure that the generic 'cannon' is just an amagamation of both ideas, or just a one standard fits all sort of thing

[Darkstryke]

Keep up the work.

If you build it, they will come

[Elydo]

ad, no, it was saying "A starting craft autocannon would likely be one of those two types." Rather than the M2 .50 placeholder graphic which is an entirely different weapon system (and also unsuited for modern air-to-air combat)

Now, the xenopedia states it's a vulcan variant, so it would be a rotary cannon type, which makes sense given that America and Russia are the primary sources of equipment. Though given how it works in game, with a very slow rate of fire and selectable ammunition type, I'd think a revolver cannon would fit better... I'm guessing that's not important.

My point is that it isn't akin to choosing between an AK skin or an M16 skin for the assault rifle, it's a akin to choosing between a shotgun skin or an assault rifle skin for the assault rifle. Be it the AK or the M16, it doesn't matter, but it shouldn't be a Remmington.

[anotherdevil]

Ah right I get it now, sorry I thought you wanted both variants in game =p Perhaps a small touch up to the Xenopedia page is all that's needed no?

[Sathra]

And replacing the Autocannon artwork to something more realistically plausible I guess?

[anotherdevil]

Well no, if you just make the text match the artwork all should be good no?

[Elydo]

Depends what the new artwork is. Chris mentioned that they had an artist and new designs, which is why I brought any of this up. I always figured that the M2 graphic was a placeholder, but given that the new art is currently being worked on, I thought now was a good time to mention things to be kept in mind.

In terms of the xenopedia text, the stats given are gameplay, not realistic. The given rate of fire is slower than the ground-based version of the M2 let alone it's aerial variants. The rate of fire of the M61 Vulcan the craft cannon is apparently a variant of is six or seven times faster, depending on the model. But realism makes way for gameplay in this just as with the ground weapons, using the actual stats is not important. Matching the appropriate look to the function of the weapon though, especially when you're describing the weapon in terms of existing models, is something the game tries to do.

Ultimately it could parse down to this, A model with a single barrel should be described as a revolver cannon, the rotating cylinder is typically not overly visible. But if you're describing it as something sourced from the US or USSR, or as a variant of such systems, it will almost certainly be a rotary cannon type and that needs to be shown in the graphic or it sets up a logic disconnect. And craft autocannons in general come in those two flavours, so if the team are still wanting something entirely different, they can obviously go with whatever they want but they'll need to highlight that it's different from what should be expected.