KickStarter Xenonauts - XCOM-like set during the Cold War

[Haba]

Oh, but now does X-Com really have a cover system after all... hmmm?

 

[Destroid]

By my understanding Xcoms cover wouldn't modify the chance to hit, but could you save from getting hit by a 'miss' that only suffered a small amount of dispersion, causing it to crash into your cover instead of you.

 

[Haba]

Xenonauts buttfucked by Paypal jews: http://xenonauts.com/component/content/ ... der-issues

It gives me no pleasure to announce this, but it's important we are honest with the community. As of an hour ago we are having trouble with our Paypal account. I think it's the same issue that Project Zomboid and Minecraft have had in the past regarding pre-orders and Paypal being a bit strange about it; currently our Paypal account has been locked down and closed, so we don't have access to any of the new money coming in or any access to the funds currently in the account. As a result of this, we've temporarily disabled the pre-order page.

The interesting part is this:

There's about $4,100 sitting in the account, with a payment of another $2,000 initiated a few days ago that may or may not make it out into our corporate account. Apparently Paypal policy is just to sit on this money for 180 days and then either give it to us or return it to the people who pre-ordered the game. [--]
This is a decent amount of cash, but losing it would not be terminal to the project. The total revenue recieved is in the region of about $54,000, which is 1,900 pre-orders net of Paypal charges.

2,000 pre-orders - is that a lot or not?

 

[Burning Bridges]

Who cares if someone else has problems with a bank account? If Paypal sucks use something more proper, but don't expect that the whole internet moans if you temporarily have lost access to your money.

It would be uninteresting enough if I made a public announcement that someone owes me 2000$, but it's just hilarious if it's done by a some people who want to be professional software developers.

The only relevant information is how they handle people who sent the money in good faith, and when they have a new payment method.

 

[Destroid]

The Natural Selection 2 pre-orders raised >$200k, that figure was reported February 2010.

 

[Haba]

Who cares if someone else has problems with a bank account? If Paypal sucks use something more proper, but don't expect that the whole internet moans if you temporarily have lost access to your money.

It is quite relevant, as the guy quit his day job to work full time on finalizing the game. That money was to be spent in getting certain things done. They game is going to be finished before that six month period passes.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Skip reading if you prefer to learn it the hard way:

Spoiler

When you quit your job, you will need money to live

If development stalls because of a paypal account, then god beware if something really serious happens, like his girlfriend getting pregnant or something.

 

[MapMan]

The Natural Selection 2 pre-orders raised >$200k, that figure was reported February 2010.

Didnt ns2 turn out to be a total turd and is dead even before release?

As for paypal: Its the shittest service ever, serves people right for using it.

 

[Haba]

Spoiler

When you quit your job, you will need money to live

If development stalls because of a paypal account, then god beware if something really serious happens, like his girlfriend getting pregnant or something.

Again, you completely miss the point. Let me tell you, even in "serious business world", money transaction issues can cause severe cash flow problems and even bankruptcies. I guess they all are hilarious as well?

Besides, if you'd actually bothered to read the posting instead of making things up, you'd see that no-one was spelling any doom and gloom over this. The worst case result is simply that some planned features are cut.

From my observation, so far Chris England has managed his project in very professional manner. If you want to find an easier target to ridicule, try VD.

 

[Destroid]

The Natural Selection 2 pre-orders raised >$200k, that figure was reported February 2010.

Didnt ns2 turn out to be a total turd and is dead even before release?

As for paypal: Its the shittest service ever, serves people right for using it.

It's still in development. Hereis a recent preview video of the newest build. Graphics look pretty damn good.

 

[Wunderpurps]

Most projects out there are vaporware of varying degrees of obviousness but this one is already supposed to be pretty playable and has customers so I don't see how anyone can make that claim here.

OTOH When I see a cover system and that it's going to use a lot of real world models from a really lame time period then I start to worry. The Two Sides was pretty much 100% complete, it just sucked.

 

[Sitra Achara]

For those who haven't been following:

-Xenonauts has moved to Desura.
-New site launched.
-Price reduction to 19.99$, with an optional 29.99$ premium account (mostly to offer extra support, but you get a special forum title, and possibly other goodies down the line).
-Old preorderers get to choose either a 10$ refund or stay premium, in case someone was wondering.
-Most importantly, build v8 has been released, with a bugfix release (v8.1) slated for Monday.

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/foru ... 8-Released

V8 Released

So I finally got V8 out around the time of the (revised) deadline. It has now been authorised and is ready to download.

So, first big news is this - V8.1 will be the one with the Research tree and manufacturing in. We'll be releasing that on Friday, assuming we can get the rendering done fast enough. There were a couple of bugs in the software and it was taking too long to render out all the weapon / armour combinations as we were adding new ones for both, so we delayed it. I figured you guys would rather be able to use the results of the research properly than just have an M16 than fired laser bolts...

Other than that, V8 has come out alright. These are the main changes in it:

Control improvements: (not an exhaustive list)
'Turn X' screen removed at the start of each turn, as lots of people thought it was a loading screen.
Selecting a new troop while another one is in motion no longer cancels the movement of the first. This makes moving troops quicker.
Double clicking the icon for a soldier should centre the camera on them, as should doublepressing their keyboard hoykey number.
Fire mode for weapons now allows you to target specific parts of the battlefield. If you want to shoot at a wall, you can now shoot directly at it rather than just past it. This makes them easier to hit too, as the soldiers are trying to do so (previously they'd be trying to miss the target, if you see what I mean).
Alien head icons for spotted aliens are displayed as normal if the selected soldier can see the alien in question. If they cannot, it it shown at reduced opacity.
Soldiers can now vault over waist high walls at double movement cost for normal movement. In this map this is mostly the metal pipes.
The line of sight mechanics have been completely rewritten and hopefully should behave much more predictably now. The old ones turned out to be surprisingly buggy.
New Kneeling / Cover System:
Previously kneeling into cover was done automatically, and did not cost AP. This was unwieldy when combined with soldiers vaulting waist high cover walls.
Kneeling now costs 4AP and provides a reduced chance of being hit (60% as opposed to 100% for any shot passing through that tile) and also a shooting accuracy bonus. However, it should also increase the stopping value of all obstacles between the shooter and the target by 50% to compensate for his lower height.
'Leaning' has been entirely removed from the game. It was a pain in the ass.
Cover now applies if you are standing in the tile, but is more effective if you are kneeling.
Title Screen:
There is now a title screen in the game when you first load it up. This has some nice art and music on it.
The art is not finished, but is essentially what we want to go for with the 'new GUI style' some of you may have heard me refering to before. More details on that at a future date.
The clipboard options allow you to Save the game, Load existing games or customise the options - sound volume, mouse sensitivity and key remapping.
There are four difficulty settings that affect the speed of the alien invasion and the HP of the UFOs in battle. These settings have not been balanced yet and will also affect the alien unit stats and weapon damage in the final game.
Save / Load:
You can now save the game on the Geoscape. This feature needs some major testing. Please break it as comprehensively as you can.
Save / Load is not yet active in the ground combat missions. We're working on that at the moment.
Radar Changes:
Previously the base radar was made up of long-range and short-range detection. Now radars have detection range and tracking range, and there is only one base radar building.
The detection range is represented by the solid blue circle on the Geoscape and UFOs have a % chance per minute to be detected when within this. Radar detection chance is now linear with range (we need to tweak this as UFOs are still picked up far too fast).
The tracking range is represented by the blue dotted circle beyond the detection range. Detected UFOs within this range will no longer be lost even if they leave detection range. This is to stop the continual detection / redetection issue that occurred when UFOs flew a random path on the edge of detection range.
The inner circle (previously short-range radar) is now defunct and will be removed in the next build. This should reduce the Geoscape clutter.

New Animations:
We've added new animations for the basic soldier and Jackal soldier with most of the basic weapons, the shotgun and unarmed ones aside. I'll create a forum thread to point out broken animations (one where a blue rifle-armed soldier performs the animation).
Battlefield Randomisation:
The battlefield is now more random than before. There's a couple of variants of most of the sub-maps, although they're not drastically different (I didn't have the time to completely change them) it does illustrate how the randomisation does work. We'll add more different maps in V8.1 or V8.2 I think.
The battlefields now have multiple UFO types - or or least, the technology is now there. I've put in 'maps' for both the Corvette and the Scout. These are variants of the Evil Alien Factory (so don't use real UFO tiles) but are differing sizes and layout. There is also some slight variation in the interior layout between the Scout maps to show that this is possible - it'll be much more obvious in the final version once the UFO tiles are done.
There might be some more new features than that, but if so then I've forgotten them. Anyway, the build is now at 40% uploaded...

General progress update:

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.

 

[Wunderpurps]

Thanks. I will pick it up eventually when it's close to final.

 

[Achilles]

I'm already a Premium pre-orderer and I can't wait to play it.

 

[zeitgeist]

'Turn X' screen removed at the start of each turn, as lots of people thought it was a loading screen.

Seriously? Who is the target audience for this again? How is it even remotely possible that a significantly large number of current testers could have such a problem understanding something that appeared in the original games?

 

[Achilles]

Yeah it's telling, isn't it? The game is not dumbed down though, it's progressing very well and the current version does seem to capture the feeling of X-Com.

 

[Trash]

Skip reading if you prefer to learn it the hard way:

Spoiler

When you quit your job, you will need money to live

If development stalls because of a paypal account, then god beware if something really serious happens, like his girlfriend getting pregnant or something.

That's bull. He's basically having the same problems as any small business that suddenly does not recieve any income. It also shows once again how incredible shit PayPal is and that people should not use it.

Anyway, hope this will keep going forward. From the change lists and his post it does seem like very early days for a great many parts. More than I had anticipated in fact after thing being in development for so long.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Is there any non-shit alternative to Paypal? Preferably one that can be used on eBay, etc?

 

[Berekän]

Just so you know there's a GIANT DINOSAUR IN MY BACKYARD ZOMG RUN RUN FOR YOUR LIVES in case anyone here wants to try it.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

The game is updated fairly frequently so what you get from the "leaked" version may be much shittier than what civilized, paying folks are playing.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I said some unwelcome things about the project in its early stage, the reason being that I generally don't like the ego show which ensues when newcomer developers talk about games which they have just begun during the holidays.

But all the time I followed this game and have recently become convinced that this one is real.

Looking at videos of the latest builds, this game looks like it is fun right away. The graphics are right down my alley. Moreover (unlike numerous XCOM/JA clones) finally a developer has realized a proper perspective (i.e. not 3D), meaning that you can go right away to clicking and ordering your mercs, not turning a frustrating 3D camera before you can even do anything. The latest version game also shows more diversity in the tilesets, working animation (mercs now jump over fences and such), and other nice things.

Some gameplay from the lastest build (V9)

AI is still not implemented but they openly acknowledge that, so they will certainly do something about it.

I think I will preorder as soon as it has working AI.

 

[The_scorpion]

Looking at videos of the latest builds, this game looks like it is fun right away. The graphics are right down my alley. Moreover (unlike numerous XCOM/JA clones) finally a developer has realized a proper perspective (i.e. not 3D), meaning that you can go right away to clicking and ordering your mercs, not turning a frustrating 3D camera before you can even do anything. The latest version game also shows more diversity in the tilesets, working animation (mercs now jump over fences and such), and other nice things.

This!
The video looks good. Soldier portraits are hopefully moddable :D oh and i don't like the solid black fog of war variant. IMHO, the grey, secondary fog of war would suffice and looks optically a lot better. But that's probably a matter of taste.

 

[Achilles]

Yup, Xenonauts is the real deal people. I have the game preordered and I can't wait to play the full version. I you can preorder, please do so! The money from preorders is invested on the game so we'll all get a better game in the end.

 

[GarfunkeL]

That video does look good. Only few niggling issues I could see, aside from the lack of AI.

 

[The_scorpion]

yeah i had a quick glance at their forums and it appears AI is in the works. if they get this done, i think i may actually preorder this thing. though it may be smart to preorder now so my money is spent for the AI rather than on hookers and booze. decisions, decisions, decisions