Phoenix Point: X-Come Again?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Phoenix Point: X-Come Again?

Ugly In The Morning: Jul 1, 2010; Pillbug

I hate that I didn�t like it much when I played it when it first came out but I�m likely to buy it again.

The concept wasn�t bad, and now it�s apparently delivering on the mutation stuff, but it just felt 2003 in a bad way, unlike Elex which felt 2005 in a nostalgic way.

# ? Sep 17, 2020 22:58

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 06:19

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

blight rhino posted:

.. I'm still playing it, though, so I can't complain too much. I keep finding myself restarting because I realized I made stupid decisions with either bases or the troops.

It's a game that commits the sin of requiring you to play a campaign through before you can understand how you are supposed to play.

Game isn't an XCOM killer (lol if you expected it to be) but it isn't outright bad. I would pick it up on sale but not at full price.

# ? Sep 17, 2020 23:33

Bogart: Apr 12, 2010; by VideoGames

Really, the year of exclusivity only benefited me, since they got their extra year of de facto dev time!

# ? Sep 18, 2020 01:14

Shine: Feb 26, 2007; No Muscles For The Majority

It's still gonna feel like a game designed in 1991, which is annoying as hell for any game not released in 1991.

# ? Sep 18, 2020 02:48

chaosapiant: Oct 10, 2012; White Line Fever

If a dude like me loves XCOM 2, does this game bring anything to the table that XCOM 2 lacks?

# ? Sep 18, 2020 05:04

Jabor: Jul 16, 2010; #1 Loser at SpaceChem

A profound sense of disappointment.

# ? Sep 18, 2020 05:12

drkeiscool: Aug 1, 2014; Soiled Meat

Jabor posted:

A profound sense of disappointment.

i dunno, i'm profoundly disappointed in my rookies in XCOM 2 sometimes

# ? Sep 18, 2020 05:56

World War Mammories: Aug 25, 2006

chaosapiant posted:

If a dude like me loves XCOM 2, does this game bring anything to the table that XCOM 2 lacks?

an approach to game design that, when confronted with a tradeoff between simulation and fun, picks simulation every time

I don�t even mean to be snide, there are grognards of every flavor out there. just, you know, I think �you have to manufacture ammo rather than just abstracting it� says a lot in a few words.

granted, the original XCOM was like that too, so

anyway, got wrecked repeatedly in my first citadel of this new campaign. rage burst isn�t stupidly overpowered anymore so my scylla strats need reworking

# ? Sep 18, 2020 06:11

Pharmaskittle: Dec 17, 2007; arf arf put the money in the fuckin bag

The aiming/projectile system is legitimately very cool. I got the game basically at release and play it at least once or twice a month just to check in and see what changes they've made. I feel like I've definitely gotten my money's worth, but yeah I totally understand anybody who's frustrated with its problems

# ? Sep 18, 2020 06:22

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

chaosapiant posted:

If a dude like me loves XCOM 2, does this game bring anything to the table that XCOM 2 lacks?

Just play Chimera Squad or War of the Chosen and forget this exists. It's very frustrating as it very much presents itself as like XCOM 2, but when you get in the actual details it more or less does everything wrong and, on release at least, absolutely felt like an early beta.

# ? Sep 18, 2020 08:39

Eediot Jedi: Dec 25, 2007; This is where I begin to speculate what being a
man of my word costs me

Pharmaskittle posted:

The aiming/projectile system is legitimately very cool. I got the game basically at release and play it at least once or twice a month just to check in and see what changes they've made. I feel like I've definitely gotten my money's worth, but yeah I totally understand anybody who's frustrated with its problems

I watched xwynns (spelling?) play this on release and the sheer joy he got out of sniping dudes through walls or lining up collateral shots with the cannon makes me very second hand fond of this game.

# ? Sep 18, 2020 09:34

Boogalo: Jul 8, 2012; Meep Meep

There's a neat game in there it just need/needs 1-2 more years in the oven but epic deal probably rushed the whole release. It still feels fairly soulless and sterile, though.

# ? Sep 18, 2020 13:52

TheDeadlyShoe: Feb 14, 2014; pretense is my co-pilot

The aiming system is cool and all but the game needed to be really tightly designed and built to make it really work.

Like in most games the details of how units stand around, how they use cover, the exact size and shape of cover objects, the specific animations, exact size of enemies, exact size of *parts* of enemies, poo poo like that has no gameplay impact. It does in Phoenix Point. But instead of coming together its like, well, everything considered, cover kinda sucks and hope you are enjoying sniping that crab dude in the face for the 20th time in a row. And sometimes you just cant get the shot you need because your dude is standing stupid and it sucks.

Where the aiming system really shines is fighting the huge enemies. But you didn't even need the aiming system for that, since the parts are so big. And I got fatigued of the game before even fighting a queen or anything, I didn't want to keep grinding down crab dudes and i wasn't good/abusive enough for the highest difficulty. Queen was neat in the kickstarter betas tho.

Game shoulda been about fighting big dudes from day 1 imo.

# ? Sep 19, 2020 12:28

Splicer: Oct 16, 2006; from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

Game shoulda been about fighting big dudes from day 1 imo.

More games need to be about fighting big dudes with targetable body parts

# ? Sep 19, 2020 13:10

drkeiscool: Aug 1, 2014; Soiled Meat

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

[cover and aim systems]

I suddenly wonder how this would all work if the game had a lean system like in Rainbow Six 3...

# ? Sep 19, 2020 13:23

Darkrenown: Jul 18, 2012; please give me anything to talk about besides the fact that democrats are allowing millions of americans to be evicted from their homes

I still haven't played PP, but from reading this thread the aiming system sounds cool but terribly integrated with the rest of the game. E.g. I seem to remember someone posting about trying to snipe an enemy in cover but having to deal with their idle animation moving them into and out of a targetable position, and other tales of your own agent's cover blocking your view as you aim at times.

# ? Sep 19, 2020 14:59

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

Darkrenown posted:

I still haven't played PP, but from reading this thread the aiming system sounds cool but terribly integrated with the rest of the game. E.g. I seem to remember someone posting about trying to snipe an enemy in cover but having to deal with their idle animation moving them into and out of a targetable position, and other tales of your own agent's cover blocking your view as you aim at times.

It's very much a case of 'what if Valkyria Chronicles, except intensely annoying?'

# ? Sep 19, 2020 15:32

World War Mammories: Aug 25, 2006

Darkrenown posted:

I still haven't played PP, but from reading this thread the aiming system sounds cool but terribly integrated with the rest of the game. E.g. I seem to remember someone posting about trying to snipe an enemy in cover but having to deal with their idle animation moving them into and out of a targetable position, and other tales of your own agent's cover blocking your view as you aim at times.

oh, yes, this is very much the case. time slows to a crawl when you're doing the actual aiming, but you have to back out and wait for their idle animation to cycle. otherwise you risk that triton taking the opportunity to scratch his rear end and having your shot whiz by him. there's also the funny wrinkle that if you shoot something in an extremity with a multi-shot weapon, the target flinching will make the last few shots much more likely to miss

anyway, it turns out that at least some scyllas crumple pretty hard to multiple heavies alternating War Cry to limit it to 2 AP per turn

one of the DLCs implemented since I last played is archaeological sites, legacy of the ancients or something like that. I think it subtly broke. there are apparently at least two resources (living crystal and mutane gas; google suggests there's a third called orichalcum that I haven't seen) that are obtained by locating sites with archaeology probes (manufacturing > vehicles), launching them from your currently selected aircraft, clearing any sites that come up, then sending a manned aircraft to idle at the site, which gives you the corresponding resource at a rate based on how many archaeology labs you have. the first site I cleared was "the living crystal lapidary" and so far as I can tell there's no way to actually harvest anything. the second was a mutane source that seems to work as intended, and also triggered a dialogue where the anu told me I should give it up because it was rightfully theirs and they were coming to claim it - though it's been weeks and they haven't done poo poo. currently I just cleared a second living crystal site - maybe that one will let me harvest any.

everything is much more functional than before - in particular there's finally a button on the Bases screen to take you to that specific base on the geoscape, rage burst isn't insanely overpowered any more, and the new exploration loop is better - and I genuinely laughed at synedrion soldiers cheerfully acknowledging orders with lines like "time for direct action" and "just another fun day in hellworld!" if you lust for essentially the 1994 xcom with a reskinned post-apocalyptic setting, more and better writing, and 3D graphics, phoenix point is your jam. I'm one of those loving idiots and so I'm having fun despite the game's best efforts to prevent it. but if you're one of the 99% of people for whom that sounds dumb as hell, don't bother, I think.

# ? Sep 19, 2020 20:16

redreader: Nov 2, 2009; I am the coolest person ever with my pirate chalice. Seriously.; Dinosaur Gum

I read that this game was bad, on release. I have a copy of it that I haven't played. Is it better now? does it need DLC to be good? What existing games does it compare to? Has someone done a write-up of it recently?

# ? Sep 20, 2020 23:27

Bettik: Jan 28, 2008; Space-age Rock Star

There seems to be a pretty decent summary literally the post above yours.

# ? Sep 20, 2020 23:36

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

I played it some more and while it is less completely broken than it was on release, it's still just aggressively boring and unfun on the whole, unless you REALLY want that classic X-COM feel.

# ? Sep 21, 2020 05:50

redreader: Nov 2, 2009; I am the coolest person ever with my pirate chalice. Seriously.; Dinosaur Gum

Bettik posted:

There seems to be a pretty decent summary literally the post above yours.

oops!

Kchama posted:

I played it some more and while it is less completely broken than it was on release, it's still just aggressively boring and unfun on the whole, unless you REALLY want that classic X-COM feel.

Thanks. Did anyone play xenonauts? I played it in early access or before it was completely done and it seemed fine. Is it worth a playthrough?

# ? Sep 21, 2020 08:42

Jack Trades: Nov 30, 2010; Can't post for 13 hours!

redreader posted:

Thanks. Did anyone play xenonauts? I played it in early access or before it was completely done and it seemed fine. Is it worth a playthrough?

It felt like such a copy paste of X-Com that I'd rather reinstall OpenXcom with mods instead.

# ? Sep 21, 2020 08:55

dogstile: May 1, 2012; fucking clocks
how do they work?

I like xenonauts. It's got a good feel to it.

Never completed it, but i like it.

# ? Sep 21, 2020 09:58

Darkrenown: Jul 18, 2012; please give me anything to talk about besides the fact that democrats are allowing millions of americans to be evicted from their homes

Did xenonauts2 get delayed or something? Might just be 2020 timeflow, but it feels like it was announced years ago and since then there's been nothing else.

# ? Sep 21, 2020 12:35

That Italian Guy: Jul 25, 2012; We need the equivalent of the shrimp = small pastry avatar, but for ambulances and their mysteries now.

Darkrenown posted:

Did xenonauts2 get delayed or something? Might just be 2020 timeflow, but it feels like it was announced years ago and since then there's been nothing else.

Seems like it...

Wikipedia posted:

In February 2016, Goldhawk officially announced Xenonauts 2,[1] with the game scheduled to be released in 2017.[5] In November 2016, Goldhawk began distributing free development builds of Xenonauts 2 with fortnightly updates.[6] The demo was later released on distribution service GOG.com in February 2017.[7] They wanted to get feedback from the player community before charging for an in-development version of the game through the Steam Early Access program.[1][6][7]. Goldhawk launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in July 2018, the funding goal was reached within 8.5 hours.[8] A closed beta was released on November 28, 2018 for Kickstarter backers who pledged �25 or more. In the announcement of the closed beta, the developers stated that the game would enter Early Access in March 2019.[9]

In October 2019, Goldhawk said that they were expecting a mid-January 2020 release on Steam Early Access, however as of August 2020, the release was still pending on the Steam platform.

# ? Sep 21, 2020 12:49

dogstile: May 1, 2012; fucking clocks
how do they work?

That's honestly not comforting. I'll be waiting for reviews before picking it up, textbook development hell timeline.

# ? Sep 21, 2020 15:08

Psycho Landlord: Oct 10, 2012; What are you gonna do, dance with me?

Xenonauts 2 is "closer" to release than it ever was but yeah. Goldhawk wound up reinventing the game like three times and are just now actually making the game that will eventually be Xenonauts 2 instead of some grand strategy 4x game where you manage an entire planetary defense network or whatever the original pitch was.

I'm still cautiously excited tbh, I'm a Xenonauts apologist because I also consider UFO Defense the platonic ideal of strategy gaming for some brokebrained reason and the moody cold war atmosphere of Xenonauts was my jam. Also the head researcher owns.

# ? Sep 21, 2020 16:20

Mordja: Apr 26, 2014; Hell Gem

I only ever played the demo for both games and while I found the first one incredibly bland, something about the X2 one really did it for me.

# ? Sep 21, 2020 16:28

Boogalo: Jul 8, 2012; Meep Meep

The xcom I'm looking forward to most right now is Open Apocalypse

# ? Sep 21, 2020 16:38

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

redreader posted:

oops!

Thanks. Did anyone play xenonauts? I played it in early access or before it was completely done and it seemed fine. Is it worth a playthrough?

I honestly haven't played it since maybe just before release when the game glitched horribly and I fell through every floor in a building and then my entire team died.

This is more my problem than Xenonauts, I suspect, but I haven't tried it again. I do wanna like it, though.

Jack Trades isn't wrong that it seemed like basically a direct XCOM 1 clone, but I do like original XCOM too, so a QoL-'d up version of that would suit me fine.

# ? Sep 22, 2020 07:59

That Italian Guy: Jul 25, 2012; We need the equivalent of the shrimp = small pastry avatar, but for ambulances and their mysteries now.

Psycho Landlord posted:

I'm still cautiously excited tbh, I'm a Xenonauts apologist because I also consider UFO Defense the platonic ideal of strategy gaming for some brokebrained reason and the moody cold war atmosphere of Xenonauts was my jam. Also the head researcher owns.

Please commander, tell me how to do my job.

I loved the fact that the soldier uniforms in the "squad setup" screen were just PNG files, so every time I would cook up something different for my soldiers to horribly die in. Your basic armor may be completely ineffective against plasma guns, but by Jove at least you'll look pretty in your hawaian shirts.

EDIT: in fact, here's a couple shirts for your Xenonauts!

And if you want to make your own, you can find the silhouette selector and the base images I've used here https://imgur.com/a/x2qkoNG.

That Italian Guy fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Sep 22, 2020

# ? Sep 22, 2020 11:42

KOGAHAZAN!!: Apr 29, 2013; a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Darkrenown posted:

Did xenonauts2 get delayed or something? Might just be 2020 timeflow, but it feels like it was announced years ago and since then there's been nothing else.

That Italian Guy posted:

Seems like it...

dogstile posted:

That's honestly not comforting. I'll be waiting for reviews before picking it up, textbook development hell timeline.

Psycho Landlord posted:

Xenonauts 2 is "closer" to release than it ever was but yeah. Goldhawk wound up reinventing the game like three times and are just now actually making the game that will eventually be Xenonauts 2 instead of some grand strategy 4x game where you manage an entire planetary defense network or whatever the original pitch was.

I'm still cautiously excited tbh, I'm a Xenonauts apologist because I also consider UFO Defense the platonic ideal of strategy gaming for some brokebrained reason and the moody cold war atmosphere of Xenonauts was my jam. Also the head researcher owns.

They do dev updates on their forums here: https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/forum/11-development-updates/

You'd think these would get posted to their news feed on the main website, too, but ha, no, that hasn't been updated since November 2019 for some reason??

August's update:

quote:

It's time for the monthly update on our progress on Xenonauts 2. The stuff we've been working on this month has largely been nitty-gritty work on fundamental game systems like the fog of war / shroud and the way that levels load, which are necessary but broke our existing maps and prevented us from releasing new builds until all the code work (and the subsequent bugfixes) and the new maps were completed. We're now nearing the end of this process, and we've also been working on a few other systems you'll hopefully appreciate in the next release.

This is a long post because these systems are complicated stuff and I know a lot of people in our community like reading it. If you're not in that category, just skip to the next heading once you get bored!

Dynamic Map Loading:
Maps in Xenonauts 2 are now created when the game tries to load the map, rather than being a pre-baked file. The map file exists as a sort of "plan" for the level, but some or all of the level can be randomised depending on how the map is put together. I won't go into too much detail because although this is an excellent system, it's not exactly groundbreaking stuff - the same system is used in Xenonauts 1, XCOM2 and is even used in the original X-Com to some degree. There were technical reasons that meant we weren't confident we'd be able to make it work properly in Unity at the beginning of the project but we've managed to overcome them and maps are now loading dynamically.

This improves the player experience because it allows the Xenonaut base defence missions to mirror the layout of your actual base like they did in X1 and X-Com, because it allows more potential randomisation within a level, and because it will save you a great deal of hard drive space and download time when playing X2. It also means that fully-functional features will no longer be roadblocked because they require incredibly time-consuming map updates - something that recently affected advanced dropships and night missions (both of which worked but weren't worth updating the maps over).

If you're interested in why this sort of thing happens, it's because a pre-baked map cannot be changed on load and thus you need a seperate version of each map for each ufo or dropship (or any other type of variant) it might support. If you take X1 which had three dropships, 7 UFOs and 6 map biomes, and assume you want five different maps per UFO per biome, the number of maps for crashsites is 3 x 7 x 6 x 5 = 630. And you probably want a landed (rather than crashed) variant of each of those UFOs, too, so you can double that to 1,260 maps. Each map is about 7 megabytes on the file system, so those crashsite maps would take up 10gb on your hard drive.

The problem there is that if you implement a new feature like night missions, you often have to specify where those systems apply. For instance, Alien Base missions shouldn't be affected by the night / day cycle because they are underground. That means we need to update the map settings for every map to contain a value for whether that map should respond to the day / night cycle or not, and under the old system I would need to potentially update the settings on over a thousand different maps and then regenerate all those maps so the new settings are saved into them. Not only would that take me days, it means that that tiny change to the map settings requires every player to download a 10gb update.

Clearly, that would be madness. Our new solution means a map can load in the desired dropship / UFO / etc at the start of the mission, so the number of maps is far lower and each one is only a few hundred kilobytes. Putting additional dropships into a map or activating night missions becomes something I can do in half an hour and is 10mb update for our players. Although this change has disrupted a lot of things over the past month, it's also going to pay big dividends very quickly.

New Ground Combat Maps / Art Style:
I've been very busy over the past couple of months making our new maps and trying to make the ground combat visuals more consistent. We've been working with an external studio to look over the 3d art we've already done and they've retextured most of the assets in the Desert and Polar biomes since then, and are just starting on the Farm biome.

I hope that when you see the new designs you'll think they are already better than the old visuals, but in the short term the main focus is just consistency - everything in each map needs a consistent level of detail and texture style so individual parts don't look out of place and break the immersion. There's a few subtly different artistic styles / choices we need to explore before we can call anything final (e.g. do we want to lean more realistic or use slightly exaggerated black lines to make objects pop like they do in X1? do we want the ground tiles to be relatively low-detail to let the player focus on the units and props that make up the playable battlefield, or do we try to dial up the detail at the cost of clarity?) so hopefully our ground combat maps will continue to improve as the we work through the remaining assets.

I've created a new set of maps for the Alien Base and the Desert, Polar, and Farm maps for the small UFOs (the first three UFOs that all fit within a 18x18 grid). Our previous set of maps were pretty much fully randomised, but I've taken a step back from this and created specific areas of the map that are randomised while other parts are not randomised at all. Personally, I think this gives a map that feels more "designed" while still supporting more randomisation than we had in X1, but hopefully the system below means we won't need the randomisation as much anyway.

Biome / Map Randomisation & Raids:
As well as the small UFO maps, I've designed a few Raid maps for the Desert / Farm / Polar biomes. These already exist in the game (they're basically mini-terror sites in tight urban environments with no UFOs) but I plan to make them occur more frequently and support all the major biomes. They'll contain Alenium Bombs which give the player a strategic resource reward (i.e. some Alenium) for completion so they don't become a chore in the same way that Terror Sites sometimes could.

The reason why I think this is interesting is because it ties in nicely with our new system to minimise map repetition. Why is this important? In the first Xenonauts, most of the battles were crash sites - so if you build your first base in a desert region of the world then you'll mostly be shooting down UFOs near that base and generating a lot of Desert crash site missions. The maps are picked randomly, so if there's five Desert maps available that support the first three UFO types, there's a decent chance you'll see a map repeat before you've even played five missions (even though the game had 100+ maps in it). Nothing kills the excitement in a combat mission faster than immedeiately recognising the map.

Our new system attacks this problem in multiple ways. Firstly, it tries to randomise the biome of a map if possible - each spot on the Geoscape can support up to two biomes, so if the mission occurs in a specific place on the map (i.e. a UFO crash site) then the game will pick the biome that has been encountered least often in the last ten maps. If the mission just spawns somewhere within a region (e.g. Raids) then the game will check all the biomes available within that region and spawn the mission in a spot that supports the biome that has occurred least frequently.

Once the biome is set, the game will then check a list of the last 100 missions you've played across all of your different campaigns. It will check the map "family" of all valid maps and try to pick one that you've not already seen, and then it will look inside the map family and try to pick a specific map you've not seen before. If you're unclear what a map "family" is, it's basically a group of linked maps - every unique map has its own family, but if we then create variants of that map (e.g. changing the spawn or UFO location, slightly changing the layout) then they will share the same family as the original map.

What this means is that every time you shoot down a UFO, the game will attempt to pick a biome you've not seen recently and will then search within that biome for any valid unique maps you've not seen before. If there aren't any available, the game will try to pick a variant of that map if one is available before it finally shows you a map you've seen before - and then then, there might be enough randomisation in the layout that you don't recognise it. The game will continue to track what maps you've seen even if you restart the game.

Raids work well within this system because they offer lots of additional variation. The map pool doesn't overlap with the crash sites, and contains more densely packed buildings that should give the mission a different feel to the UFO missions. Most importantly, though, they allow the game to place missions in biomes you're unlikely to see much of otherwise - e.g. if you've mostly been seeing Desert and Arid maps and the game generates a Raid in North America, it'll probably stick it up in a polar outpost up in Alaska or Northern Canada. If the game mixes in one Raid for every two or three Crash Sites then I think it'll have a big effect on how repetitive the game feels. Or at least I hope so!

Ground Tile Destruction:
Although the ground in Xenonauts 2 isn't destructible in the sense that you can't actually blow hole in the world and then fall through it, it also hasn't shown visible damage up until now. Explosive weapons used to place a decal on the ground to show their point of impact, but this never looked particularly convincing and didn't really bear any relation to the tile grid and the objects on it. Making the ground tiles visually react to damage inflicted on them makes weapons (particularly explosive weapons) feel meatier and more powerful.

We did some experimentation with 3d craters but anything that cuts into the ground looks kinda weird because units end up hovering above it, so we're just using a tile-based damage decal overlay system similar to what we had in the first game. It's not the most exciting feature ever, but honestly I'm happy to see it in because there we had some concerns it wouldn't be possible to implement the ground destruction without breaking batching on the ground tiles and thus causing massive performance issues (thankfully we found a way to do it that does not affect performance at all). Hopefully we can now use the same method to replace the blood effects with something that looks better, too.

New Ground Combat UFO Style:
The new UFO style that we've been showing off in recent months (a new set of UFOs using the X1 style) has finally made it into the ground combat, replacing the grey box style that we've been using up to this point. Implementing this has been challenging - the X1 system of hiding the hull when you see inside the UFO and instead showing the interior floorplan took a lot of time to get right back in X1 in 2D, and it proved even more complicated in 3D. But it's a good system and after a lot of trial and error we managed to iron the bugs out and now have the code side of things working as intended.

The game now contains 4 UFOs, which have been modelled up but are currently untextured white models. The reason for this is that we want to playtest the interior spaces of these UFOs before we do the final texturing - if we want to enlarge / shrink them or change their shape, it's much easier to do that before the texture work begins. I'm currently expecting there to be 8 crashable UFOs in the game so we'll be unveling the larger ones as the designs for them are completed.

Fog of War / Shroud Changes:
We've been working on some really low-level stuff to do with the shroud and fog of war. It's easy to take for granted how smoothly the system in X1 works (one of the things the game does well is show what tiles are visible and what are not), but there's quite a few little edge cases that cause trouble with this sort of stuff. In X2 we darken everything that was in the shroud to black and return it to colour when the player has vision on it, which works pretty well in most cases but has a few issues that need to be ironed out.

For example, if you have a tall tree sitting in the shroud directly below a group of tiles that you have vision on, you'll still be able to see the silhouette of a tree jutting into the playable area. This happens often enough that it gives the edge of the shroud an irregular and "cluttered" feel. So we've had to implement a system that actually entirely hides the models on any tile that isn't visible to the player. This stops objects you can't see from interfering with the playable area - but because we're now in 3D, there was knock-on effects. Those objects cast shadows, should the shadow of that tree be visible if it falls onto a tile even if the tree itself isn't visible? Or should the shadow only pop into existence when the model itself is seen?

Anyway, there's still a few shroud / line of sight artifacts that we ideally need to fix up, but hopefully you'll notice that the vision feels a bit cleaner next time you play.

Summary:
I'm just going to wrap things up with a very quick summary, as this is a really long post already. In terms of 2D art things have been pretty slow this month; we got the final artwork for the new Phantom interceptor done but a couple of our important artists have been busy so not much else happened beyond some work on the end-game exosuit armour and some progress on the Fighter UFO design. A different artist we had high hopes for also seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth too, which is frustrating because it means we've wasted some time and money there - but that sort of thing happens from time to time in game development.

The timing of the next build is dependent on how well the level design work goes more than anything else, so I'm going to keep working at that and then see where we are in a couple of weeks (it's taking me roughly one week per biome at the moment so I'd hope to have five of the biomes done by then). Sorry everything's been a bit quiet here and there's not been a build recently, but hopefully now you guys understand why!

I don't think we're expecting the game this year.

e: Xenonauts was great as an up-QOL'd X-COM remake, speaking as someone who never got into nuCOM.

# ? Sep 22, 2020 14:38

SupSuper: Apr 8, 2009; At the Heart of the city is an Alien horror, so vile and so powerful that not even death can claim it.

Psycho Landlord posted:

I'm still cautiously excited tbh, I'm a Xenonauts apologist because I also consider UFO Defense the platonic ideal of strategy gaming for some brokebrained reason and the moody cold war atmosphere of Xenonauts was my jam. Also the head researcher owns.

It was the opposite for me, I appreciated the vanilla mechanics with QOL stuff, but the look and feel was just completely drab and lifeless and didn't really grab me. At least UFO Defense was charming and colourful.

# ? Sep 22, 2020 14:50

dogstile: May 1, 2012; fucking clocks
how do they work?

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

They do dev updates on their forums here: https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/forum/11-development-updates/

You'd think these would get posted to their news feed on the main website, too, but ha, no, that hasn't been updated since November 2019 for some reason??

August's update:

I don't think we're expecting the game this year.

e: Xenonauts was great as an up-QOL'd X-COM remake, speaking as someone who never got into nuCOM.

Yeah I should have updated, i did find their monthly updates but i had to dig for them. They need a community manager or something.

# ? Sep 22, 2020 16:19

Psycho Landlord: Oct 10, 2012; What are you gonna do, dance with me?

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

They do dev updates on their forums here: https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/forum/11-development-updates/

I'm aware, it's the source for my statement :v:

# ? Sep 22, 2020 16:21

KOGAHAZAN!!: Apr 29, 2013; a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Psycho Landlord posted:

I'm aware, it's the source for my statement

I figured, I was just quoting the whole convo. :cheeky:

# ? Sep 22, 2020 16:27

Darkrenown: Jul 18, 2012; please give me anything to talk about besides the fact that democrats are allowing millions of americans to be evicted from their homes

I wasn't aware of those updates, so thanks for posting it!

# ? Sep 22, 2020 17:33

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

e: Xenonauts was great as an up-QOL'd X-COM remake, speaking as someone who never got into nuCOM.

I agree with this, as someone who thinks nuCOM is 100% superior to oldCOM.

# ? Sep 30, 2020 05:04

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 06:19

FrickenMoron: May 6, 2009; Good game!

With openXCOM existing there's no reason to ever play xenonauts.

# ? Sep 30, 2020 07:53

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Phoenix Point: X-Come Again?

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