Xenonauts, Strategic Planetary Defense Simulator(BUILD 5.5 IS OUT!)

Edith Upwards · December 2010

If Xenonauts is not released, I shall eat my own cock!

Strategic Planetary Defense Sim? What the hell?

Xenonauts is a single-player strategy game due for release in 2011. Primarily a strategy game, it sits astride several genres and so we’ve coined the phrase ‘planetary defence simulator’ to describe it. The game puts the player in control of an organisation tasked with defending the planet against extraterrestrial invasion; establishing bases all across the world that house aircraft, scientists, technicians and soldiers and using them as staging posts to defend the skies against alien incursion and strike at crashed UFOs or terror sites on the ground.

What differentiates this from the dozen other X-COM clones?

Xenonauts does away with the near-future setting of X-Com and instead is set in 1979, at the height of the Cold War. Though not completely historically accurate (particularly with regards to the alien invasion), we've made an effort to create a believable world for the Xenonauts to operate in. This section explores the lore of the world; you can read up on the background of the organisation on the Background page, along with extracts from interviews with survivors of the disastrous Iceland Incident - humanity's first contact with extraterrestrial life.

News
Game Overview
Setting
Project Status
Media
Forum
ModDB(Use if main site is down)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woLBBfgY8fg&feature=player_embedded

Edith Upwards · December 2010

Sitrep #11 - Future Plans

This Sitrep is going to be a quick update on what's been going on in the development of Xenonauts in recent times (and what our plans for future updates will be), as its been a while since we did one.

The first thing to mention is that we have finally managed to acquire a 2D paintover artist to paint over the 3D pre-rendered tiles that you will have seen in the earlier builds / screenshots of the game where the Industrial tileset was involved. Our previous paintover artist vanished off the face of the earth quite a while ago now, and it has proven difficult to find someone capable of painting consistently to the standard that we want, in the style we want, and within our budget (it's not exactly a skill most artists develop at art school, so you need someone who has had plenty of experience in their job). Thankfully, it seems the search is now over.

The image below is a side-by-side comparison of two tiles before and after paintover, with the unpainted tile on the left and the painted one on the right:

As you can see, we can cram substantially more detail onto the painted tiles, making everything look a lot crisper. It's also going to give the game a fairly distinctive art style - the limits of the engine mean that we can only use 2D tiles rather than a full 3D battlefield, so we've decided we may as well make Xenonauts a bit of a last hurrah for 2D tile-based gaming (as we certainly won't be using a 2D engine in any further titles!) and we're determined to make it look as good as possible. I think the art style has improved a bit since our Farmyard tileset, which was always a bit of a tester for us (and probably came out a bit too cartoony). Anyway, it should improve the consistency between the Geoscape and Ground Combat quite significantly.

The other major plus point is that having a 2D artist now allows us to give all of our tiles a 'damaged' and 'destroyed' variant. The destructible scenery means we need three times as many tiles in the game as we would normally, but it immeasurably adds to the experience of the game. We've scattered various examples of tiles in each of their three states throughout this post for you to look at, and hopefully you're as impressed by the artwork as I am. The sheer number of variants of each tile and the substantial expansion in the raw number of tiles in the game means that there will be something like 400 - 450 tiles in each tileset (including variants), which means much more immersive maps (and remember, you'll be able to blow up everything on the battlefield). There should be between 6 and 8 full tilesets in the game, so if you were wondering where your pre-order money has been going, there's (some) of the explanation!

Next thing to mention is the sound design. As has been mentioned before, we've recruited a new Sound Director (the chap who worked on Amnesia) and he has proved very capable. We're getting SFX done at a rate of knots, and have been working on the terrain editor to add support for them. Now it's possible to set different footstep noises to be played when a tile is walked over, allowing us to have different footsteps for when a soldier is walking on grass or dirt (and have them change depending on what armour he is wearing too). We can also set a different destruction sound for each tile, and each variant of the tile - so if you shoot a window out, you hear glass shattering. If you keep on shooting it and the wall itself collapses, there's a different sound depending on whether the wall is made of brick or wood. Oh, and while we digging around in the terrain editor, we've added exploding scenery into the game too. That's always good fun.

The final major development has been finding an experienced animator to join the team. Greg is the creator of the Eight Bit Strange animated shorts, and has joined our team now he's finished the first season. While we already had a number of animations in the game, we've taken this opportunity to sit down and rework our entire rendering pipeline with the benefit of Greg's experience. This means we'll be able to tweak a few of the animations in the game (which are generally good quality already, but there's a couple of niggling issues with them that we can correct before we re-render them) and then dramatically speed up the render times. Importantly, it also means that we can get our civilian models rigged up and in the game too. This should not take too long once our render setup is finalised and you should begin to see the results soon.

In terms of coding, there haven't been any major advances in the last few weeks - it's mostly been finishing off things like the alien artefact recovery at mission end (including battlefield tiles like UFO components that can be recovered, assuming you've not blown them up), and rearming the soldier correctly after battle (which is more complex than it sounds). We've also made some usability changes, like stopping soldier shots scattering outside the 90 degree cone centred on the spot they are aiming at - in extreme cases, soldiers could previously end up shooting behind themselves! We've also removed the telepathic ability to pathfind into hidden territory, knowing exactly where doors etc are despite not having revealed that part of the battlefield.

As has been mentioned in passing before, what we're currently aiming for is a high-quality build of the game so we can start offering some more substantial previews to the press (once it has been made available to our pre-orderers, of course). Having a painted tileset, realistic sound effects, proper animations and improved usability are all vital for this. We're not exactly sure when this build will arrive yet, but hopefully you can see the progress we are making towards it.

Finally, expect to see a little less online presence from myself and the team over the next month or so. On a personal note, I am extremely busy with my day job for the next couple of weeks and I've taken the decision to prioritise using my spare time on project managing the development team rather than on community / media engagement. Once 'crunch time' is over, I'll be jetting off on holiday for the next ten days, and while I'll still be in touch with the team I doubt I'll be spending much time on the forums during that period. I'll be properly back in early August, and I've no doubt I'll have plenty of exciting development news to pass onto you - but in the meantime, it's unlikely there will be any further Sitreps posted.

As always, dicussion or comments are welcome on our forums!

Edith Upwards · December 2010

Sitrep #10 - Build V5.5 Available!

As seems to be becoming a habit, I am reporting on our releases several days after they have occurred - we released Build V5 on Sunday. But this post does contain some actual news too - we've just released Build V5.5, which pre-orderers can find in the same thread on the Early Access forums as Build V5 (it improves the ground combat map and fixes a couple of problems with it).

The major improvements over Build V4 are:

- Aliens shoot back at you, so you can now have a proper battle.
- The Terrain Editor is now available for people to play with. It's a really powerful tool, but unless you're particularly gifted with technology you might find it a bit impenetrable. Documentation should solve this, and will appear in the next build. Press 'W' in the ground combat to access the Sub-Map Editor and run GCLevelEditor.exe to access the Level Editor.
- The air combat now works properly, with the UFO / interceptor paths displaying correctly and missile lock now working as intended.
- We've updated a lot of the sprites from V4 which weren't working properly.
- We've fixed a significant number of bugs, not only those from Build V4 but a number of lower-priority historical ones from V2 and V3. Not very exciting, but it has to be done!

Much of what we're doing at the moment is polishing the game up to send out to journalists, which is why we've been spending more time fixing bugs than adding new features. Nevertheless, we do have some announcements to make:

Firstly, we've decided to split the SFX and music duties out (our composer was previously doing both). We'd like to welcome Tapio to the team as our Sound Designer, a role he has previously performed on a number of games including Amnesia and Magicka. We consider the sound design to be a vital part of building the atmosphere in the game, and if anyone has played Amnesia then I'm sure they'll agree with me when I say that Tapio will be a great addition to the team.

We've spent the last week or so playing around with our terrain editor to support these new sounds, allowing us to specify specific destruction noises for each tile type. You should notice these sounds start to filter in over the next couple of builds, and they should add to the realism in the game significantly.

Secondly, expect an update on our new terrain generation on our PC Gamer blog shortly. We're quite proud of it, even if we'll have to hire a level designer in order to make full use of it - it combines the best features of hand-crafted maps and procedurally generated ones, and should significantly increase the replayability of Xenonauts. There's not enough space to go into the mechanics here, so keep your eyes peeled for the update on PC Gamer.

Finally, a quick glance forward at what we'll be up to over the next couple of weeks - we're current working on finishing the Mission Victory / Loss screens and the associated mission-end soldier development tracker (this includes recovering alien artefacts from the battlefield). For the Geoscape, we're about to start on putting the final piece into place - the month-end regional funding updates and the reactive alien invasion AI to go with it.

Kris_xK · December 2010

RESERVED.

FOR EXCITEMENT!

kaliyama · December 2010

The preorder thing isn't compelling right now. Too much risk at too high a price - I want to support the project, but currently they're asking for an investment into the product, and my return is ten bucks off retail - so that's a 30% return, at best. I like the mount & blade beta model, where the game got progressively more expensive as time went on and more work went into the game, and you got access to beta + final product.

I think I bought into the beta for $8.