Sembra promettentissimo, anche nel design sembra molto ben fatto...staremo a vedere
se riescono nell'impresa gliene prendo 2 di copie 1 la uso l'altra la metto sotto vuoto assieme all'orginale di x-com
Devono *muoversi* a mostrare sto benedetto ground combat, perché per me sarà l'elemento decisivo per capire se abbiamo davanti un degno erede o l'ennesimo clone scoppiato che non vale la metà dell'originale.
*
maggio è alle porte, vedremo come si evolve.
magari poi riescono a farlo uscire prima dell'abominio di x-com: sai che schiaffo morale?
This post accompanies Sitrep #7 on the main page, and is a detailed update on the progress we've made on the project in recent times.
First of all, I'd like to thank all our pre-orders for their ongoing support. For the first time we've, taken more money in than has gone out this month. This is great news for the project. Last week I was looking at the budgets and musing on how many tilesets we really needed for the ground combat part of the game (as each one weighs in at 200-300 tiles, they aren't cheap). Having a good inflow of cash means that I can breathe a little easier and possibly err on the side of generosity here, which can only be a good thing for the final game. It’s also great to see a bunch of new members in the forums – I hope you guys stick around!
As you probably saw on the front page, the biggest thing that has happened over the last month or so has been the ground combat/geoscape merge. This means that:
- The game now runs as a single shared .exe file, and has shared resolutions etc between the two halves of the game. Previously, it was two entirely separate executable files (which was messy).
- The game now allows crash sites to spawn on the Geoscape when a UFO is crashed over land. It also allows the player to attack landed UFOs with dropships (but not interceptors).
- The contents of the dropship are accurately represented in the combat, both in terms of which soldiers were taken to battle, but the layout in the dropship is also correctly imported from the Aircraft Equip screen.
- The soldiers have their names and attributes successfully imported into the combat.
- The soldier inventory system has been put into the ground combat, so the soldiers import weapons correctly and can reload weapons by using clips in their inventory etc. This still needs a bit of work as there's a couple of bugs, and movement doesn't yet cost APs and items cannot yet be picked up/dropped on the ground, but we're working on this. It represents the majority of the remaining work on the merge.
- The starting soldiers all have an intelligently-assigned default loadout to make the game easier to play for beginners and less tedious when you start a new game.
- The victory conditions work for the UFO crash site missions - you can both win by killing all the aliens, or by taking and holding the UFO.
- Soldier attribute skillup tracking is taking place for all statistics where it is currently possible, and this is being fed back to the Geoscape so the cumulative total is retained mission-to-mission for each soldier.
- The alien spawns are no longer completely random – a set percentage of the aliens spawn inside the UFO, while the remainder spawn across the rest of the map but cannot spawn inside the ‘exclusion zone’ around the player dropship. This stops ‘Saving Private Ryan Syndrome’ occurring at the start of every mission.
- Aliens now have their own animated sprites, rather than just being recoloured human soldier sprites.
Outside of the above, the biggest improvement has come from the 2D animations. Our new 2D animator, Alex, has produced a series of beautiful non-character animations (ie, weapon projectiles, weapon impact animations, fire/smoke, explosions) to put in the game. It’s taken us a long time to find someone capable of doing hand-drawn isometric 2D animations that match the slightly cel-shaded style of Xenonauts, but Alex has solved this problem very well.
Pretty, eh? This is another good example of where the pre-order money has been very useful, as his fees are two or three times what we originally budgeted for this area. The increase in quality is well worth the price (you’ll be watching those animations a lot!), but you can’t buy something if you don’t have the money, no matter how good value it is. So, again, a great example of where the pre-order investment has significantly improved the final quality of the game.
We’re presently working on finishing up the morale system, so soldiers panic and flee correctly, and we’re reworking the terrain generation system to make it only semi-randomly generated. This basically means each mission level will be drawn from a pre-created map, but each sub-map (for example, a barn or a carrot field) would have several different variations that might appear. That way, even if you get the same map twice, it’ll look different and will have a slightly different layout even if the overall position of everything is roughly the same. We’re doing this because sadly having purely randomly-generated maps really wasn’t giving us the quality we wanted in the mission levels.
You should expect to see screenshots of the ground combat in about two weeks. In the meantime, we’re working on a couple more tilesets – a desert and an industrial one (even though the farm one still needs some more touching up). We’ve doubled the size of the team working on this, as we’ve let it slip a bit over the last couple of months. It’ll be important to keep consistency between the new artists, but I have high hopes.
On the Geoscape, we’ve got a bit of work relating to the merge to clear up, and then it’s only really the ongoing air combat work and that relating to the invasion AI (including country relations and event generation) that needs to be done before it is feature complete. There’s a bunch of miscellaneous stuff also to be done too – title screen, options screens etc, but at least we can see the finish line now.
What else has happened in the meantime? Hmm. We’ve got a lot of the character modelling done now – we’re doing the female civilian model, which is a single model with 6 different skins, and then all the humans will be done. We’ve two more alien models to do, which are both standalone (ie, single rank only) aliens, as all the aliens with multiple variations have already been completed. That’s a total of roughly 40 models, or something, so again we’re doing well on that front. We’ll be looking to pick up one or two animators in the near future to get them all animated with the various weapons they’ll be using.
Speaking of animations, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and bought a new PC. I think the hint came when my current PC was struggling to run Portal 2 (handily being in game development, both are tax deductible – one as a work tool, the other as ‘research’!). Some online benchmarking suggests that it’s roughly 4 times faster than the old warhorse was, so I expect that’ll significantly speed up the process of getting new sprites into the game.
In the near future, I’m going to pick up a motion graphic designer as we want to start doing some promotional trailers and videos, and we’ll need some expertise on that front. It’ll probably take me a couple of weeks to find someone with the right blend of price and experience, but hopefully our updates will be taking a somewhat more multimedia flavour in the next month or two.
Finally, there should be a bit more publicity on the horizon for us on a few other major sites. I’ll keep you all posted on how that develops. I think that’s pretty much everything now – well done for reading this far down!
First of all, I'd like to thank all our pre-orders for their ongoing support. For the first time we've, taken more money in than has gone out this month. This is great news for the project. Last week I was looking at the budgets and musing on how many tilesets we really needed for the ground combat part of the game (as each one weighs in at 200-300 tiles, they aren't cheap). Having a good inflow of cash means that I can breathe a little easier and possibly err on the side of generosity here, which can only be a good thing for the final game. It’s also great to see a bunch of new members in the forums – I hope you guys stick around!
As you probably saw on the front page, the biggest thing that has happened over the last month or so has been the ground combat/geoscape merge. This means that:
- The game now runs as a single shared .exe file, and has shared resolutions etc between the two halves of the game. Previously, it was two entirely separate executable files (which was messy).
- The game now allows crash sites to spawn on the Geoscape when a UFO is crashed over land. It also allows the player to attack landed UFOs with dropships (but not interceptors).
- The contents of the dropship are accurately represented in the combat, both in terms of which soldiers were taken to battle, but the layout in the dropship is also correctly imported from the Aircraft Equip screen.
- The soldiers have their names and attributes successfully imported into the combat.
- The soldier inventory system has been put into the ground combat, so the soldiers import weapons correctly and can reload weapons by using clips in their inventory etc. This still needs a bit of work as there's a couple of bugs, and movement doesn't yet cost APs and items cannot yet be picked up/dropped on the ground, but we're working on this. It represents the majority of the remaining work on the merge.
- The starting soldiers all have an intelligently-assigned default loadout to make the game easier to play for beginners and less tedious when you start a new game.
- The victory conditions work for the UFO crash site missions - you can both win by killing all the aliens, or by taking and holding the UFO.
- Soldier attribute skillup tracking is taking place for all statistics where it is currently possible, and this is being fed back to the Geoscape so the cumulative total is retained mission-to-mission for each soldier.
- The alien spawns are no longer completely random – a set percentage of the aliens spawn inside the UFO, while the remainder spawn across the rest of the map but cannot spawn inside the ‘exclusion zone’ around the player dropship. This stops ‘Saving Private Ryan Syndrome’ occurring at the start of every mission.
- Aliens now have their own animated sprites, rather than just being recoloured human soldier sprites.
Outside of the above, the biggest improvement has come from the 2D animations. Our new 2D animator, Alex, has produced a series of beautiful non-character animations (ie, weapon projectiles, weapon impact animations, fire/smoke, explosions) to put in the game. It’s taken us a long time to find someone capable of doing hand-drawn isometric 2D animations that match the slightly cel-shaded style of Xenonauts, but Alex has solved this problem very well.
Pretty, eh? This is another good example of where the pre-order money has been very useful, as his fees are two or three times what we originally budgeted for this area. The increase in quality is well worth the price (you’ll be watching those animations a lot!), but you can’t buy something if you don’t have the money, no matter how good value it is. So, again, a great example of where the pre-order investment has significantly improved the final quality of the game.
We’re presently working on finishing up the morale system, so soldiers panic and flee correctly, and we’re reworking the terrain generation system to make it only semi-randomly generated. This basically means each mission level will be drawn from a pre-created map, but each sub-map (for example, a barn or a carrot field) would have several different variations that might appear. That way, even if you get the same map twice, it’ll look different and will have a slightly different layout even if the overall position of everything is roughly the same. We’re doing this because sadly having purely randomly-generated maps really wasn’t giving us the quality we wanted in the mission levels.
You should expect to see screenshots of the ground combat in about two weeks. In the meantime, we’re working on a couple more tilesets – a desert and an industrial one (even though the farm one still needs some more touching up). We’ve doubled the size of the team working on this, as we’ve let it slip a bit over the last couple of months. It’ll be important to keep consistency between the new artists, but I have high hopes.
On the Geoscape, we’ve got a bit of work relating to the merge to clear up, and then it’s only really the ongoing air combat work and that relating to the invasion AI (including country relations and event generation) that needs to be done before it is feature complete. There’s a bunch of miscellaneous stuff also to be done too – title screen, options screens etc, but at least we can see the finish line now.
What else has happened in the meantime? Hmm. We’ve got a lot of the character modelling done now – we’re doing the female civilian model, which is a single model with 6 different skins, and then all the humans will be done. We’ve two more alien models to do, which are both standalone (ie, single rank only) aliens, as all the aliens with multiple variations have already been completed. That’s a total of roughly 40 models, or something, so again we’re doing well on that front. We’ll be looking to pick up one or two animators in the near future to get them all animated with the various weapons they’ll be using.
Speaking of animations, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and bought a new PC. I think the hint came when my current PC was struggling to run Portal 2 (handily being in game development, both are tax deductible – one as a work tool, the other as ‘research’!). Some online benchmarking suggests that it’s roughly 4 times faster than the old warhorse was, so I expect that’ll significantly speed up the process of getting new sprites into the game.
In the near future, I’m going to pick up a motion graphic designer as we want to start doing some promotional trailers and videos, and we’ll need some expertise on that front. It’ll probably take me a couple of weeks to find someone with the right blend of price and experience, but hopefully our updates will be taking a somewhat more multimedia flavour in the next month or two.
Finally, there should be a bit more publicity on the horizon for us on a few other major sites. I’ll keep you all posted on how that develops. I think that’s pretty much everything now – well done for reading this far down!
bla bla bla, io voglio foto e video.. sti discorsi hanno rotto il cazzo
sono sotto esclusiva su pc gamer e come ben sai, è molto importante per loro se vogliono vendere in futuro.
Io invece più lo leggo più mi ispira fiducia.
Non volevo dirlo
Speriamo che non faccia la fine di Black Mesa....
Speriamo che non faccia la fine di Black Mesa....
Spoiler
Da dove stracazzo le hai rpese? 
Già oggi con la postepay carica di soldi mi son dovuto trattenere dal preordinarlo, vuoi rovinarmi.
Già oggi con la postepay carica di soldi mi son dovuto trattenere dal preordinarlo, vuoi rovinarmi.
Mi rispondo da solo, gli screen son tutti presi da qui, con tanto di walkthrough di una missione a terra 
i modelli dei personaggi mi paiono troppo "staccati" dallo scenario nel senso che non mi sembrano ben integrati sembrano "appoggiati" ...
Per il resto, beh sembra ufo mi pare di rivedere le stesse case i stessi campi e gli stessi alberi ...non so...non mi ha entusiasmato tantissimo.
Per il resto, beh sembra ufo mi pare di rivedere le stesse case i stessi campi e gli stessi alberi ...non so...non mi ha entusiasmato tantissimo.
A primo impatto non ha colpito neppure me, ma magari visto in movimento con le animazioni che han promesso, sarà molto più godibile.
Beh, un attimo. Considerate quello che scrive nell'articolo:
..quindi l'estrema somiglianza con l'originale è assolutamente voluta in questo caso particolare.
Mancano le ombre dei personaggi, il che forse gli ha dato quell'aspetto di distacco dallo scenario di cui parla noob.
Le animazioni mi aspetto siano diecimila volte migliori dell'originale, e tutto sommato l'aspetto grafico mi piace (è un pò xcom in HD).
Quello che NON mi piace sono quelle ombre scalettate che si vedono, non so se si possa fare qualcosa in proposito ma lo chiederò sul forum.
Altro aspetto importante sulle mappe:
..quindi l'estrema somiglianza con l'originale è assolutamente voluta in questo caso particolare.
Mancano le ombre dei personaggi, il che forse gli ha dato quell'aspetto di distacco dallo scenario di cui parla noob.
Le animazioni mi aspetto siano diecimila volte migliori dell'originale, e tutto sommato l'aspetto grafico mi piace (è un pò xcom in HD).
Quello che NON mi piace sono quelle ombre scalettate che si vedono, non so se si possa fare qualcosa in proposito ma lo chiederò sul forum.
Altro aspetto importante sulle mappe:
Mi aspettavo qualcosa di più evoluto dal punto di vista tecnico...
Sono i primi screenshots che vedo e non mi è chiaro perché abbiano usato degli sfondi 2d, o comunque che sembrano in 2d...d'accordo a voler ricreare le atmosfere di ufo ma, considerando la cura per l'interfaccia e il dettaglio riposto per i modelli delle unità, mi aspettavo qualcosa di meglio, anche da uno scenario casuale, tra l'altro rigorosamente squadrato... possibile che non ci sia modo per rendere gli scenari più "naturali" nel 2011? direi di si...poi certo, si tratta di un indie, un piccolo team, e mi accontento comunque se mettono su un gameplay ben strutturato e ricco di features
Sono i primi screenshots che vedo e non mi è chiaro perché abbiano usato degli sfondi 2d, o comunque che sembrano in 2d...d'accordo a voler ricreare le atmosfere di ufo ma, considerando la cura per l'interfaccia e il dettaglio riposto per i modelli delle unità, mi aspettavo qualcosa di meglio, anche da uno scenario casuale, tra l'altro rigorosamente squadrato... possibile che non ci sia modo per rendere gli scenari più "naturali" nel 2011? direi di si...poi certo, si tratta di un indie, un piccolo team, e mi accontento comunque se mettono su un gameplay ben strutturato e ricco di features
Non avevo notato il post, altrimenti te lo avrei detto.
A me comunque interessa dagli screen, a differenza di molti qua dentro.
comunque 30$ mi sembrano un po tantini 
Sì non sono pochi e il perchè della scelta l'ha spiegato lui stesso da qualche parte sul sito.
Eppure ogni volta che lo leggo mi dà l'impressione che stia lavorando per creare qualcosa che sia persino migliore del primo ufo. Lo si vedeva all'inizio quando diceva di voler eliminare i pochi difetti del primo ufo, o dall'attenzione ai dettagli si vede un pò ovunque, dal bilanciamento al ground combat.
Boh poi magari sono io che mi faccio le seghe mentali, ma mi sembra stia puntando molto sulla qualità del prodotto.
Gli ho fatto due domandine sull'articolo, se risponde ve le riporto.
beh oddio nostalgia a parte non mi paiono poi cosi tanti 30 dolla, sopratutto con tutti i giochi di merda che escono oggi a 50 € ...