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[Silleh Boy]

I gave the other two game modes a shot, figuring that what I remembered of my experience playing XCom would assist me somewhat (Read: Not much in either context.)

Area 51:
Stunrod guy died charging a disc only to find a... Sectoid I believe, hiding behind the other side of the wall he'd been hiding behind, after spending ten rounds hiding and waiting for a chance to attack something.
Most others died stupidly tragically in their attempts to find cover that hadn't been vaporised, or just got sent out to take potshots at stuff because I'm an arse.
The power suited pair I had:
The one with the gatling laser fired a few bursts from the backmost building, taking out a disc or two, as well as the large pod thingies - He was easily the man of the day, 'till a large amount of plasma fire vaporised half the part of the building he was in, along with him. A third of my kills were probably his, due to how mismanaged my other troops were.
The other one took a good while to die, being the last (wo)man standing - she fought a retreating battle with no ammo and no hope to take cover in a warehouse in the lower corner - where the missile launcher she found only briefly stemmed the tide before she too, was vaporised while reloading.
I died horribly, but I learned something carried across true between this and XCom. Your people are made of paper and need you to stop telling them to dance around when they're taking fire.

Exodus:
All but two men died due to me once more mismanaging things while under fire, while amusingly, the laser pistols I had turned out to be quite lethal.
If you were a civilian.
One round had the guy set to reserve points for burst and... Well...
This followed:
New contact: Shredder
Adam Robinson quickly fires his Laser Pistol.
Civilian hit by a laser beam.
Civilian dies.
Adam Robinson quickly fires his Laser Pistol.
Adam Robinson quickly fires his Laser Pistol.
Civilian hit by a laser beam.
Civilian dies.
Needless to say, I was quite amused that I was doing a better job of taking out the civilians than the aliens were.

At one point I knew there were aliens in a room above me, so, naturally I tried high explosives, though 'U'sing it didn't seem to do anything and it never seemed to go off when 'T'hrown. So much for my plans for a heroic sacrifice!
The flying person with the gatling laser scored a few kills here, though they didn't do as well as the prior game and went down after a few etherials and the like took potshots at them.
In the end, after trashing half the city and dealing with the villainous civilians, my remaining two retreated from a fair number of the remaining Shredders - one even getting batted away from me by a heavy strike from my auto cannon, before a few incendiary rounds and smoke grenades covered the remainer of our retreat.

Success!

Well, apart from most of my men dying and taking out civilians who were between them and the aliens their reaction fire was intended for. Oops.


My impressions this time around:
Unless I'm blind and missing it, some kind of display beyond toggling the log window and log files after the game telling you among other things, when your soldiers are/have hit, have fallen, etc, would be nice - a line or two at the bottom maybe. I wouldn't put it past myself to have missed that somehow, though.
Tying in with the above, some way to know I'd activated the explosives (and other things in general being announced.) would be nice, so I could have got those aliens by collapsing the building spared my guy dying in a pitiful shootout against someone with the high ground once they vaporised half the wall/floor in the room above.
Gatling lasers are fun, especially when everything's going right for you.
Gatling lasers are fun, especially when everything's going terribly wrong for you and you're killing the wrong people with it.
Rocket Launchers effects are pretty impressive looking for a roguelike, further reinforcing my prior opinion that the game's appearance is well done for the limitations the medium of text presents. Watching the rockets zip along and leave areas of grass blasted away had an odd thrill to it.
Incendiary rounds for the weapons I had seem rather underwhelming, I steered clear of incendiary rockets as a result. I may have just been unlucky there, though, as there was no way for me to know if I'd set something alight or not.

Not much else I can think of adding at this time, but, the games I've played when I've had the chance have been fun, especially with how everything's going wrong for me in the chaos - this promises to be a lot of fun down the line when there's more ways for everything to go wrong for me, and the subsequent attempts to get things back under control.
I'll be looking forward to future releases.

[Draxis]

There is a letter missing from each of the red headers on the f1 screen.  Several are 'E', but they appear fine in other places.

[Kyzrati]

Not much else I can think of adding at this time, but, the games I've played when I've had the chance have been fun, especially with how everything's going wrong for me in the chaos - this promises to be a lot of fun down the line when there's more ways for everything to go wrong for me, and the subsequent attempts to get things back under control.
I'll be looking forward to future releases.

Always fun to read others' experiences playing my games, thanks for writing this up! Some specific notes below:

I gave the other two game modes a shot, figuring that what I remembered of my experience playing XCom would assist me somewhat (Read: Not much in either context.)
[snip]
At one point I knew there were aliens in a room above me, so, naturally I tried high explosives, though 'U'sing it didn't seem to do anything and it never seemed to go off when 'T'hrown. So much for my plans for a heroic sacrifice!

Yes, apparently you forgot that in X-COM you have to 'p'rime your grenades then 't'hrow them in order to use them. The 'u'se command is something I added later to handle special item use, most of which aren't in the game yet (medkits, motion sensors, psi amps)--all it can be used for right now is to prepare a detonator for manually-triggered remote charges (an addition of my own). There is no manual or tutorial yet to explain all these things since I'm still putting the basics together, but those will come eventually.

My impressions this time around:
Unless I'm blind and missing it, some kind of display beyond toggling the log window and log files after the game telling you among other things, when your soldiers are/have hit, have fallen, etc, would be nice - a line or two at the bottom maybe. I wouldn't put it past myself to have missed that somehow, though.

Nah, you didn't miss anything, the real HUD hasn't been designed yet, and it will include a small message area for events like that.

Tying in with the above, some way to know I'd activated the explosives (and other things in general being announced.) would be nice

There are UI messages for this, but you apparently didn't prime them

Rocket Launchers effects are pretty impressive looking for a roguelike, further reinforcing my prior opinion that the game's appearance is well done for the limitations the medium of text presents. Watching the rockets zip along and leave areas of grass blasted away had an odd thrill to it.

I made all the effects in just a couple days back when working on the first tech demo, so there will be plenty more where that came from when the full set is put in place.

Incendiary rounds for the weapons I had seem rather underwhelming, I steered clear of incendiary rockets as a result. I may have just been unlucky there, though, as there was no way for me to know if I'd set something alight or not.

Incendiary in X-COM isn't all that useful for doing real damage, and is mostly for special uses, like creating smokescreens and lighting up the night.

There is a letter missing from each of the red headers on the f1 screen.  Several are 'E', but they appear fine in other places.

Thanks a lot for your report Draxis! This is caused by an engine updating limitation and if you're seeing it, it means your system might either be a little too slow, or was processing too much at the time and delayed the program. What are your system specs? And does this happen consistently *every* time you open the F1 screen? What do you mean by "several are 'E'"? (The letters are instead shown as an 'E'?)

Do any parts of the inventory or log window do the same thing on your machine? (i.e., show some kind of graphical artifact) This is important because the future interface is going to be based almost completely on the methods used to draw the inventory/log windows. The F1 screen itself will not exist later, and I'm using a temporary method to draw it, so it might not be a huge deal.

Tarran, you'll be happy to know that for now the log is colored very much along the lines of your suggestions (DF-style-ish).

Oh wow I actually contributed something to the(a?) project. Hooray!

Hehe, yep, and I rather like the color scheme the way it looks so far.

[Draxis]

The f1 screen is the only screen where there is a problem.  Several of the missing letters were 'E', but they all just displayed a black space.  Also, different letters are missing every time I start the game, but they stay the same no matter how many times I open the f1 screen in a session.  The computer has a 1.7 GH zprocessor and 1 gb of ram, but it consistently works slower than it should from that.

[Kyzrati]

Thanks for the extra info. As long as the inventory and log windows are acting normal, then the graphical funny business probably won't matter in the future--the command list headers specifically are drawn using an unusual method I pieced together back when prototyping the concept of printing consoles and text using a particle engine. 1.7 GHz should be sufficient to run the current version without any real issue... We'll see if similar issues pop up when the updated UI comes out.

[Kyzrati]

I know that a good number of you only subscribe to this thread, rather than the X@COM RSS feed, so you may not know that there have been several progress updates since the last release a few weeks ago.

Check the dev blog for details on morale implementation, the new help/command system, and the upcoming special abilities framework.

[Dohon]

Me gusta. 

[Crazy Cow]

I'm pretty ashamed to admit I've never played X-COM (close3st I ever came to it was Rebelstar on the GBA). Time to change that, me thinks.

[BishopX]

I'm having the same issues with X@COM that I had with CogMind, namely that the game performance degrades if it's left running and that after the game has been running for a while it fails to print all letters.

While it was nicely atmospheric in cogmind, it's just annoying here. I'm running 32-bit vista btw.

[Kyzrati]

I'm having the same issues with X@COM that I had with CogMind, namely that the game performance degrades if it's left running and that after the game has been running for a while it fails to print all letters.

While it was nicely atmospheric in cogmind, it's just annoying here. I'm running 32-bit vista btw.

I've heard reports of this from more than one player, but I never see any of these effects myself. The performance is noticeably degrading over time? Is it actually using increasingly more RAM/CPU? To my knowledge there are no serious memory leaks.

Can anyone who's seeing this, or having any strange issues with the text typing / window drawing post their system specs? (just need OS, RAM, and CPU--you could PM me with the info, too) There have been lots of downloads, but I've only heard about this from a few people, so I'm not sure how widespread it is, or what could be causing it. I'll have access to a Vista machine tomorrow, and can test if that's an issue, though I doubt it...

(And thanks a lot for the report BishopX. I agree that is was nicely atmospheric in Cogmind--I saw a couple screenshots where it looked cool, but it's definitely going to have to be solved for X@COM.)

[BishopX]

Before I go on record claiming CPU/memory usage characteristics, I want to gather some more data, but until then, all I'll say is that the programs ability to display letters degrades over time and that the game starts to feel sluggish after five rounds or so, or 30 minutes of leaving it running without any input.

I'm running a 32 bit vista machine with 2 GB ram and dual 2.4GHz cores.

It's a five year old machine running a crap OS so it usually gets to play canary in the coal mine.

[Kyzrati]

Thanks for the data so far. Really your rig seems as if it should be fast enough. For the next release I'll probably have the game output a few engine performance statistics to a file that might tell me more about why you're experiencing this issue. For now you can also press F5 to check your FPS (it shows an average in the window title bar)--watch what happens to it while you're opening the inventory window, since that'll slow the game down a bit. I'd be surprised if it's not running at or close to the cap speed, though, as your machine isn't all that slow.

RAM is definitely not the problem, but it sounds like your CPU might not be allowing updates as fast as it should be. I would think your CPU usage should be maxed out (or hogged by other running programs) if the game is having this issue. The rendering engine requires at least 19 ms resolution on the CPU clock, though pretty much any PC should be able to do that--if it misses updates then some things won't get drawn, though, which is what's happening here. The fact that it gets slower and slower is sorta weird though. Did you play any X@COM versions at or before R4? And if so, did they have the same problem? (Since R5, I totally rewrote the timing system in the core game loop in order to solve some issues, but who knows, could've made things worse for some people.)

My old XP dev machine was five years old and slightly slower than yours, but it bit the dust last year right before I started X@COM, and my ancient single-core laptop died a year before that, so all I've got on hand is a blazing fast quad core laptop, poor me... nothing to do low resource hardware tests on anymore!

[Crazy Cow]

I've been playing a lot in Area 51 and Exodus (gotta say, Exodus is my hands-down favorite). I know it's pretty late, but I want to say that map size isn't an issue for me; the maps are the perfect size, in my humble opinion.
One thing I /would/ like is a way to see how much you're hurting what you're hitting. Other than the lack of the 'Sectopod is unscathed' message, I have no idea how much I'm hurting these aliens or how much I have to hit them until they keel over.

[Frumple]

Re: Low resource testing, there are some programs and suchlike for throttling performance (I regularly use Battle Encoder Shirase to keep things from chewing up entire CPUs, ferex), which might let you at least simulate it, to some degree or another.

Might be able to set up a virtual machine of some sort, too, I guess -- something akin to DOSBox, just more versatile. Don't actually have any clue whatsoever how to go about it, but I'd guess it's possible. Somehow

[Kyzrati]

I've been playing a lot in Area 51 and Exodus (gotta say, Exodus is my hands-down favorite). I know it's pretty late, but I want to say that map size isn't an issue for me; the maps are the perfect size, in my humble opinion.

Never too late to support my opinion! =P
Really, I still believe they are the perfect size. (Hey, they match the original, which I think we can say they designed that way for a reason.) Larger areas, where necessary, can be connected by transfer zones.

And I'm glad you're having fun with Exodus--it's my favorite, too! There'll be a new map out for the next release, though that one could be a ways off since I'm adding a lot of new features before then.

One thing I /would/ like is a way to see how much you're hurting what you're hitting. Other than the lack of the 'Sectopod is unscathed' message, I have no idea how much I'm hurting these aliens or how much I have to hit them until they keel over.

I'll add some sort of relative damage indication to my list of features for probable inclusion, though the original X-COM didn't do that. I wonder if not having that information increases the suspense somewhat? Even what I have now, the "unscathed" log message, is already more info than you got in X-COM. Would make sense to have it for better informed tactical decision-making, of course. Anyone else with thoughts on this?

Re: Low resource testing, there are some programs and suchlike for throttling performance (I regularly use Battle Encoder Shirase to keep things from chewing up entire CPUs, ferex), which might let you at least simulate it, to some degree or another.

Might be able to set up a virtual machine of some sort, too, I guess -- something akin to DOSBox, just more versatile. Don't actually have any clue whatsoever how to go about it, but I'd guess it's possible. Somehow

I do use virtual machines sometimes, XP and [rarely] linux, though I don't have a copy of Vista atm (nor would I really want one, but making a good game does require that it be thoroughly tested for quality control on different systems, unfortunately...).

Hm, never heard of BES. Looks cool; I'll have to try it out. I do have on hand a couple of other programs that can do low resource testing, but I've never needed them before since I had older computers around. I'll probably have to actually use some of these methods at some point... though I'd prefer to test on *actual* older systems.

Or... I could just develop X@COM so slowly that by the time it's done, everyone has supercomputers at their disposal!