To The Developers Of Xenonauts.

Edit: Some rummaging in the game files revealed that not only is there a correctly-shaped lightmap in the geoscape folder, but you can actually use it to replace the current, awful lightmap through some simple file renaming. So the only remaining question now is, why isn’t it being used as default? 

First, great job on the game! The cold war setting in particular is a great idea; it looks like you should be able to produce something special if — as looks very likely — you guys make your Kickstarter target and then some. However, when you are considering your stretch goals (or what I would otherwise call “deciding what to do with our huge piles of money” if I were feeling uncharitable) I would like you to take a look at the above picture, and then have a long, hard think about what exactly this is going to do to the day/night border as it progresses across the surface of the Earth as rendered via the Mercator projection. Hopefully this will lead you to make some changes to the geoscape so that it doesn’t break basic physics, or at least put some blurb into the lore about the aliens either altering the axis of rotation of the Earth to zero degrees or else physically shifting the Sun to match, because aliens are dicks like that.

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8 thoughts on “To The Developers Of Xenonauts.

  1. Smurf says:

    When I win the lottery I’m going to make a game that’s riddled with physics errors. They won’t be immediately obvious but as you replay the game again and again more of them will become clear. This way there will be no sudden release of physics rage but it will build over time as you start noticing more and more until when you play the game all you’ll see will be physics mistakes. You will have been playing the game for so long without noticing them all, you’ll start to fear that maybe lots of games you liked before may have mistakes in them and you just haven’t noticed them. You will start to doubt your physics knowledge. From then on you will instantly have a fear that every new game you play will be error-ridden until eventually games in general will remind you of physics mistakes and you’ll have to give up playing games to preserve what little sanity you have left.

    Then I will leap out your wardrobe and be all “lol jk”.

  2. Gorlom says:

    I don’t really know who wrote this, but Goldhawk is aware that the earth tilts. There is an old discussion thread about more accurate day and night cycle with a link to some NASA page where you can see exactly what it looks like.
    Baisically there are 2 issues. 1) There are technical limititations regarding the changes in the day and night cycle as the year progresses. It just can’t be implemented to full accuracy.
    2) The wave form looks rather odd and might not be what the usual/casual gamer is expecting. So from a design choice the over simplified day&night cycle has thus far seemed to be advantageous.

  3. notsureifserious.jpg says:

    I personally think that putting development time into improving game features is just sliiiightly more important then accurately simulating the orbit of the earth around the sun.

    If you truly want accurate then you would need to factor in the tilt of the earth that shifts over time and accurately represent that in the game too or Someone is going to get annoyed by that as well! Then after that you need to… Well you see where I’m going with this?

    Or they could just, you know, keep it as it is since it’s perfectly fine for any kind of gameplay purposes, because it’s a game and not an accurate solar system simulation?

  4. hentzau says:

    To Gorlom and notsureifserious.jpg: I’m half-joking about this and I don’t seriously expect Goldhawk to prioritise it over adding actual content, but I’m not asking for 100% accuracy reflecting the orbit of the Earth around the sun and the progression through the seasons. Surely it can’t be that hard to replace the current barcode sweep with the familar orbital curve? They’re both fixed shapes, after all.

    (Also, your point about casual gamers: you realise this is a child of X-COM, a game which, while hardly being the sole preserve of grognards, is substantially more complex than the average mainstream release today? If they’re put off by the day/night border not being the shape they expect then they’re probably a lost cause anyway.)

  5. Anonymous says:

    I’d kind of like to see some lore about how the aliens are such dicks they messed with the earth’s axis of rotation. One can imagine them sitting in orbit snickering over cocktails as commercial jetliners panic and tides shift… one more reason to fight them off!

  6. Interrobang‽ says:

    Pandemic 2.5 annoys me greatly because the ENTIRE EARTH goes through the same night/day cycle at the same time. Oh how I wish it even had the linear progression of night chasing day chasing night.

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