evan

Interesting idea. There aren't any plans for it at the moment, but I don't see why we couldn't do it. I'll mention it to the guys, and see what they think about it. Evan

I think that the idea is more like this: The world is basically destroyed. All of the factory owners are dead. All of the armies of the world are dead. There's a slim number of people and a bunch of aliens and mutants left. So, it's pretty easy to go on over to the nearest military base and loot the thing for weapons and ammo. The later supplies are predicated on the idea that if you don't really need a giant weapons factory to overwhelm a small force with supplies. Assuming that you have a machine shop, some good technicians, and maybe a chemist or two (American chemist, not a pharmacist), you should be able to produce a small stream of weapons at a decent clip, assuming that this is what your production facilities are geared towards. Anyhow, that's reasoning, I think. It makes sense to me, but then, I didn't think that the production aspect of the X-Coms really added all that much. Evan

I'm right here. There have been two scenarios discussed, as far as I know. 1. We whip up a ton of simple videos detailing possible outcomes of various combats, and the result of the intercept is played depending on the outcome as determined. 2. We render a small scene in the corner that changes dynamically along several projected paths, and is affected by the types of weapons used and the progress of the fight as it happens. Which one we're going to use hasn't been finalized yet. More information will be available as the game comes closer to completion, as always.

I don't know about the in mission scripting language, as things actually happening to the players in our generated (or even pre-designed) missions don't really need that kind of interaction. As far as I recall, most of the story will be conveyed through the research tree and the briefings for the pre-designed missions. As usual, don't quote me on that, I'd need to ask Martin. I don't think that it would be impossible, but I also don't see the pressing need for it with our game structure. It seems pretty likely that your storytelling ability will be limited in the same way, without any in-combat dialog. I'll ask Martin more about this and get you all some more information about it later. Evan ALTAR interactive

I'm not entirely sure how it all works, myself, but here's what I know. Note that none of this is final, so it could all change, and Im' not sure about it anyway. So don't quote me. As I understand it, the bases aren't all under alien control. Many of them will be, but not all. Some can be taken back without a direct base assault, but I believe that combat will most often be involved. Then the base can be assigned a type, which will have differing effects on the game. Like I said before, not a lot is final, so I can't tell you many specifics. Evan

We're in no way involved with Infogrames (the current X-Com owners), so this is not in any way an X-Com game. So we can't go around using the same names or calling the aliens Sectoids or anything like that. However, there are some similiarites. I don't know if the Geoscape title is copyrighted, but it stems from a similar concept called a Globe. So I think that there is enough prior art to make any problems with the similarities a non-issue. And besides, as much as we all loved X-Com, it wasn't really all that original a game. As usual with games, it was the gameplay that made it interesting, rather than the same-old setting, or the universal grey aliens. And, let's face it, it doesn't really matter what the story here is, either. We're not making Metal UFO Solid, after all. Whether or not people like the game is basically going to be entirely predicated on the gameplay. We could make the backstory that the aliens came down and smothered most of the people on earth to death with cream pies and it wouldn't really matter all that much, as long as we deliver on the gameplay. Anyway. Enough screeding about story in strategy games. As far as I know, the people under our command won't really have stories. They'll just have names that you can change, and basically, you build them up from nothing, allocating points to skills as you see fit. Evan

Like I said in the other forums, we're trying to keep an ear open to the community in terms for modification at this point. If it comes to pass, it likely won't really be anything like the tools for NWN, but would more likely be a few homebrew tools and a some exporters, and a lot of documentation (hopefully). I, for one, am all for modding of the game, and I hope that it happens. However, I'm not on that team, so I don't really have much say about what happens in that regard. We really want to support the community, so the more we hear about this, the more likely it is to actually happen. Evan