Amenable to Change

Don't apologuise, just be aware if you are the only one that gets this problem then it's unlikely ever to be fixed. Your best chance is to document it all, and try and make the bug reproducable and send a comprehensive bug report/support request to Altar.

If you want to have a mean view of this. Altar signed a contract with Cenega which set the amount of money they would recieve, whether this was a lump sum or a % whatever. if they want more then they should have negotiated a better contract. as neither Altar or Cenega are likely to make public these terms we'll not know how much Altar get. I very much doubt it's a mere £1 per game. Certainly in many situations the publishers take the lions share of the profits, however Cenega are not a large publishing company that needs to take disproportionate amount of the profit to support their top heavy infrastructure. Considering the amount of contract negotiations Altar went through they probably got a good deal.

I believe there are other people playing the German version of UFO:A without these problems. Therefore, I am afraid it would appear to be an issue with incompatibility with your computer and the game. This means that it is unlikely Altar will never release a patch that will solve your problems. Whilst it may not be very satisfying to hear that it's your problem not Altars, I'm afraid thats the way it is, because of the nature of PC gaming these problems arise. Whilst many applications may run on your computer and others may have problems, unless it is truly a problem with UFO:A and not some other issue caused by something on your computer then the onus is on you to solve the problem. That was basically a disclaimer so when i say you need to check your computer you'll understand why. The most basic thigns is to check your computer is all sorted right away, e.g. virus check it, remove spyware and malicious programs, make sure it's got all the patches from Microsoft. latest drivers etc. make sure all the connections are firmly in place, it's cooled properly and the PSU is up to it's task, do a scandisk and defrag. if none of those fix it then your in trouble. It may be that you have some corrupt librarys installed on your computer, the only way to solve this is find the problem and replace it with the latest non-corrupt one. this is very difficult which is why re-installs are often advised, because it's often easier, unless you consider the problems that arise from building your system from scratch. If there is a lot of disk access when the problem happens perhaps there are some rogue programs doing bad things, make sure you have no bad programs running, such as worms and such, disable windows file indexing service, make sure your hard disks aren't throwing up bad blocks, or sending corrupt data that could cause a problem to the program. (e.g. scandisk) Apart from the usual advice theres not much else to say if it's not fixable easily, then you can pretty much guarantee it's going to be incredibly difficult and contrived. In which case you make a decision to either work at it and fix it, or to not play UFO, and hope any other programs don't have the sam problem.

The changes can really only be content changes. the engine and it's features is in it's final state, only bug fixes will be applied to it. This means if the current engine doesn't support it, then it's not going to be added i a patch. If all that needs to be done is a little bit of hacking of the game scripts not really a problem. Bear in mind that patches take money and time to do, and they get no financial gain out of them. So any major changes to the game are unlikely it'll only be tweaks and bug fixes. This can be said about many games, even the original UFO, and TFTD, they had weird bugs and problems, one's which weren't fixed, but they were so great games people worked around them. Many people don't realise is the decision isn't to either release a game or keep working on it till it's perfect. It's to release the game, or just to shelve it. Whilst a lot of the fixes can be done with the current engine a lot of them are significant work. There won't be patches with any large amount of additional content, so new guns, planes etc. won't happen. there won't be any changes to the current GUI, as this implys making engine changes as well as cosmetic alterations. Small changes even at this stage would require far too much work. Making a stand about a crap product is fine, but expecting anything from a small developer and publisher such as altar and cenega is a bit much. You should take your arguments t the giants that lead the industry, when you convince them to do these things then the rest of the industry will follow, asking small independant studios to do things a large studio won't is pointless. As the Genre isn't exactly brimming with possible games, I can't see how a small company that creates an entirely original product brings it to market that provides an enjoyable experience, for a decent price could possibly be ripping off it's fans. I don't think insulting people by calling their products half-baked or ripp off's is the way to make things better either.

The best way to get those pesky aliens if they outgun you is to ambush them with several people. The best way is to get your soldiers around a corner and kneeling and lure them into the firing line. Then let your guys blast away with the highest damage guns they got. Doing this you can get them really close before they can shoot, so you get a good hit chance, and if your lucky you can sometimes take them out without them firing a shot. Other than that Grenades are a fine way to even up the odds, and perhaps the best way on open ground.

I always smile when I see a dead cow in the middle of the city. How did that get there!

Hrm I never put faith in the words of journalists anyway but saying they haven't modernised the game is a big fat lie. The mechanics are very different, did he fail to notice it wasn't turn based for instance. As for the control interface, the default setup is annoying at times but if you take the time to customise it you'll find that the annoyances are small. I think the biggest problem with the game was they didn't pay PC Gamer to review UFO:AM, you know a few thousand in the right pockets goes a long way to get a good score.

Just out of curiosity, I'm playing UFO pretty slow. My last tac mission I spent about an hour cleaning out a base. Ok so I'm playing hard and I only had 3 soldiers with uzi's that had used all their grenades already and several medkits just to get to the base. Against 8 aliens all with rifles that out ranged my soldiers. But when I read the forum post's I'm seeing, OMG I already stolen da enemy UFO and flew to the alien planet and setup a base on the homeworld. gg. I'm thinking either there are people who don't have other things to do, (lucky them) or and quite probably it is also true that I suck.

When you have a full compliment of troops maybe you can go round dismissing them. but when you only have 4 and 1 is in hospital, you accept monkeys that can fire a gun. In my last nail biting base siege, my lousy can't move hardly at all person. who as her speed was so lousy was carrying a lot of crap. was kinda backup. the base was full of morelmen with long range rifles, and my men only had uzi's having used all their grenades to get to the base in the first place. So even though she was slow. She made a positive effort to clear the base by making sure no aliens came up from behind and also giving that extra bit of fire power to take down aliens quick.

No Your guys not mine. It's insane to set waypoints so far that it causes problems. I'm not suprised the pathfinding is poor. its because there are very few good path finding algorhythms, and the longer the path to find the problem gets exponetially harder, it's basically a variant of the travelling salesman problem and the best thing to solve those is the human mind. So give your computer a break and plot your own route, you can set multiple way points.

To be honest JPG's aren't the best format to be comparing image detail. At the end of the day, Altar had to make decisions about what to implement and what to leave out. We don't know why they didn't add other supported Resolutions, perhaps it's because the gui elements didn't resize properly, because the game was coded to be in only 1024x768. The game I think however is good enough that it doesn't detract from being in 1024x768 only. It's not exactly a small resolution as it is, and beside when you start getting into those high res's things get mightly small, and when you get older you'll be wishing they had done it in 640x480 with double height fonts.

It sounds like your save games are perhaps being corrupted, first the best thing to check is that it isn't a non UFO:a problem. First thing to check is do a scandisk and maybe even a surface scan make sure your hard disk isn't failing and have a cluster of bad blocks where your save games are being saved. Second check for any malware runnign on your computer. I would recommend, running a virus checker and adaware of some other anti-sypware software on your computer. Next make sure there is no other applications running on your system that may interfering with writing to disk, applications such as virus checkers background apps can cause problems so disable those temporarily and try again. Have you installed anything since you've installed UFO:a? Also check all your wire are correctly plugged into your hd and motherboard, with the power off obviously. A slightly loose at one end IDE connector can cause dodgy reads and writes. IF your computer is in good general heath thats good. but just to be sure check the voltages your PSU is giving out, if the 12v or 5v rails are out by a large margin. especially the 5v rail then there may be a lack of power to the harddrive that can be causeing problems.

I think my UFO:A technique just improved.

My work around for picking up aliens is to set a walk waypoint the direct other side of the alien. then start time and stop it just as your soldier is ontop of the alien. then cancel his orders and tell him to pick up the alien. I think I may have crashed the game by doing this but not cancelling the walk order so what I essentially did was made my man walk across the body, then queued him to pick the alien corpse up, but on the other side of the body where it didn't exist. Hence crash.

No grenades are fine. I specifically have one or two of my squad mostly packing grenades, so when you get a cluster of baddy's, they pop out and chuck a few nades at them. The most important thing I've learnt is that when you pickup some good rifles like the M4's and AK's you don't just leave them in your base for later. because you can guarantee theres some morelmen out there with a unique ability for removing your mens health and being out of your range. *mutters something about ammo for medical packs*