New Assets:
I mentioned last month that the main focus of Milestone 6 was adding new content to the game, and we continued to add new assets to the game this month. The first of these is the new 3d model for the alien Heavy Servitor unit (which can be seen above), which I think is a nice addition to the game and much more distinct from the basic Servitor than previously. This means we've now added unique 3d models for all of the new alien unit variants added in Milestone 5.

Various other new assets were added too:

• The illustrations for the final cinematic is now complete, and the cinematic is now being put together by the animation team that made the intro cinematic.
• We added a proper background to the UOO-1 Sabotage mission. The platforms that make up this level were previously floating in empty space, but are now contained within the (fairly elaborate) hull of an alien space station.
• Work has continued on the new Soviet Town terror biome, which we're hoping to have finished in the coming month.
• Inventory tile artwork was added for the Alien Bio-Rifle weapon given to the Mantids in Milestone 5.
• Corpse / stunned inventory art for the new Heavy Mentarch was also added.

Air Combat Refresh
The biggest code changes this month were to the air combat section of the game, which has had a major interface facelift and several usability improvements. We've only completed part of this visual refresh so far, but next month we'll be updating the background, the battlefield UI and the various combatants with sharper and more attractive replacement graphics to finish the job.

The gameplay changes so far have mostly involved adding extra information to the UI - for example, the Evasive Roll buttons now show a cooldown bar overlay so players no longer have to guess how long until the ability is available again. The weapon tiles also show a reload progress bar for similar reasons. We've also made minor tweaks to the control system so it's easier to select aircraft and give them orders.

Next month we'll be making some actual mechanical changes, like refining the way speed / acceleration work and switching the interceptor retreat mechanic back to how it used to work in older versions of the game (where aircraft had to reach the edge of the battlefield to retreat). Once all that is done, we'll finally be able to start implementing the air combat section of the tutorial.

Launch Aircraft Panel
Prior to starting on the air combat, we also made some quick improvements to the Launch Aircraft panel. Hovering over an aircraft in the list now shows a pop-up panel on the left that shows additional information on that aircraft, including its full loadout of weapons and equipment and exact values for HP / Armour / Fuel. If the aircraft is a dropship, it instead shows all the soldiers assigned to it. 

We made some improvements to the aircraft selection logic here, too - previously this was a bit clunky, and potentially confusing for newer players.

Shroud Fixes:
Community bug reports for Milestone 5 were much less frequent in June than in previous months, which allowed us to shift our attention towards some long-standing issues with the shroud system in tactical missions. Anyone who has played the game will have encountered these - ranging from objects like cursors / fire + smoke / weapoon projectiles all incorrectly drawing underneath shrouded areas, to more subtle things like us being unable to reveal the rear side of doors in alien base maps.

We're hoping to have fixes for some of these issues in the next week or two. However, these are quite thorny problems and there's always a chance it'll take longer!

Modding Documentation:
The updated Xenonauts 2 modding documentation can be found here: https://github.com/GoldhawkInteractive/X2-Modding/

Again, it's worth mentioning that the average player will struggle to mod the game until we finish the mod tools, which we'll probably start work on after Milestone 6 releases. The documentation will be most useful for C# coders want to do code injection, or intrepid pioneers with a very high tolerance for manually editing JSON files that were never intended to be readable by humans.

Milestone 6 Stability Test:
Finally, we're planning a stability test for Milestone 6 on the Experimental branch this month - most likely between the 7th-11th July. There's still quite a bit of work to do before Milestone 6 is finished (both in terms of adding content and doing a balance pass), but we'd like to start finding and fixing any major crash bugs while we work towards a "proper" test build for Milestone 6. 

As always, thanks for reading the update. We'll be back with another at the end of July!

New Assets:
We've added a lot of new assets to the game over the past month. The most notable of these are the new 3D models and animations for the alien Sebillian and Cyberdrone units, and while the visual improvement is hopefully clear from the screenshot below, the Cyberdrone in particular also benefits from having proper animation set (e.g. movement / shooting) rather than just being a static lump of floating alien amour. The various ranks of alien are also a bit more distinctive now; again this is most obvious with the two Cyberdrone variants!

Work is currently continuing on more of these new alien models. Both the Heavy Mentarch and the Heavy Servitor units are currently just palette swaps of the corresponding basic unit, but we're aiming to have distinct designs and 3d models for both in place before Milestone 6 releases.

Further progress was also made in other areas too. We finished another research illustration this month, leaving three remaining (one of which is already in progress). The inventory tile artwork and 3d model for the recently-introduced Alien Bio Rifle is nearly finished. We've added some new sound effects to some of the aliens to help make them more distinctive, and we finished up our level design work on the updated Tropical biome and started adding various new tiles and maps to the new Soviet Town biome.

Aircraft Paired Slots:
One of the major goals for Milestone 6 is a refresh of the air combat that improves the visuals and polishes the gameplay. The first part of this has been to improve the UI on the Aircraft screen, so we can use our new "paired slot" system to replace the existing "Hardpoints" system (the blue numbers on the aircraft weapons that previously sat alongside the Weight values). This work is now complete.

The Hardpoint system reflected the size of different weapons, with each aircraft having up to four hardpoints and missile / torpedo weapons filling one and cannon / lance weapons filling two. Rather than represent this numerically, we can now pair weapon slots together to produce a linked double slot. Putting a cannon / lance into a paired slot will fill both of the linked slots, while missiles and torpedoes only fill a single slot - effectively the same system as before, but much easier to understand.

This change is also beneficial from a design standpoint, as it gives another method of differentiating interceptors. For instance, we may decide to give the basic Angel interceptor four weapon slots, with only two of them being paired together - this would limit the plane to only being able to carry a maximum of one cannon / lance. More advanced aircraft could have two sets of paired slots, allowing them to carry dual cannons. These extra options should help with the balancing work we'll be doing as part of the air combat refresh!

Bugfixes:
Once again, we ended up spending significant amounts of time last month on bugfixes. We released five more stability hotfixes for Milestone 5 last month, fixing a lot of crashes and other gameplay problems - including several annoying bugs we'd been trying to track down for several months, plus a number of older bugs that predated Milestone 5.

Our work on Milestone 6 also includes bugfixes, and one of our programmers spent rather a lot of last month doing the painstaking job of tracking down the numerous places in the game where text was not being properly translated and figuring out why. Hopefully we'll be finished with this by the end of next week and non-English users will have a fully localised Milestone 6.

Modding:
Our technical director spent some time fixing the remaining issues with our mod loading system last month, so it's now possible to create and share "mod packs" that modify the game files. The Mod Loader panel on the Main Menu screen will now read and apply these mods correctly. From a purely technical standpoint, we can now officially say that Xenonauts 2 supports modding.

Additionally, we've added support for code injection - basically, mods that can change the code of the game itself (e.g. one user has been experimenting with changing the game code so flight paths on the Geoscape follow the realistic curvature of the Earth). There's now a proper C# framework for doing this, and the process is integrated with the mod packs so that Steam Workshop will be able to distribute these mods once enabled. We'll be creating some documentation and an example project for this system in the next couple of weeks.

However, it would still be misleading to claim that Xenonauts 2 is a genuinely moddable game right now - we won't start work on the official mod editor until after Milestone 6 is complete, so modding the game remains painful and difficult due to the format of the JSON files we use to store data. It'll still be a few months until most users can start making mods!

Milestone 6:
So when will Milestone 6 actually arrive? Sadly, it's still hard to say. Milestone 6 contains a lot of small / medium sized tasks, and the much larger task that is the update to the air combat. We've made good progress through all the smaller tasks, but we've not yet begun work on the core parts of the air combat refresh. We'll have a better idea of how long it'll take to complete once we get started on it, which we're hoping to do in the next two weeks.

Of course, that timeline may slip if more hotfixes are needed for Milestone 5. While I think prioritising stability has been the correct decision, it has unfortunately sucked programmer time away from working on the planned new content. Thankfully, the number of bug reports has started to drop off recently - hopefully that's an indication we've dealt with most of the bugs and can switch focus to Milestone 6, but we'll just have to wait and see.

I think that's plenty for this update. Thanks for reading!

Gameplay Fixes:
Over the past month our top priority was to release hotfixes for Milestone 5 when players encountered and reported bugs. This ended up being rather time consuming, because it turned out there were quite a lot of crashes related to rare occurrences in some of the new systems - but thankfully, the vast majority of these issues are now fixed (although we'll continue to hotfix any further bugs reported by the community!)

As we're heading towards the end of our Early Access journey, we also took the opportunity to fix some long-standing visual bugs. The most obvious of these was the bug where the interior walls of restaurant buildings on Terror maps would always appear pure black, but there were more minor issues too - for example, dropships / UFOs having ugly solid shadows rather than a soft gradient like on other objects. These should all be fixed in Milestone 6.

New Content:
We've also added new assets to the project. Progress continues on the final cutscene, with the rough sketch for each illustration now complete and sent over to the animation team that will be putting the cinematic together. We've completed another couple of pieces of research art (there's now only a handful remaining), and we've also added brand new models for the Cyberdrone and Heavy Cyberdrone that look better, have proper animations, and make the two variants much easier to tell apart.

Lots of new tiles have been added to the tactical combat, too. We've added the final environmental tiles for the ATLAS Base mission command room, and the Cleaner Base command room (including some updated tiles for the "Cleaner Device"). We've also added a lot of new tiles to the Soviet Town biome and we are in the process of creating our first proper test maps for that new environment, which we're hoping to include in Milestone 6 as an alternative tileset for Terror Site missions.

We've also added a lot of new tiles to the Jungle biome so we can create dedicated Jungle abduction maps - previously this biome lacked the tiles required to make the urban / industrial setting of an abduction map (whereas a jungle wilderness environment worked perfectly well for Crash Sites). The first Jungle abduction map is now complete and we should have all four in place when Milestone 6 launches.

Defender UFO:
A new UFO will be arriving in Milestone 6 - the Defender, a dedicated escort fighter that appears some time after basic Fighter UFOs. While less agile than Fighter UFOs, it is tougher and is equipped with a medium-range weapon that can target both Xenonaut interceptors and incoming missiles. As it's an escort craft it doesn't produce crash sites and won't appear in the tactical combat, but it should add a bit more variety to interceptions on the strategic layer.

Graphics Settings:
Finally, we've been working on proper graphics settings for the game. There's now sliders that allow players to control brightness / contrast / gamma, and we've evaluated the various quality settings to ensure that only things that actually affect performance are changed - previously the lower graphics settings would disable a lot of things that didn't actually affect performance, but still made the game look worse. We're largely done with this task; all we have remaining is to finish updating the UI with the new options.

That's everything we worked on last month. Thanks for reading, and I'll write another update at the end of this month!

Milestone 5 Public Release:
Almost all of last month was spent working on the long-awaited Milestone 5, and yesterday we finally released it onto the standard Steam / GOG / Epic branches for everyone to play. This is a major update that adds a lot of new content to the game, but also allows players to unlock the final mission and win a campaign (the full changelog can be seen here). 

Overall, we're pleased with the way Milestone 5 turned out. I personally think that the addition of the Geoscape Supporters / Strategic Operations and the new Phase system have made the strategic layer a lot more engaging than before, and the new "UOO" missions add more variety to the second half of the game. We hope you all enjoy the update - many of these new systems are "extra" content (beyond what was in our original roadmap) that we've only been able to add because so many players have been willing to support an Early Access product! 

The next couple of weeks have been set aside to focus on fixing problems that people may experience in Milestone 5, so please report any bugs or gameplay issues you encounter and we'll do our best to fix them quickly.

Milestone 6:
In the meantime, we've started work on Milestone 6. This was originally intended to be a single large update that would bring the game all the way to final release, but Milestone 5 had such a long development cycle that we've changed our plans so players don't have to go so long between updates.

The key goal for Milestone 6 is now to finish all the missing gameplay content - e.g. adding the final victory cinematic, adding all remaining research art, revamping the Air Combat to have an updated UI and a proper tutorial, adding the Soviet Town biome, etc. Essentially this represents completing the remaining content on our roadmap and finishing the areas of the game still marked as incomplete.

We're also going to be adding some new content that we've already completed but never made it into Milestone 5. For example, we've got a full set of updated Sebillian models that we need to set up, and we're currently working on upgraded models for the Cyberdrone and Heavy Cyberdrone that make the two types more visually distinct. There's also a lot of new terrain tiles that we need to set up and add into our existing maps.

Hopefully this means Milestone 6 will still feel like a substantial update, despite the changes to the game systems being largely limited to the air combat. Our aim is to have this update released on the public branches in three to four months.

Pathway to 1.0:
We'll then spend a few more months polishing up the game as we transition to our final 1.0 release, as there will still be plenty of things we want to improve. We'd like to spend some more time testing and improving the AI. We'd like to do a pass over all the maps. We'd like to optimise performance and load times a bit more. We need to build the mod tools. There's also a lot of sensible and relatively straightforward community suggestions that would improve the game. We probably won't have time to do everything we want, but we'll get as much in as we can!

This means we're unlikely to add any major new features to the game beyond those already planned for Milestone 6. There was a lot of content on our original roadmap and we've gone beyond that on several occasions already (the new content in Milestone 5, the expansion to the Cleaners in Milestone 3, etc), so with our second anniversary of our Early Access launch approaching we need to shift focus from adding new content to polishing what we have.

We're aiming for the 1.0 update to drop before the end of the year, but as always, we'll keep you posted. We'll have a better idea of the timetable once we're done with Milestone 6.

Milestone 5 Progress:
As always, our focus has been on getting Milestone 5 ready for public release. I said in the last update that we're hoping to do this in March and we're still on track for that, although the exact date depends on how smoothly the bugfixes go over the next few weeks - we're expecting mid-March if all goes smoothly, and late March if we run into issues.

In coding terms, a lot of this month was spent ironing out gameplay / stability issues and tidying up some loose ends regarding new features added in Milestone 5, so although our programmers have done a lot of work there's not much in the way of exciting new headline additions for me to talk about here. However, we did find a few days to improve the shooting path calculations in the tactical combat so the permitted fire paths better match what the player would expect, particularly around doorways and corners, as community feedback suggested this area needed more polish (turns out the system had a couple of subtle bugs that needed fixing).

Writing & Art:
Last month was a big month on the writing front - the writing in the game is now largely complete. This means that all research projects now have research text, the phase briefings have been revised, more tactical missions have introductory character conversations, and there should be a more consistent narrative thread running throughout the whole game. Hopefully it's now much clearer why all the factions in the game are acting the way they are.

Finishing this allowed us to send all the new game text off for translation, and we should have localised text in Milestone 5 in the next week or two (which was one of the main barriers to the public release).

We've added some new illustrations to the game over the past month, most of which are just adding flavour art to the new UI popups related to the new Geoscape mechanics in Milestone 5. In our recent 5.13 Experimental update we also added unique illustrations for three of the five strategic operations (which should make it easier to tell them apart) and we're expecting to have the remaining two done shortly.

Community Suggestion Review:
Once Milestone 5 is done we'll be starting work on Milestone 6, which should be our final major update before then 1.0 launch. Alongside the last remaining features on our roadmap (Air Combat Revamp, Ending Cinematic, Soviet Town Biome, Mod Tools) we've been reading through the many, many community suggestions that have been posted on Steam, our Discord and our forums during the Early Access period.

We're now reviewing all these suggestions as a team and looking at which ones we can include in Milestone 6. Although we can't add every suggestion to the game, there's a lot of good ideas here and we want to thank everyone who has given us feedback and suggestions during development - we may not always have responded immediately, but we did read them all eventually!

That's everything for this update - thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll have a big announcement in the next few weeks about the public release of Milestone 5!

Milestone 5:
Work is continuing on Milestone 5 over on our Experimental branch. This month we released three stability hotfixes for Milestone 5, and we've spent the last three weeks working on a major gameplay update (5.8.0). Our initial plan was to release this a couple of weeks ago, but some of the changes we're making break existing campaigns and we wanted to avoid doing that more than once. We've therefore rolled the changes into one big patch which should be coming out on the Experimental branch in the next few days (hopefully tomorrow).

Our goal is to lock down Milestone 5 so the translators can begin work translating all the new text later this month, which will allow for a final public release of Milestone 5 early next month.

Mind Control:
The first new addition is the alien psionic ability Mind Control, which has been granted to Psyon Officers, Psyon Leaders, and Eternals. This formula takes into account the psionic strength of the alien versus the Bravery and Morale of the defending soldier, with greater distance making the attack easier to defend against. This should make alien Eternals a bit more intimidating than before, as they have very high psi-strength!

As we've experimented with several iterations of Mind Control since our original Kickstarter, for clarity - the older alien "Mind War" ability has been removed, and the Psyon Mesmerise ability no longer has a chance to Mind Control the attacker on a critical fail. The new Mind Control ability is the only way the aliens can take control of your soldiers.

Strategic Operations / Supporters:
We've also expanded the Strategic Operations and Supporters systems to address feedback about the choices becoming predictable after a few hours of play. Strategic Operations now become more effective each day they are not used - for example, the Raise Funds operation usually grants $500,000, but this increases by $10,000 for each day the operation is not used (once used, the value resets back to the default value).

Supporters have also been tweaked slightly. Each supporter now has a "protection level" value that controls how expensive it is to interact with them - if they have high protection the cost of recruiting / eliminating them is increased by 30%, whereas if they have low protection then the cost is reduced by 30%. This value changes every 10 days, with supporters having a 50% chance of being in a normal state and 25% each for high / low protection.

The purpose of these changes is to make these systems less static. Instead of just waiting until you have 150 Operations Points so you can recruit a new Supporter, the player might now want to evaluate which Supporters are lightly protected and which Strategic Operations look good value.

Writing:
Over the past week or two I've been working on the plot-related writing, which has become a bit disjointed since the introduction of the plot-related missions and the Phase system in Milestone 5. We have added several new early-game research projects to ensure that the player is better informed about why the aliens are acting the way they are with regards to the invasion (mostly better explaining the limits within which they are operating), and also who the Cleaners are and why they acting the way they do.

Later in the game, I've added research text to the various projects related to UOO-1 and we've also added little intro conversations to those missions as well. I'm currently working on the research text and intro conversations for Phase 5 and Operation ENDGAME, which are the last remaining placeholder research reports in the game. I'm hoping to have that completed this week.

Early Game Rebalance:
Finally, we spent a fair bit of time this month fixing some of the balance issues reported by people in the feedback threads we provided, so thanks to anyone who contributed to those whether on Steam, Discord or our official forums. One of the most common pieces of feedback was that the early game (i.e. Phase 1) felt too compressed, so we have extended this by an additional month (up to three months) and moved the Cleaner Base mission forward from early Phase 2 to the end of Phase 1.

We'll be doing another pass on game balance after we release 5.8.0, as it's quite likely that the additions from earlier in the post will affect the balance. Please keep the feedback coming and we'll do our best to improve the gameplay as we finish up Milestone 5 for general release!

That's it for this month - I'll write another update next month!

Milestone 5 Release:
The biggest news this month is that we released the initial Milestone 5 prototype on the Experimental branch on the 13th December. Although we did a lot of internal testing prior to releasing the prototype, it still ended up being very unstable (probably because we were still adding new features the night before release).

As the studio closed for Christmas on the 20th Dec, we then worked long hours to try and get the prototype into a more stable state before the holidays. After five hotfixes (including a festive Christmas Eve update) we managed to deal with most of the critical issues, leaving the prototype in much better shape. However, we're already aware of a number of bugs that we need to look at in January.

We'll also be adding a lot more content to Milestone 5 next month - as mentioned in previous updates, the initial prototype contains quite a lot of placeholder assets that we need to finish or replace before Milestone 5 is released on the standard branches.

Thanks once again to everyone who has taken the time to report bugs or give us feedback. If anyone wants to offer further thoughts, we've created an official Milestone 5 feedback thread that can be used to keep it all in one place.

UFO Delegation:
One change in Milestone 5 proved controversial, which was the "UFO Delegation" feature. Basically, this is triggered after completing two Crash Sites of a particular UFO type, and it gives you a permanent monthly funding increase - but also imposes an Operations Point cost if you complete further Crash Site missions of that particular UFO type (there is a lore justification for this, but for the sake of brevity I won't explain it here).

We introduced this change because the player shoots down a lot of UFOs during the course of the game, and unfortunately there's two opposing (but equally valid) playstyles regarding the Crash Sites produced. The first group of players will happily fight every single tactical mission that spawns on the Geoscape, which can easily be 30+ Crash Sites over the course of a single campaign (making the game much longer). The second group of players is happy to fight one or two Crash Sites of a particular UFO type to see the new content and unlock the associated research, but find it repetitive to do more than that.

It's extremely difficult to balance the game to account for both these playstyles, as it either ends up too easy for the people who like to complete every Crash Site (as they have way too much money / resources) or too tedious and grindy for the people who prefer to complete only one or two per UFO (as they're forced to complete every crash site to avoid money / resource shortages). The delegation system was our attempt to support both sides by reducing the potential rewards for fighting lots of identical Crash Sites - players can still do it if they choose, but they gain less of an advantage than they did previously.

We've already listened to community feedback on this point (the Operations Point cost was previously a Panic penalty) and we'll continue to do so. Much like we added options for people who wanted to disable turn timers on tactical missions, if necessary we're prepared to add an optional "extended" mode that fully removes delegation and is balanced around the player completing every Crash Site. However, this won't be possible until the game balance for the "normal" campaign is locked for final release in Milestone 6, as keeping an additional game mode updated while balance is still in flux would take up lots of development time.

So if you see people getting upset about this topic, please point them at this post. I think most people will find the new system an improvement overall, but we'll continue to support those who would prefer to play without it.

Conclusion:
That's everything from me. The first of us will be back at work on Thursday and we'll be at full strength on Monday 6th, so expect the patches and updates for Milestone 5 to resume next week.

I'd like to close by thanking everyone for your support during 2024 - this game genuinely wouldn't be possible without our community. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and have a happy New Year!

Milestone 5 Prototype Update:
November was a productive month for us. All the core systems for Milestone 5 are now complete and we're currently in the process of testing the initial prototype, which we'll hopefully be releasing onto the Experimental branch later this week.

As always, the first Experimental build for a new Milestone is likely to be a pretty rough experience - although all the major new gameplay mechanics are present there'll probably be a lot of bugs, balance issues, and missing pieces of content that need to be patched in. If you'd rather have a more polished experience then it'd be best to wait until the final version of Milestone 5 arrives on the standard branches early next year!

Before we move on, I just want to be clear - although players will be able to unlock the final mission and complete the campaign once Milestone 5 is out, this will not be the final update for Xenonauts 2. We still want to add more polish to the game, so we're planning another major update before final release (likely focusing on usability / visual improvements / AI & game balance / modding / etc rather than adding additional game mechanics).

The Testing Process:
Most of our work this month has been addressing the numerous gameplay and stability issues encountered in our testing. Each new batch of fixes has allowed us to play further into the game, and we're currently testing the last month or two of the campaign (so fighting Battleships and doing the final mission).

So far we've been doing "strategic" playthroughs that involve auto-winning the tactical battles for speed (the average campaign is 30+ missions), but once we confirm it's possible to complete a "strategic" playthrough we'll shift to playing a full campaign including the tactical missions. Most game-breaking stability / balance issues tend to occur on the strategy layer, so hopefully this will go smoothly - but whether we release the prototype this week as planned really comes down to how many issues we encounter.

One major benefit of this testing is that all of these campaign playthroughs have given us plenty of opportunity to playtest and iterate the new strategy mechanics. We actually found the first iteration of the new Geoscape mechanics weren't quite as engaging as we'd hoped, so we expanded them a bit more and came up with something stronger!

Updated Geoscape Mechanics:
I personally think the updated Geoscape mechanics are a major improvement on what we have before, giving the player more things to interact with and a wider selection of possible strategies without being too overwhelming.

Players now gain a certain number of Operations Points per day (representing the off-screen work carried out Xenonaut agents), which can be spent on Strategic Operations or recruiting Supporters. Strategic Operations provide powerful instant effects, such as allowing the player to reduce Panic in a specific region or receive some extra cash / alien materials. They are not the most efficient way to spend Operations Points, but can still be very useful in the right circumstances!

Each of the six funding regions contains four Supporters, which represent key figures in the local government who can become aligned with either the Xenonauts or the Aliens. If they fall under Alien control and become Infiltrators (usually caused by successful Infiltration UFO missions), they will generate additional Panic in the local region each month - but if convinced to join the Xenonauts they will instead slightly reduce Panic in that region each month and provide a permanent bonus to your organisation.

Additionally, each region has a unique "region bonus" that is unlocked if you recruit all the supporters in that region (e.g. the North America bonus improves the quality of your starting soldiers, while the Soviet Russia one reduces your upkeep costs, etc). However, most regions also contain a single Elite Supporter who provides double the bonus of other Supporters of the same type; prioritising recruiting these Elite Supporters from the various different regions can be an alternative to racing towards a specific region bonus.

Although I think these additions work well, my own personal opinion only counts for so much - we'll be really interested to hear what the community think of the new systems once the prototype is out!

Other Additions:
We also had time to work on a few miscellaneous things this month. Firstly, the tactical combat now properly supports objects falling, so we've been able to enable destruction on building roofs. Explosions can now collapse these and cause units and items to fall onto the level below.

The illustration work is now complete on the updated Research screen background art (see above), and this month we'll be creating the "advanced" versions of this that are unlocked as you progress through the game and gain access to more advanced technology.

We're continuing to revamp the visuals of some of the weaker parts of the tactical combat. We started work on some new models for the Sebillian aliens, and we've also updated the appearance of quite a few assets in the Farm biome. Neither of these updates are currently present in Milestone 5 but both should be patched in before we finalise it.

We've made some further AI improvements and written some custom AI for the new missions added in Milestone 5, one of which is a wave defence mission. A few updated sounds have been added to the tactical combat for the new Biter alien, and also some new unique movement sounds for the MARS / ARES / Sentry Gun vehicles.

We also set up the proper Game Over screen for the various types of victory and loss. The final victory cinematic isn't ready yet, but the new UI has unique art / text / music / campaign stats / etc so still it's a lot more atmospheric than the plain popup you got in earlier versions of the game.

I think that covers everything. Well done for reading the wall of text, and hopefully we'll have a prototype ready to play in the next few days!

Milestone 5 / Strategic Improvements:
Our main focus is still on getting our Milestone 5 prototype into a state where we can release it for public testing. We were hoping that would happen last month, but we weren't able to make enough progress on the new strategy mechanics. There were a few reasons for this, but the main one was that we continued to find new bugs that needed fixing after the Unity editor update I discussed in our previous update.

Thankfully, in the second half of the month we were able to better focus on implementing our new Supporter system. This system places four VIPs in each funding region who can be recruited as Supporters by the Xenonauts to provide your organisation a variety of strategic bonuses (more funding, faster research / engineering, etc) or turned into panic-generating Infiltrators by the aliens. If you can recruit all of the Supporters in each region, you also unlock a special regional bonus.

The Supporter system itself is now mostly functional, but we're still unsure how long it'll take us to connect it to the other game systems. For instance, the new Doomsday Counter system that is now active in the early stages of the game also ties into the Supporter system (with alien Infiltrators generating enemy Doomsday progress, and Xenonaut Supporters slowing it). We will also need to update the Infiltration UFO missions to turn neutral VIPs into Infiltrators if successful (where previously they simply generated Panic like other types of UFO mission), etc.

Given what happened last month I'm not going to make any promises about when the Milestone 5 prototype will be out - I'll just say we're working hard to get it into the hands of testers as quickly as possible (we should be able to release the first testing builds as soon as these strategic updates are complete).

New Missions:
Milestone 5 adds various new missions - crash sites for the Battleship UFO, the two-part final mission (Operation ENDGAME), and two unique new plot missions that take place on an alien orbital station (which appear around the point Cruiser UFOs start appearing). 

The Battleship assets and crash site maps were completed some time ago, and this month we finished the final art assets and map setup for both halves of the Operation ENDGAME mission. The first mission on the alien orbital station is also at quite an advanced stage, with the custom art assets for that map now complete, but there's still further work to be done on the second orbital station mission. Thankfully, this shouldn't cause delays - most of the remaining work is custom art assets, and we don't need the visuals to be final for the Milestone 5 prototype builds.

Alien Updates:
Last month we added a new type of alien to the game, the Biter. These small insectoid aliens are more of a living weapon than a proper new species, as certain alien units can fire them towards enemy units - at which point they will charge towards nearby hostiles and try to bite them to death. Biters will expire within a few turns of spawning and have very low HP, but a pack of them can still pose a threat - particularly against units equipped with weapons that cost a lot of TU to fire (e.g. sniper rifles). 

We also continued to make changes to our existing aliens to better differentiate them from one another. The main cannon on a Cyberdrone no longer acts like a giant plasma rifle, but is instead now a blast weapon that can inflict major damage across a large area (although it is now less likely to instantly kill a heavily-armoured soldier). We'll be finishing up some changes to the Mantid and Sebillian weapons this month too, which I'll explain next month.

Illustrated UI Backgrounds:
One of the coolest features in Xenonauts 1 was that the illustrated backgrounds of the strategic UI screens would upgrade as you progressed through the campaign, showing the way the new technological developments you had unlocked were changing your organisation - by the end of the game, the all characters had futuristic uniforms and the rooms were full of sci-fi equipment. Lots of players thought this really helped immerse them in the game.

Although implementing this in Xenonauts 2 involves repainting our existing (perfectly fine) UI background art, we've decided the feature is cool enough that we've found some extra budget for it. Handily, all the programming for this feature has already been finished, so as soon as the new artwork is done we can just slot it straight into the game. We started the sketch work for the new Research screen background last week, and hopefully you'll be able to see some results either in the Milestone 5 prototype or next month's development update!

I'll leave the update there for this month - thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll have some good news on Milestone 5 in the coming few weeks!

Milestone 5:
Although we've continued to release hotfixes for Milestone 4 this month, our focus has been Milestone 5. If all goes well, we should (hopefully) have an early prototype of this update ready for testers to play later this month.

Milestone 5 is taking a long time because we're making quite a few changes. Aside from the Phase system mentioned in the last update, we're also going to be testing a "strategic operations" system that gives the player more control over the Geoscape and opens up a greater number of strategic gameplay options.

Essentially, the player gets a certain amount of "operation points" each day that can be spent on one-off missions to provide benefits (e.g. lowering Panic in a region, gaining an immediate cash injection, etc) or can be used to recruit Supporters in Geoscape regions who provide passive bonuses (e.g. increased monthly funding, reduced research / engineering times, etc). If you recruit all the Supporters in a region, you also gain a powerful Region Bonus for your organisation.

Our goal for this system is to add a bit more strategic depth to the Geoscape, and provide players a way to reduce Panic in regions where they do not have aircraft or radar coverage. Choosing which types of Supporter and / or Region Bonuses players want to pursue should hopefully provide players some interesting strategic choices - we're looking forward to seeing what people think when they get to play it!

New Missions / Terrain Tiles:
Milestone 5 is intended to include the complete sequence of story missions, allowing players to play the entire campaign from start to finish. We've therefore been working on the final mission, creating some unique terrain tiles to reflect the setting in which it takes place. Similarly, we've also created some unique tiles for the areas where the player will encounter the alien leader species, the Eternals (the bridges of Battleship UFOs, and the command centers of the largest alien bases).

We're also attempting to address feedback about mission variety becoming a bit stale towards the end of the game by adding two new story missions into the later stages of the campaign. These center around an orbital station the aliens have constructed high above Earth. This gives us an isolated environment where aliens outnumber humans, which is helpful because the presence of large numbers of enemy reinforcements means we can once again make use of some mission types that stopped making sense after the defeat of the Cleaners.

We're still experimenting with these missions, but again we're hoping to have a basic version of them in the Milestone 5 prototype.

Other Updates:
We've also added various smaller systems to the game this month. Firstly, Xenonaut bases now cost varying amounts ($500k - $1.5m) depending on where they are placed. This means there's fewer places where placing a base is objectively a bad decision; the locations with optimal radar coverage are now also more expensive. It's worth bearing in mind this also affects the first base, meaning you'll have more starting funds available if you choose a cheaper location.

In the tactical combat, we've added support for alien weapons capable of spawning clouds of (poison) gas on impact. This should allow us to equip certain alien species (probably Mantids) with weapons that behave a little differently from other alien units, while also making items such as the Rebreather a bit more useful. 

As you can see at the top of the screen, we've also continued to add new artwork to the game - the image above being tied to the Phase system and the updated storyline.

Updated Game Editor:
Over the last couple of updates I've mentioned our Game Editor upgrade, which is the first step towards having working modding tools for Xenonauts 2. Although work on the final modding tools won't start until after Milestone 5 is complete, this editor upgrade is now largely complete and will act as the foundation for our mod tools. 

That's it for now, I think - I had a few more smaller things I wanted to talk about, but this update has run long already so I'll leave it here. We'll post another development update once the Milestone 5 prototype is ready to play!

Programming:
This month our technical director spent much of his month on honeymoon, and the rest of it fixing the trickier bugs discovered in Milestone 4 by the community. Our other senior programmer split his time between bugfixes and working on our updated internal game editor (mentioned in last month's update), which meant we only had one programmer available to work on feature implementation.

Aside from the weekly stability fixes we've released for Milestone 4 and various small usability changes / AI improvements, we added a few useful gameplay features to our upcoming Milestone 5 update. One was a much-requested update to the item sale price system, allowing sale prices to slowly regain lost value as time passes, and another was expanded options for "difficult terrain" which makes it more costly for soldiers (but not vehicles) to walk through and crush plants like hay. This may allow things such as shallow water that can be waded through on the Jungle maps, making the different biomes a bit more distinct from one another.

Invasion Phases:
I've spent a lot of time this month on the new "Invasion Phase" system. This divides the alien invasion into five escalating phases, with a narrative event and some artwork and a short conversation with the Operations Director and Chief Scientist at the start of each one.

The goal here is to tie the lore together and explain how the invasion is escalating, what the aliens are doing differently and how the world is reacting to it. It also allows us to more clearly explain the shifting role of the Xenonauts thoughout the conflict, starting as an clandestine organisation fighting a secret war against an unknown enemy and ending as an elite military organisation leading the fight against a full-scale alien invasion.

This coming month I'll be experimenting with several mechanical changes that we're hoping to tie to the Phase System, making the Geoscape mechanics a bit less static throughout the campaign. I'm quite excited about these, but I also don't want to talk about them yet in case I disappoint someone - they're still at the prototype phase, and could be changed or abandoned entirely based on playtesting. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this next month!

Other:
Other areas of the game continued to progress over the past month. We partnered up with a couple of new illustrators, one of whom painted the new "Funding Report" artwork at the top of the post, and the other is working on environment concepts for the tactical combat. We've also added lots of small things like some new 3D weapon models, some updated textures for certain alien combatants, and new tactical biome ambient sounds.

That's everything for this month - thanks for reading!

Milestone 4
Although we released Milestone 4 last month, we've continued to patch it with bugfixes and balance updates. As many players found the game too punishing, we've been making the lower difficulty settings a bit more forgiving - and there's another update incoming (it's currently being tested on the Experimental branch) that will reduce the accuracy of enemies. Thanks to everyone who has given us feedback, and we'll continue to monitor it while we work on Milestone 5.

Fixing bugs has also been relatively time-consuming this month. With many new players coming from both Tacticon and the recent Steam sale, we've been received a lot more bug reports than normal and we've made fixing them our priority (we released our 21st patch for Milestone 4 today). Some of these were obscure stability bugs, but many were small gameplay issues - e.g. yesterday we were fixing a bug where soldiers could lose 1 or 2 TU when their rotation was interrupted by spotting an enemy. Continuing to iron out these sort of small annoyances should improve the experience for everyone.

Unfortunately, a large influx of new players combined with Milestone 4 being overly difficult and having some stability issues when first released means our Recent Reviews on Steam aren't as positive as they were previously. If you are enjoying the game and haven't left a review, please think about doing so - and if you've left a negative review, just know we're working hard on improving the game and we hope you'll give Xenonauts 2 another shot once it leaves Early Access!

Air Combat UI
One of the parts of the game we're working on for Milestone 5 is the air combat, with a particular focus on the visuals and the tutorial. This month we've done some initial work conceptingthe final UI style for the air combat, and even though we're still exploring the visuals (so please don't read too much into the information in the concept!) we thought we'd share it with you.

The other area of the air combat that we'll be working on for Milestone 5 is the air combat section of the tutorial, as a lot of players bounce off the interception minigame because the game currently doesn't even explain the controls. Hopefully a better tutorial and improved visuals will allow more users to enjoy that section of the game.

It's probably also worth mentioning that the Geoscape UI is also not yet final (which is why it still looks so similar to the first Xenonauts), and we'll be tackling that once the Air Combat is done.

Rescue Civilians
Another system we implemented in Milestone 5 this month was the ability to order civilians off the battlefield, as many members of our community have been requesting this since our Early Access launch. The system is simple - soldiers can order adjacent civilians to evacuate with a right-click, which causes the civilian to run back towards the player's dropship where they can flee off the map edge.

By default civilians will skulk around the map and avoid enemies, but once they have been ordered to evacuate they will simply sprint as quickly as possible towards their evacuation zone. Make sure you have cleared a path for them if you want them to live!

 Game Editor / Modding Tools
The final major system we've been working on this month is our internal game editor. Our Unity 2022 update means we've now got access to much more powerful plugins, which means we can replace our creaky old game editor with something that has better performance and more functionality.

Why are we mentioning this? Not only will this allow us to work faster, but the game editor is also going to serve as the foundation for our mod tools.  Once the work on our internal tools is complete we'll hopefully have taken a significant step towards having a working community mod editor.

That's everything for this dev diary. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next month!

Milestone 4 Released:
We released our Milestone 4 update onto the default Steam / GOG / Epic branches last week, which was a rather substantial update to the game. Most of our efforts this month simply went into patching and tweaking Milestone 4, so this is going to be a much shorter update than normal.

Anyway, we want to give a big shout out to everyone who helped us out by testing the experimental versions and reporting bugs or giving feedback, as your assistance really helps improve the quality of our updates!

We've continued patch Milestone 4 post-release to fix the handful of bugs that made it past our testing, and also to add a few bits of missing content (such as the text for handful of research projects that didn't quite meet the original deadline). We'll continue this as long as necessary to fix any remaining stability issues, but in general the game seems to be stable for most players. This means we're now ready to turn our attention to our next big update.

Milestone 5:
Milestone 5 is going to be our most important update so far - the goal is to allow the player to unlock and complete the final mission, meaning you will be finally able to play the entire game from start to finish. However, this won't be the last update for the game before we launch out of Early Access, as we'll still be releasing at least one additional Milestone update afterwards to further polish and improve the game. 

Unfortunately, Milestone 5 is likely to have quite a long development cycle - it's likely to be an even larger update than Milestone 4 was, and will likely include most of the remaining gameplay-related items on our roadmap and revamping the second half of the story. That means there's going to be quite a lot of content for a small team to generate!

Rather than try to talk in detail about plans that haven't yet been finalised, I think the most sensible thing is just to finish this update here. Next month's update should be a lot more exciting, as we should have some solid progress towards Milestone 5 that we can show off!

As always, we greatly appreciate the feedback from members of our community who have played the new version. This help has been invaluable in finding and fixing bugs, and ironing out problems with the game balance. We've got most of the stability issues under control now, which means it's a good time for anyone interested in playing the Experimental build to dive in - and please let us know any thoughts or issues with the game balance in the dedicated Milestone 4 Balance thread!

Campaign Balance & Stability:
Over the last month we spent a great deal of time playing the campaign in an attempt to get the game balance into reasonable shape before the Experimental release. This seems to have paid off, with the update getting a positive reaction from the community so far. There's not really space to go into specifics about what we've changed (we've tweaked the numbers in a LOT of different places), but the overall difficulty progression and campaign pacing should feel smoother than in previous versions.

We've also spent a lot of time fixing bugs. Most of the crash bugs in Milestone 4 have now been fixed, and we're continuing to work through fixes for the other bugs introduced by the new content. In addition to this, we've been working through our backlog of historical bugs (some of which date back to the original Early Access launch), and we've now fixed quite a few of the more serious historical issues too.

New Content:
We added new content in a few areas last month. Our new sound designer provided a number of new sounds for various parts of the game, such as the soldier equip screen where moving weapons and equipment in soldier inventories previously played no sound. There's now unique sounds for picking up and putting down all sorts of items (also played when switching weapons in the tactical combat), which makes the screen feel much more satisfying to use.

We've also added some new 3D models for certain alien variants, some of the human Fusion weapons, and some new terrain pieces for the Farm and Tropical biomes (although these won't appear in the game until Milestone 5). Our level designer has also continued to create new maps for the game; I think we're getting to a pretty good place in terms of map variety now.

As per usual, we've added a number of small usability features too - but there's too many of those to list, and individually they're not that exciting. Hopefully you'll notice one or two when you next play the game though!

Finally, there's a new bug reporting tool in Milestone 4 that makes it easier for players to report bugs, which can by accessed by pressing F11 and appears automatically after a crash. This just provides a handy zip file of all the files we need to track down bugs, which should make squashing the remaining bugs in the game more straightforward!

Conclusion:
Our priority for this month is to finish up Milestone 4 and push it out for general release - although we're exactly sure when this will happen, because a lot depends on what feedback we get from our testers and how many bugs we need to fix. However, we'll let everyone know as soon as we're able to set a launch date!

Milestone 4:
We've now done the bulk of the work on Milestone 4 and we've started internal testing on the updated campaign. Assuming there's no major issues we'll probably be releasing an early version of the build to the public early next week to get feedback - but initially this will be on our Protoype branches, as the build is currently too rough even for the Experimental branches. After a couple of weeks of polish the build should migrate to the Experimental branches, and hopefully into full public release on the normal Steam / GOG / Epic branches by the end of the month.

Aside from the headline features for the build (Androns and the Harvester UFO for the aliens, the Colossus Battlesuit for the humans) we've got a long list of changes that should continue to improve the usability, balance, performance and stability of the game!

Sound Design:
Last month we brought an experienced sound designer onto the team to work on the game audio, as earlier in development we hadn't had the time and funds to give it the attention it deserved. Audio is sometimes an unappreciated part of game development, as the benefits of good sound effects can be quite subtle but are nonetheless very important.

This month we've updated the strategy UI, creating nicer sounds for the standard click / hover / error actions and then adding new clips so give subtly different feedback for different actions a click can cause (like confirming an action, closing a window, opening a tooltip, etc). There's still a bit more work to be done on the UI sounds, but after that we'll be moving onto the tactical combat sounds and trying to give the different alien species a bit more character.

As a side-effect of this process, we've also noticed various places the game didn't have sound but needed it. Some of these are already fixed in Milestone 4, e.g. now Medikits and the Automed Unit play a sound when healing a unit, and melee weapons play a sound if they miss the target.

Levels & Environment Art:
As Milestone 4 contains over thirty new maps, we've also brought on a fulltime freelance environment artist to help us improve the variety and quality of our tactical environments.  We worked on an assortment of smaller tasks last month ranging from improving the ATLAS Base command room assets (wall screens and the command table) to fixing up some of the assets for the Alien Base maps, but once those were complete we began to focus on the Farm biome.

Our plan is to add some new terrain objects and update some of the ground textures for the Farm to try and make the maps feel a bit more like a real agricultural environment, and then we'll be moving onto the Tropical biome to do the same thing (as there's not really enough tiles to do the inhabited areas of the Tropical maps properly right now). Once that's done, we'll be able to move onto our final biome - the Soviet Town terror maps!

Alien Crews:
This month we updated the crews for all the various UFOs / alien ground missions to ensure there was a steady escalation of new enemies throughout the campaign. The addition of Androns means we now have enough units to group the alien races together, so each species now has a dedicated secondary support unit and a terror unit.

As part of this task we've added "heavy" variants of the Mentarch, Servitor and Cyberdrone that are tougher and have more powerful weapons, which start appearing towards the end of the campaign. We'll be adding new artwork and 3D models for these units in the next month or two.

General Improvements:
We've also made an assortment of improvements to other parts of the game. The air combat now supports weapons that are capable of shooting down missiles and we've added a new late-game escort UFO that provides an alternative to the alien Interceptor. We've added support for transferring scientists and engineers between bases. We've added a new soldier module that gives soldiers a 180-degree vision arc. We've made further improvements to the loading times, added many small usability features, and added various small new bits of content to the game.

So overall it's been a busy month for us, with lots of good progress made. Thanks for reading and we'll hopefully have Milestone 4 in your hands soon!

Milestone 3 Patches:
A lot of our time has been spent fixing bugs in Milestone 3 recently, with five patches being released in the last month. Many of these issues were minor problems caused by our Unity 2022 upgrade, but there's also been fixes for various older bugs and some improvements made to the foreign language translations of the game too. These updates should have collectively improved player experience quite a bit.

One highlight was finally finding a fix for a long-standing bug that turned the screen black whenever any unit fired a weapon. This bug only affected a small number of users and there was a workaround (disabling the "camera shake" setting), but it made the game basically unplayable for anyone who did not know that - so it's definitely a relief to have it fixed!

New Maps & Environments:
We've also been hard at work on the content for Milestone 4, and the new maps needed for the largest UFO crash sites are the biggest component of this. These are progressing well - we're aiming to have 3 large maps per biome when Milestone 4 comes out, and we're about 80% of the way there now. In addition to this, the update will also contain numerous new Alien Base maps that were made the previous month.

Furthermore, a new environment artist contractor has joined the team to help us improve our existing environments and eventually finish off the Soviet Town biome that we plan to add to the game before final release. We've already updated the command room in the ATLAS Base map so it more closely resembles what we have in our artwork (with a command table and proper wall screens), and now we're working on some underground earth textures for use in the Alien Base maps.

I'm planning on using these to address one of the gameplay issues with the Alien Base maps - that all the walls are indestructible (even the ones between rooms). Under this new setup all walls will be destructible, so it'll be possible to destroy both internal walls and the external ones around the edge of rooms. Doing this will reveal the earth tiles behind the walls, and these themselves will also be destructible.

This should allow more realistic gameplay where powerful weapons and explosives will be able to gouge holes in the walls, and theoretically it would also allow players to dynamically "mine" through the earth and breach other rooms if they sufficiently powerful weapons. Be aware this idea is still at the testing phase so I can't promise it will definitely work as planned... but all our testing so far looks good!

Alien Visual & Audio Improvements:
Our updated Androns have now been finished and will be marching into battle against humanity in Milestone 4. We've also retextured the basic Sectons, as these are the first aliens that new players encounter but previously had fairly basic textures. We're currently retexturing the Wraiths so their basic non-combatants have a simple military uniform rather than being completely naked, and this month we'll be creating an additional Wraith variant with heavier armour that will appear towards the end of the game.

We're also in the process of hiring a contract audio engineer to improve the game's sound design in general, which will include creating some new sounds for the aliens to try and give them a bit more character (like new injury / death sounds, or unique footsteps etc).

Smaller Improvements:
We've also completed several small features this month that were requested by the community. Firstly, the dropship screen (where you can position your soldiers within the dropship) now shows the soldier role icons on the green soldier tiles, making the process much more straightforward than it was previously.

Secondly, we've finally got "destruction linking" working properly, which allows us to have walkable tiles placed on top of large multi-tile objects like shipping containers and have them remove themselves if the underlying object is destroyed. This means there's now a lot more objects in the game that allow you to land on top of them and walk around (shipping containers, caravans, buses, certain fuel tanks, etc), and fewer cases of aliens mysteriously standing in mid-air on invisible tiles.

Work was also done on the end of turn camera, which now better shows regeneration healing and Bleeding Wounds damage on any visible units at end of turn. We also rewitten the item assignment logic that occurs after a completed mission, because players were getting some strange loadout problems when running a second mission with the same dropship (some weapons not starting with a clip loaded, etc), which was just down to the primitive way in which the game assigned items to your soldiers if there wasn't enough to equip the whole squad.

Finally, a surprisingly popular request was an upgrade for the basic Combat Knife weapon that is available for your soldiers, so we've designed an upgraded Energy Knife that will unlock off Alien Electronics and should allow the weapon to remain relevant for much longer.

Conclusion:
That's everything for this month - lots of smaller tasks that together represent good progress on the project. Hopefully we'll have an early version of Milestone 4 out for testing on the Experimental branch later this month!

Milestone 3 Release:
The biggest news in February was the release of Milestone 3, which launched in conjunction with a Steam promotion and contained many significant upgrades and improvements to the game. We were concerned there might be stability issues arising from our migration to Unity 2022, but in general the release went smoothly. This is in no small part due to the many people who helped us by testing the build on the Experimental branch, so a huge thankyou for that!

However, most of our time over the past couple of weeks has still been spent fixing bugs reported by the commmunity. Over the past couple of weeks we've released a couple of patches onto the Experimental branch, and if testing doesn't reveal any further bugs then we'll release them onto the main Steam / GOG branches some time next week.

Milestone 4 Planning & Harvester UFO:
Our next big update will be Milestone 4, which we're expecting to have ready for early testing on the Experimental branch in roughly six weeks. This will be another major content update centered around the introduction of a new UFO, in this case the Harvester - the penultimate alien craft in the game (the Battleship is the largest UFO and is due in Milestone 5).

We're therefore already working on the content necessary for this. Aside from the obvious work required for adding and balancing a new UFO, there's quite a bit of extra work required here because the Harvester is so much larger than the Abductor and Cruiser UFOs that it requires an entirely new set of maps. We're aiming to have three new maps per biome for this UFO, which means a total of about 25 new maps will also be added in Milestone 4. 

Androns & Updated Aliens:
Milestone 4 will also see the re-introduction of the Andron alien race. We removed these prior to our Early Access launch because the models and animations looked pretty bad, but we've now created a new set of models / animations for them. I think they've come out well, and are now some of the best-looking aliens in the game.

In gameplay terms these remain heavily armoured, fearless robotic enemies, but unlike in previous incarnations they now carry standard alien weapons (either rifles or machineguns) rather than having an integrated cannon arm - this makes it much easier for players to gauge how much threat any Andron unit poses, because you can now actually see the gun they're using.

We're also likely to revisit a few of the existing aliens before Milestone 4 arrives and either retexture them or update their animations, as some of the aliens definitely look better than others right now!

Colossus Battlesuit:
The most important research project unlocked off the Harvester is the Colossus Battlesuit, the "ultimate" suit of armour available to the player, so this is something else we'll be looking into this month. We want this to be a powerful asset that offers exceptional protection, but not something you want to equip on literally every soldier in your team - so it needs some disadvantages to go alongside its strengths. I've not yet decided exactly how this will be done yet, so hopefully we'll have more details for you in the next update once we've had a chance to test some of our ideas!

That's all from me for now. As always, thanks for reading, and I'll be writing another update at the end of next month!

The idea is that they will be able to add new features / fix bugs and release patched versions of the Xenonauts .exes, which will be distributed on these forums or via Steam Workshop. They will not be official Goldhawk-endorsed releases, but may be incorporated into future official patches.

This will also make things easier for non-programmer modders, as a few Community Coders could make moddable areas of the game that are currently hardcoded. Essentially they can act as enablers for the wider modding community as well as modders in their own right.

If you are interested in becoming a Community Coder and would like access for the source code, these are the requirements:

• You are a good coder, so you know your way around git and have a programming degree or a coding job in the industry or so forth. There are two reasons for this:
  
  • Our codebase is a mess and you are unlikely to be able to achieve much if you do not have good coding skills.
    
  • We want to ensure you don't end up breaking everything for the other coders on the project (and they don't break everything for you).
    

• You are willing to sign a NDA / agreement which states:
  
  • The source code remains our property and you will not discuss / distribute it outside the hidden Community Coder forums. We'd rather not have it leaked across the whole internet!
    
  • You may freely distribute any executables compiled from the code provided it is on a non-commercial basis.
    
  • We're allowed to (and will) sue your ass in the UK if you break either of those rules
    
  • The work you produce from the source code can be used by Goldhawk for any purpose without requiring permission or attribution if we so choose (you do not lose the right to distribute it if this happens).
    

If you're happy with those terms, please send me an email with your details and we'll consider and hopefully accept you. It'd be really great to have a larger team than just Solver working on this sort of thing - I'm sure the rest of the community would really appreciate it!

Milestone 3:
The biggest piece of news is that Milestone 3 is out on our Experimental branches for testing, with the goal of releasing the final version of Milestone 3 onto the default Steam / GOG / Epic branches on February 19th.

There's an extensive changelog for Milestone 3 which you can read here, but this new build ticks off a number of content items on our roadmap: the Cruiser UFO, both alien and human Fusion Weapons, the third interceptor aircraft and third dropship aircraft, plus the ARES (an upgraded hovering version of the MARS).

We're currently hotfixing the game on a daily basis to remove crashes and AI hangs encountered by our community, and we'll be focusing on smoothing out the game balance once the worst of the bugs are dealt with.

Unity 2022 - Load Times & Borderless Fullscreen:
The biggest single task we've completed on over the past couple of months has been upgrading to Unity 2022, which Milestone 3 now runs on. This has been quite disruptive, but worthwhile - the update has enabled us to reduce load times by ~30% across all parts of the game, and we're hoping to further improve that to a ~50% reduction in the coming months.

The game now also properly supports Borderless Fullscreen mode, allowing you to freely Alt-Tab without issues (something a LOT of people in the community had been requesting). Players should encounter fewer issues with multi-monitor setups than before too.

The upgrade should also help speed up development somewhat. I won't bore you with the technical details, but code compiles much faster in 2022 relative to our older version and there's much more powerful debug tools available, so we'll collectively be spending a lot less time twiddling our thumbs while we wait to test our work.

AI Upgrades:
The other major task we've been working on is AI improvements. The AI now has access to more information about the battlefield around it, and it's making much more sensible decisions in combat about where to position its units and how to attack.

However, we're still keeping a close eye on the AI because further tweaks or bugfixes may be required - even minor issues in the AI settings can cause AI units to do bizarre things in certain situations. But the good news is that these issues should now be easy to fix, and it's just a case of testing the game enough to find them all.

Specific AI improvements have been also made to the civilians (who were famously suicidal in older builds) and for melee aliens like Reapers, which had been struggling to attack effectively.

New Assets:
As well as the new content I already mentioned has been added for Milestone 3, we've been adding lots of new maps to the game and have also added a significant number of new 3D models for various soldier weapons that had previously been using placeholders. The research art for the new research projects is also largely complete and should be finished by the 19th.

We're also starting to work on updates that won't appear until Milestone 4. Kickstarter backers will remember pre-Early Access versions of the game contained the Andron alien race, but they were removed due to issues with their models and animations. The updated Androns have now been designed and are in the process of being modelled up so we can reintroduce them in future.

This is part of a wider task to create additional variants of existing aliens. The Wraiths in particular don't have enough 3D model variants to represent their different ranks, so we've designed a more heavily armoured Wraith variant that will appear in the later UFOs, and also designed a proper uniform for the basic "civilian" Wraith you encounter acting as a pilot or engineer inside UFOs (currently they just appear naked).

Conclusion:
Overall, it's been a productive couple of months for the team despite the disruption of the Christmas holidays. The Unity 2022 upgrade and the AI upgrades were both large tasks so it's nice to have them done, and I think Milestone 3 is going to be another significant upgrade for the game - once testing has ironed out all the kinks.

Thanks for reading, and please let us know if you encounter any bugs or issues when playing on the Experimental branch!

However, we did release several early test builds of Milestone 2 on our Prototype branches this month so we could gather early community feedback on our ideas. The build is now shaping up nicely and we're expecting to move it over to the Experimental branches in the next week or two, where we'll continue to fix bugs and polish it until it's ready for general release.

Artist Recruitment:
Before I start talking about the new features, I quickly want to mention that Goldhawk is hiring a couple of additional 3D artists for Xenonauts 2. If you are potentially interested in joining our team as an Environment Artist or a Character Artist / Animator, please check out the posts below!

• Recruitment - 3D Environment Artist (Remote, full-time / part-time)
• Recruitment - 3D Character Artist / Animator (Remote, full-time / part time)

New Missions & Early Game Update:
Two common issues raised in player feedback about the Early Access launch version of Xenonauts 2 were that the pacing of the campaign could be improved, and the role of the Cleaners (and their storyline) could be expanded.

We therefore added quite a lot of new content to the opening section of the game in Milestone 2. There's now more Cleaner missions in the early game, including three new mission types - Rescue Soldiers, Convoy Ambush, and Rescue VIP - and the process of locating the Cleaner HQ has become more organic. Now you gain progress toward the HQ location simply by winning the Cleaner missions that spawn on the map, with extra progress earned if you capture prisoners for interrogation or if you recover optional Cleaner Data from the map.

I've also rewritten the dialogue around the tutorial and opening section to make the plot more interesting (and do a better job of involving the Cleaners), and I'll be continuing this process while Milestone 2 is on the Experimental branch.

Soldier Armour - Heavy / Light Variants:
We playtested a number of changes to soldier armour in the prototype builds, but the only improvement we decided to keep was creating Light and Heavy variants of each type of soldier armour. This replaces the existing ballistic plates modules from Milestone 1 with a checkbox that toggles between these heavy / light variants.

Heavy armour simply weighs more, but offers greater protection that the lighter variant. This gives the player a lot more flexibility, and avoids the situation where your newly researched advanced armour is actually worthless because it's too heavy for many of your soldiers to use (as they can just use it in the lightweight configuration if needed). Feedback so far seems to suggest players consider this a big improvement over what we had before.

Interceptor Weight System / Air Combat Rebalance:
We've also taken a look at the air combat in Milestone 2. The biggest change is to how aircraft equipment works, as aircraft slots can now hold any type of item / weapon but each aircraft has an overall weight limit that the equipment loadout must stay below. We've also added a fuel pod item that boosts the aircraft range, and an armour plating item that boosts survivability. The UI for this system still needs work, but overall it feels pretty solid already.

Some work has also been done on the UFOs themselves. We've introduced a new early-game unmanned UFO called the Probe, which is much weaker than the Scout and initially serves as a basic introduction to air combat before being used as the first type of escort craft for larger UFOs (as Fighter UFOs are too deadly to use as escorts early on). The existing UFOs have also been rebalanced to try and make them more distinct from one another.

New Maps:
Our new level designers started work in September, and their first task was to address the lack of UFO crash site maps in the Dockyard biome. We've now got five new maps to support this, and we're working on expanding the number of Jungle maps too. After that, we'll get to work creating more maps for the new mission types added in Milestone 2.

(Community) Mod Tools:
We've also continued to develop the foundations for modding. We've finished implementing the mod management systems, and the "mods" panel is now accessible from the Main Menu screen in Milestone 2. Unfortunately the modding tools themselves require more work at our end than we expected, so we're still in the process of planning that out. We're making steady progress, though, and the game should have a solid set of modding tools in place before launch.

And that's everything that I can think of - thanks for reading, and I'll write another progress update at the end of the month!

The map uses quite a few placeholder graphics but is intended to let us test a few things:

- Map sizes relative to the number of aliens in it

- A more open style of map

- The new UFO wall hiding mechanics

- The size and interior layout of the proposed new Light Scout UFO

Future maps are in the works, there'll probably be at least one more this week that will showcase the new style of the Farm maps with big LOS-blocking hedgerows. If you're lucky, we'll get the first test map for the alien bases out this week too. The Xenonaut base defence missions may appear in the next couple of weeks too, as Aaron's done a lot of new tiles for them.

The intention is that we'll iterate the maps with community feedback until we know what size works best for each UFO type, what the best UFO layout is etc, and take on board specific comments on each map so we build up a decent library of hand-crafted and playtested maps for release that are fun to play through.

In the next few weeks we'll be adding more functionality so we can test "scenarios" as well, which will involve setting a specific number of alien units and a specific number of Xenonauts with specific equipment on certain missions to see how easy / hard they are. This will require further amendments to the levelsetup.xml code and the AI code, but we're working on those.

There's also a bunch more tiles in the updated version, as well as as updated Submap / Level editors for those who like making your own maps. Enjoy!

Milestone 2:
The biggest news this month has been the official release of Milestone 2, our first major update since our Early Access launch. I discussed the many upgrades made in Milestone 2 in our previous update so I won't cover them again, but getting everything ready for this release took up most of the month.

Our thanks go out to all the testers who were reporting bugs and giving gameplay feedback on the Experimental branches over the past couple of months, as it has been incredibly valuable!

Broadly speaking, all this testing meant Milestone 2 launched in pretty good shape - but we've already patched a few major bugs and put out a fix for the funding situation being overly restrictive on the easier difficulty settings. We're continuing to monitor stability and balance issues, so please do let us know if you're encountering problems and we'll consider further patches!

Milestone 3:
Although Milestone 2 is barely out the door, we're already hard at work on Milestone 3. This update contains the alien Cruiser UFO, which is crewed by aliens carrying deadly Fusion weapons. If you can successfully capture one of these Cruisers, you can unlock the final interceptor and dropship aircraft, plus another tier of infantry weapons and an upgrade for the MARS that turns it into a hovertank.

We'll also be continuing to work on the alien AI and the air combat, and we're hoping to add various minor community-requested features into this update too (e.g. the ability to autosell "junk" items after combat). Finally, we're expecting Milestone 3 will have significantly improved loading times compared to earlier versions of the game!

Unity 2022 Upgrade:
These faster load times will be happening partly because we're in the process of upgrading from Unity 5.5 to Unity 2022. We've already done the necessary technical work for this, but there's always teething issues with a major engine upgrade, so I expect we'll have to spend a couple more weeks fixing things up before things are fully back to normal.

Players should see faster load times and better performance when this work is complete, along with proper support for multiple monitors and borderless windowed mode etc. It will also make development work more efficient, as the codebase compiles much more quickly etc. Finally, it'll also bring us one step closer to mod tools - as some of the work we'll be doing upgrading our internal editor tools could be re-used to create a more effective mod editor.

I think I'll wrap things up there. If all goes well, we might have an early prototype of Milestone 3 ready for people to play on the Experimental branch by mid-December (if not, it'll be early January). Thanks for reading!

Although the update is content complete and we were originally planning to launch it today, we've decided to push back the release by a week because the Steam Autumn Sale is starting today - it's never a good idea to push out a huge update that might cause stability issues just before a major sale. A second benefit is that delaying the update also gives our localisation partners time to translate the new content.

However, anyone that wants to try the new update can switch onto the Experimental branch right now and start playing. Your save games will carry over to the public version of Milestone 2 once it releases, as the only changes we'll be making in the next week are bugfixes and translation updates.

A big thanks to everyone who has helped us test Milestone 2 on the Experimental branches over the past four weeks, we really appreciate it!

Milestone 2:
Our main focus this month has been Milestone 2, which is undergoing testing on the Experimental branches. This is now feature complete - we're concentrating on bugfixes and balance changes while we wait for a few more maps / art assets / research texts to be completed. We're expecting to be able to release it onto the default Steam / GOG branches a couple of weeks from now, about halfway through November.

Milestone 2 contains a lot of updates, including several new types of tactical mission, a new UFO type, and some significant changes to the early part of the campaign to expand the role of the Cleaners (there's more details about this in our previous development update).

Air Combat Rebalance:
One thing worth mentioning in more detail is our rework of the air combat. We've implemented a more freeform equipment system for Xenonaut aircraft and then rebalanced the air combat itself so it rewards skillfully maneuvering your aircraft in a similar way to the original Xenonauts, while also trying to remove a few of the more abusable tactics (e.g. it's no longer possible to continually use evasive roll to circle-strafe around an enemy).

This means the overall balancing pass has touched almost every part of air combat. We've tried to create distinct identities for all the different types of weapons you can fit on your interceptors, make the different UFOs pose different challenges to the player, and added some new UFO weapons and aircraft equipment to increase variety.

Of course, many people prefer to simply autoresolve the air combat - and this is one of the ongoing balance issues we're aware of in Milestone 2. Making the game playable for people who only use autoresolve has led to the air combat being a little too easy for people who use only manual autoresolve, so we're going to be working to fix that over the next week or two.

AI Improvements:
We've also started upgrading the AI this month. We begun by focusing on the civilian AI, as they currently don't behave in a very realistic way - as MANY players have noticed! I'm not sure if we'll have a patch ready for Milestone 2, but if not then we should have noticeable improvements in place for Milestone 3.

Additionally, many of the issues we've found with the civilian AI were caused by problems with the general AI model - which means fixing them will make the aliens a bit smarter too!

Loading Times & Unity Upgrade:
Another thing we've been actively working on is improving loading times, with the eventual goal of reducing load times by roughly 50%. The good news is that we're making steady progress here, but the bad news is that players are unlikely to see any improvements until Milestone 3.

This month we experimented with stripping some further data out of our saved game format and found this sped up loading times by 25%-30% on our current (very outdated) version of Unity. However, when we tested this change in a more modern version of Unity, we found something interesting: load times were sped up by 25%-30% even if we disabled our change. It turns out recent versions of Unity have optimised that part of their loading process already.

As upgrading Unity will also bring a lot of other improvements to the game (e.g. better performance, proper support for borderless window mode, etc), we're planning to do that as part of our plans for Milestone 3. In the meantime, we're working on multithreading as a way to deliver the remaining ~25% loading time reduction.

Conclusion:
Although there's plenty of smaller things I could talk about, I'll end things here. I think we've had a productive month overall, and personally I've particularly enjoyed seeing progress towards fixing some of the largest remaining problems raised by players at launch (slow loading times, bad civilian AI, the air combat needing more work).

As always, thanks for reading - I'll write another post next month!

Expanding the Team:
This is mostly because the development team has expanded significantly over the last couple of weeks. When we launched into Early Access the team here at Goldhawk was only three full-time employees (one designer and two programmers) and there's just not enough hours in the day for a team that small to run a project of this size effectively, even if you're all working evenings and weekends.

In practice this has resulted in a situation where we've collected a lot of useful gameplay improvements / suggestions and bug reports from our community, but we've only been able to tackle the most urgent of those issues. This is frustrating for both the team and for the players, as the other tasks are still important things we want to fix - they're just not as important as the stuff we actually have been fixing.

As the only way to make a serious dent in the task lists was to get more manpower, this month we hired one additional full-time programmer (who is actually an old friend that worked with us on the original Xenonauts) and two more highly-experienced part-time programmers. Many thanks to anyone that applied for a position on the team after reading our last update - we really appreciated seeing so many enthusiastic people reaching out to us!

Furthermore, we've also hired an additional full-time level designer / QA assistant, and two part-time designers who will be helping with the level design and game design / balancing respectively. Our goal is to respond to all community bug reports within one working day, to start delivering new maps with each major update, and generally to be able to respond better to player feedback and suggestions. I've been spread WAY too thin over the past few months.

Improving the Game:
We've continued to improve the game over the past four weeks, adding community-requested features like the option to modify the length of mission timers and the ability to break apart / merge together airborne squadrons, plus successful fixes for the memory leaks in the game and all sorts of other gameplay bugfixes.

However, work on the game has been slower than normal due to all the recruitment we've been doing - if you're a small team, it takes a lot of time to be reading through CVs and code samples / portfolios to evaluate applicants, it takes time to interview candidates, and it takes time to get employment contracts signed. And most of all, it takes time to get people set up on the project and get them up to speed on our huge codebase or to teach them how to use a complex tool like our level editor. Time spent on this will quickly pay off, but it does slow things down in the short term.

This has affected Milestone 2 most badly. We're now hoping to release this onto the Experimental branches at the end of next week or the beginning of the week after. 

I'll also mention the loading times briefly here, as I know they are important to many people. We took a look at them earlier this month but it quickly became clear any serious attempts to speed these up would change the structure of the saves and therefore break save game compatibility. As a result, we've pushed this work back to Milestone 2 (as each new Milestone build is likely to break save games anyway, due to the significant balance changes).

Community Mod Tools:
One thing we did spend a bit of time on this month is the mod loader and Steam Workshop integration, which is now nearly complete. However, we've not yet started work on the official mod creation tools and it may be a few months until we do given our focus is currently on upgrading the core game.

If anyone is potentially interested in helping design a GUI that hooks into our code so modders can more easily edit the game files, please take a look at this thread!

Conclusion:
That's it for this month's announcement. We've made decent progress but most of our time this month has been spent expanding the team so we can make faster progress in future. Thanks for reading, everyone!