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I was defending my base, and I stopped to get in a little extra target practice at the training facility when I noticed something about the firing range...

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! This is our first test build for Milestone 3, and we're releasing it to test for stability issues that may have occurred as a result of us upgrading the game to use a newer version of Unity. The new content is included but still unpolished at this stage; we'll be finishing that off and starting to test that properly next week (assuming there's no widespread technical issues as a result of the Unity upgrade). KEY CHANGES: New Content: The playable time for the campaign has been extended to 260 days (from 180 days), during which time the Cruiser UFO will begin to spawn. This contains or unlocks several new pieces of content: Cruiser UFO (with two interior layout variants) Alien Fusion Weapons Xenonaut Fusion Weapons The Gemini interceptor The Pegasus dropship The ARES (an improved version of the MARS) At present we only have research text / art for some of these projects; the remainder will be finished by the end of next week. Unity 2022: We've upgraded Xenonauts 2 to run on Unity 2022, which is a much more modern version of Unity than we were previously using. We've tested the game pretty heavily at this end and fixed most of the bugs we encountered, but now we need to see how the game works on a wider selection of hardware. Please give the game a test and let us know if you encounter any issues! Borderless Fullscreen: Borderless Fullscreen mode should now be properly supported in Xenonauts 2. The monitor resolution settings are now handled natively by Unity 2022 rather than through our own code so we'd appreciate it if people can give this feature a test and see if it is working as intended, particularly if you have multiple monitors or some kind of unusual hardware setup. Faster Loading: Load times should now be reduced by about 30% across all sections of the game, and we're hoping to reduce this by another 10%-20% in Milestone 4. However, please remember that this is an Experimental build and it has lots of extra logging that slow load times - for now, this is likely to cancel out any improvements compared to the "normal" build on the default branches! We've also taken the opportunity to move the tactical mission briefing onto the loading screen, rather than showing it at the start of the mission. This gives you something to read while the mission loads, and allows you to get into the action faster once the load is complete! AI Improvements: We've spent a lot of time working on the AI for this update, improving both the general decision-making of the AI and addressing various specific issues that have been affecting gameplay like: Civilians are now much less suicidal. Melee units (especially Reapers) should make better decisions. AI units will no longer just stand in fire / smoke until they die or pass out. The AI will now open doors even if the tile on the other side is blocked by another unit, allowing them to shoot at Xenonauts camping doors. Pre-Mission Soldier Equip / Arrangement: One frequently requested feature was to add a button on the pre-mission Soldier Equip screen that allows the player to easily access the screen where they can set the positions of their soldiers within the dropship. We've now implemented this, allowing you to easily switch back and forth between these screens prior to launching a dropship. "Sell Junk Items" button: We've also added a button on the base stores screen that will set all "junk" items (e.g. items that are not used in research / engineering projects) to sell at maximum quantity. In future we may expand this system to allow autoselling items immediately after the mission, or we may add in a system where the reduced sale prices of items will increase over time (giving players an incentive not to always sell their junk immediately). Bleeding Wound Healing & Bleeding Aliens: Aliens can now suffer Bleeding Wounds when they take damage in the same way that Xenonauts do. However, each Bleeding Wound now have a 25% chance of healing and disappearing after it inflicts damage at the end of the turn. Unconscious units will now also continue to suffer damage from any bleeding wounds they suffered while conscious, and may die as a result. Mission Updates & Balancing: We did a balance pass on the early game as part of our AI testing. A number of tweaks have been made to reflect the fact Convoy Ambush missions felt a little too easy, whereas the second Abduction Site mission, the Cleaner Leader Elimination missions and any early Base Defence missions felt harder than other missions. We've also made a number of changes to specific mission types: Abduction missions: Abduction missions no longer end immediately when the abduction tubes disappear; the mission will now continue until all alien forces are eliminated (effectively these are now deathmatch missions with a time-limited optional objective). This change was made because many players reported that the abrupt ending of the mission in previous versions could feel quite jarring. You still gain Alien Alloys for each abduction tube you disable, but now you also gain -1 Panic in the local region for each surviving civilian that you released. The timer on abduction tubes has been reduced by 2 turns (from 8 turns to 6 turns). There's now a teleport animation when the tubes disappear. Data Raid missions: These are the missions where you have to capture a certain number of Data Sticks from Cleaner computers. These have now been updated so victory is triggered off the number of computers you have interacted with (i.e. sabotaged), rather than how many Data Sticks you have brought back to the dropship. This change is unlikely to affect too many players, and was made because having a retreating soldier killed while carrying Data Sticks could completely ruin a mission. In most cases the mission will play out exactly the same as it did before. We've added a new UI element for this mission that shows how many Data Stick items are being carried by each soldier. The objectives now show how many turns remaining until the enemy reinforcements start appearing. Enemy reinforcements timer reduced by 1 turn, unless the mission is encountered in month 1. Extract VIP missions: At the start of the mission, the camera shows the empty dropship you are trying to reach before panning to the starting positions of your soldiers. This gives the player clarity over which direction they need to travel at the start of the mission. The VIP is now automatically added to your team at the start of the mission (rather than the player having to click on them). The VIP now has 50 TU rather than 40 TU. Enemy reinforcements timer reduced by 1 turn (from 9 to 8) The objectives now show how many turns remaining until enemy reinforcements start appearing. Soldier Rescue missions: Many players did not appear to understand that you were expected to leave 3 free slots in your dropship on this mission, which gave you space to pick up the 3 soldiers that needed to be rescued. We have therefore added them to the dropship as "ghost soldiers" that fill those dropship slots (this means you can also view their stats prior to the mission). We've also updated the logic about which soldiers are recovered if the player does not leave those 3 free slots in their dropship. The game will now always pick living soldiers over dead soldiers (irrespective of their origin), and will prefer your existing soldiers to those you are supposedly trying to rescue. Eliminate VIP mission: On Eliminate VIP missions, the camera will now pan to the VIP and show a message reading "VIP Sighted" when you see the target. It will also show a "VIP Eliminated" or "VIP Stunned" message at the appropriate points. The objectives now show how many turns remaining until enemy reinforcements start appearing. MINOR BALANCE CHANGES: We found that soldiers were becoming too strong too quickly in previous builds and this problem was just getting worse as we extended the length of the campaign. We've therefore taken several steps to slow down soldier progression a little: Starting values for soldier attributes are now capped at 65 (previously 70) Starting soldiers are now Privates rather than Corporals. Reduced the speed at which soldiers gain combat experience to about 60% of the previous level. The training speed of the Training Room has been halved (both the starting value and the gain from completing Interrogation projects). It is no longer possible to see doors opening or closing under the fog of war, as this made the position of alien units very obvious. These doors will now only visually update when one of your units sees them. Sectons now trigger their Psionic Triangulation accuracy bonus from being near Psyons, not by being near other Sectons. However, if the Psyon is killed (and no other Psyon is nearby) the Secton will now immediately panic and lose all remaining TU. Duration of crash sites reduced from 72 hours to 32 hours. Medikit weight increased to 25 (from 15). Construction time of Radar Array reduced from 20 days to 15 days. Using a healing item will no longer trigger enemy reaction fire. Enabled reaction fire on the various alien melee weapons (mantids, sebillians, reapers, mentarch, zombies). Air Combat balancing: Reduced construction cost of missiles / torpedoes by 20% Reduced upkeep for Angel from $100k to $75k per month Reduced upkeep for Phantom from $150k to $120k per month Destroyer UFO increased to 200HP (from 175). Fighter UFO turn rate increased by 50%. Fighter Cannon armour destruction increased to 2-5 (from 0-3). Abductor UFO increased to 275HP (from 250). Abductor Cannon range increased by 10%, armour destruction increased from 1-3 to 3-5, and reload time reduced from 0.75 sec to 0.5 sec. Projectile speed slowed down by 33%. Alien Interceptor Missiles armour destruction increased to 3-7 (from 0-4). MINOR GAMEPLAY / CONTENT CHANGES: Added a number of new maps for Terror Sites / ATLAS Base / Cleaner Data Raid / Convoy Ambush / Rescue VIP missions. Added new 3D models for the Cleaner Accelerated Rifle, Accelerated Shotgun, Accelerated LMG, Alloy Shield, Stun Gun and Stun Baton. Added new 2D inventory tile art for the melee knife and the HEVY Smoke Rounds. Added Fusion weapons to the game. For any Kickstarter backers who saw the old incarnation of these weapons, we've updated the designs of the Shotgun and LMG and also given each weapon a unique ammo battery design. Added proper melee animations for the Mantid and Sebillian units. Units now play an injury sound and injury animation when struck with a stun weapon that does not inflict damage. Soldiers should now hide their carried weapon when performing their ladder climb animation. It is now possible to use any combination of uppercase and lowercase letters in soldier / aircraft / base names. Moved a check that was preventing a player launching an empty dropship from the Launch Aircraft screen to the pre-mission Soldier Equip screen instead (i.e. after you've had a chance to fill the dropship with soldiers). Stopping chance 0% objects are no longer highlighted on the fire path. Added a basic sort order system to the soldier loadout profiles. Units that can crush terrain now do not crush an open double door when they pass through it (most noticable inside UFOs and in Alien Base missions). The MARS now shows a custom "cannot interact" cursor when hovering over a mission objective item (like a computer desk) that soldiers can interact with but vehicles cannot. BUGFIXES: Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to run a building upgrade project when having a large number of buildings (most commonly occurred with the Gauss Battery Upgrade project). Reloading a weapon in the tactical inventory now correctly plays the reload sound. Fixed a bug where the text on UFO information pop-ups was not being displayed for users playing in Chinese / Japanese / Korean. Fixed a bug where Unassigned soldiers are not showing certain items on their paperdoll image on the Soldier Equip screen (jetpacks, MARS weapons, etc). Fixed soldiers sometimes not being removed from the dropship even when reduced to below 50% HP. Fixed a bug where the Autofill Dropship button on the Soldier Equip screen could bypass the dropship vehicle limit. Fixed a bug where Senty Guns were incorrectly showing on the Soldier Equip screen in secondary bases (they should only appear before Base Defence missions, as that's the only time they can be used). Fixed a bug where the soldier paperdoll could get blurred if a certain combination of items were equipped Fixed a bug where the soldier portrait could disappear on the dropship soldier arrangement screen Fixed the bug where grenades could get stuck displaying a 0% hit chance. Fixed a bug where units could stand in mid-air at the top of a ladder. Fixed a bug where you could place two soldiers into the same destination tile if one of them was using a jetpack. Fixed a bug where unconscious units could not be revived with a medikit, Fixed a bug where the shoot/move preview hit calculations was not accurately updating the value for Wraith Cloaking Field based on the new soldier location being previewed. Fixed a bug where TU values could end up with a decimal point after a Berserk action. Fixed a bug where suppressing an enemy unit with reaction fire would not stop them finishing their planned movement. Fixed a bug where crouching during the pre-battle deployment phase on cerrtain missions cost TU, and did not refund it if you stood up. Fixed a bug where the crouch keyboard shortcut ("C") did not work during the pre-battle deployment phase. Fixed a bug where the combat shield was not disappearing after being destroyed. Fixed a bug where certain weapons could not be picked up from the ground after being dropped. Fixed certain objective items (mostly the computer desks) being incorrectly rotated in some situations. Fixed the Bleeding Wounds counter being displayed vertically if the unit has more than 10 Bleeding Wounds. Fixed the open door mouse cursor remaining active on the menu if you press Esc while hovering over a door. Fixed a visual issue where the green deployment area tiles could sometimes remain after the end of the deployment phase. Fixed throwing a grenade / flare onto the roof of a building causing windows on the floor below to shatter. Fixed some visual issues with the restaurant sign in the Western Town terror maps. Fixed a number of bugs with the Ultimate Power achievement (bring all Colonels to a mission).

This version is outdated, see announcement for 0.35 instead. Version 0.34.3 of Xenonauts: Community Edition has been released. Installation (Windows Steam users): Switch to the Community branch in Steam by right-clicking on Xenonauts, selecting Properties, going to the Betas tab and selecting Community. No access code is needed. You can enable/disable mods in "Modding Tools" in the game launcher. You can revert to the standard official game by switching back to the NONE branch in Steam. Installation (other users): 1. Download the base mod and the mod package. 2. Launch the old version of the game, install the base mod using Modding Tools. Alternatively: extract the base mod into assets/mods/xce, overwriting everything. 3. Exit the game launcher. 4. Run the new executable from assets/mods/xce. It should display the version 0.34.3. Using this launcher, go to Modding Tools and install the mod pack. Say Yes when asked about overwriting mods. 5. You can now play from assets/mods/xce, or optionally copy the files to the main game installation folder. What is the relation between X:CE 0.34.3 and Xenonauts 1.6x? The official Xenonauts releases incorporate some features/fixes from an older X:CE version, and some have intentionally not been included. X:CE 0.34.3 should contain all relevant Xenonauts 1.6x fixes and new features. If you already play X:CE, there should be no advantage to switching to Xenonauts 1.6x. X:CE 0.34 can read saved games from Xenonauts 1.5x or Xenonauts 1.6x, but Xenonauts 1.6x cannot read normal X:CE 0.34.2 saved games. Switching option saveCompatibility in assets/gameconfig.xml to "gh15x" before running X:CE should produce saves in a format that Xenonauts 1.5x or 1.6x can read (keep the option as "xce" for normal play, otherwise some new X:CE values may not be kept in save files). Note that Xenonauts 1.6x may still be unable to load such a saved game if it includes objects it doesn't know (e.g. researches from the Lore+ mod, or incendiary grenades from X:CE). Changes from 0.34.2: This version has some stability improvements and updates to the bundled mods. System The game is now large address aware. This allows better stability / performance with very big mods. Sound effects are now stored uncompressed in memory. This only uses a bit more memory but should significantly improve sound-related stability problems, such as freezes due to ambient sounds and similar issues. Bug fixes Corrected loading of psionic defence values in saved games. Fixed the delete button in the modding tools with relation to the Steam Workshop. Prevented a freeze during ground combat if a map with a bugged door is encountered (door that opens into a wall). Fixed loading of some saved games that get corrupted by having incorrectly "cloned" planes. When retaking Xenonaut bases is enabled, fixed problem of that not applying to undefended bases. Fixed some UFO loot in the Furies mod. Modding In config.xml, a variable has been added (MeleeVehiclePriorityModifier) to tweak the priority with which melee aliens attack vehicles. The default value does not change gameplay. Modded Xenopedia screens can now display more information about combat armour suits. Included Mods Xenonauts Fix Pack by Policenaut has been updated with multiple fixes, with credit to Charon. Tropical and Swamp tileset - updated from version 1.6 to 1.61. This version is significantly more stable.

On my first game, with my first base. And the Cleaner's HQ was only revealed to me after going through the missions to get their data like you're supposed to. I can only assume that they've also been wholly unaware that our HQs were right next door to each other all along.

Even at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have to once again criticize tactical maps we currently have in X2. Many of them still feel like shooting galleries instead of real places. Maps need more: Verticality Visual story telling. Have the map itself say something about what has happened. Does this place feel like a real place or a map in a game? Larger, more interesting buildings with many floors. More urban maps. (tends to be more interesting than a random jungle) Variable pacing: large open areas -> tight close quarters. Better "paths" through an area with sense of progress. Need of surveying the area -> Seeing an alien in a third floor window - how can I get there? Completely different map layout styles within a single biome so they wouldn't feel so samey. Having more complex maps will really benefit the game by giving players more interesting scenarios to play through. I checked the old X1 maps I made back in the day. You can maybe see and feel the vibe in these screenshots I'm looking for:

Greetings all, A little preface here on relative skill level: The issues I want to talk about get more obvious and more of an issue the better a player is, hence this preface. This is sort of an inverse of "Get gud". However, it may appear I am asking to make the game easier in general, that is not the case. I would like the game to be harder if anything, but at the end where it makes sense for it to be hard and not at the beginning where it doesn't. More on that later... A note on my own skill level: I've completed pretty much every decent strategy game on the hardest possible difficulty, that includes games like: XCOM (The originals, terror from the deep excepted as I never got into it), XCOM (The Remakes), Jagged Alliance (even the awful reloaded one), Panzer General, Peoples General, etc. Also, some hard realtime stuff like EUIV (One-tagged the world), Shogun II total war (Impossible Ironmanned it), etc. I also have a youtube where I do hardest possible turn based Ironman campaigns, though that is mostly battletech. If your interested in that or simply want to verify, you can find it at www.youtube.com/TheEdmon and I hope you enjoy it :). My two key issues with XCOM type games are thus: 1) In the early game no-one seems to know there is a war on and it determines everything. 2) Win-More, Lose-More gameplay. The early game: Most of these turns based games are won in the first 6-10 hours and the rest of the game is just a walk to the victory screen, provided you don't make some critical mistake. But if you are winning hard enough, early enough, the odds of a critical mistake drops: 1) You win early missions with no losses and get more stuff. 2) So you have more money to expand, upgrade and research faster, with no losses to replace. 3) You are powering faster than the difficulty curve due to the above and can afford more coverage (when applicible). 4) You win more easily, due to your powering, which leads to less/no future losses and more money. 5) The cycle repeats, with your A-Team carrying you to the victory screen often without any losses at all. Dont you know there is a war on? The early XCOM game has this weird tone, situational as well as gameplay issue. You start off weak, barely any better or the same as a standard military of the time period. Then the game pretends like other militaries don't exist or are unable to mount even the slightest defence. So, where you are and what coverage you can get early is all that matters. This means that (often randomly), the game is determined by how much of the early hostiles appear near you (so you can deal with them) and is a race for you to power up as quickly as possible so you can protect the earth. The game balance revolves around this, making it so that you can get more ahead very quickly because you are 100% of the force being exerted against the aliens. That 100% can be vastly different between a good player and an excellent one, let alone a weaker casual player. You are totally and 100% critical in the early game, so balancing that early game becomes very difficult. I have always thought a good way to solve this problem would be to have the player be more like 10% of the force in the early game. NPC Military, coverage, airforces, etc. So what if we do this instead: 1) NPC's have military bases, airforces, coverage just like you do. 2) There is a lot more alien activity in the early game, but NPC militaries can barely handle it. The scramble interceptors, shoot down hostiles, airstrike, etc. 3) You can place your base to try and protect a country with a weak military, like africa, or place it where activity is high to protect a stronger NPC so they are useful for longer... The early game then consists of a world at war against the aliens and actually holding it's ground. You are there, to shoot down what appears in your general area, steal technology, go on missions, etc as usual. But you are not 100% of the fight, more like 10% of it. Of course, as the game goes on, your technology improves and so does the aliens. But your human allies do not. So in the mid game, they start to lose and some very badly: 1) You can see NPC bases and interceptons getting crushed. 2) Gaps appear in earths defence, relations sour. 3) It becomes clear that you must fill in the gaps, protect your allies, etc. You can afford to make the general alien presence that much more, when there is a lot of NPC defence around to handle it. Taking the pressure off the early game. In the late game: 1) NPC presence is all but gone, now it's all down to you. 2) Difficulty can be much higher 3) You've had time to put coverage in place, but the pressure you are under can also be higher than in a normal XCOM like difficulty curve. In conclusion: The early game matters too much, player skill level cannot effectively be balanced for, due to the snowballing effect that is caused by the player being 100% of the force against the aliens. The tone is also odd, where is everyone else, don't they know there is a war going on? My thought is to try and shift this to the mid game, while also fixing the weird lore and tonal issues. What do you guys think?

November is nearly over so it's once again time for our monthly dev update. We've had a productive month here overall, making numerous improvements to the game and adding in several new features too. Public Releases: We continued patching V24 this month, eventually releasing V24.7b onto the standard Steam / GOG branches. We got a lot of useful feedback on balancing from the community and I'm actively playtesting V25 at the moment with the intention of releasing it either later this week or some time next week. V25 is going to be our first open beta build, although it'll spend a few days with our existing community beforehand so we can find any critical bugs in it before we begin the open beta. The first (small) wave of invites will probably therefore be going out in mid-December. Alien Abilities: The biggest new feature we implemented this month were the remaining alien racial abilities. These are a bit more "active" compared to the alien powers in the first Xenonauts, with the idea being to pose interesting tactical challenges for the player. I'll give a couple of examples to show you what I mean. The first is the Wraith, which in Xenonauts 1 could teleport around the map (not particularly funny when you were trying to find the last alien in an alien base, etc). Now they instead have an ability called Cloaking Field, which reduces Accuracy by -2 for each tile of distance when shooting at a Wraith. However, Cloaking Field is disabled for the remainder of the turn when the Wraith takes damage from any source. The second is the Cyberdrone, which is a late-game alien unit which has heavy frontal armour and rotates in the direction of any sound - gunshots, footsteps, explosions, etc. Using multiple soldiers (or just throwing grenades behind it) allow you to expose the weaker rear armour and can make it easier to kill. Hopefully this illustrates what we're trying to achieve - basically to make the player think more closely about where to position their soldiers and what attacks or equipment to use. While these abilities still require quite a lot more testing and polishing, once we have them working properly the gameplay will hopefully be richer and the aliens more memorable. Soldier Equipment: In V24 soldiers have an equipment slot called the "special" slot (also known as the "undersuit" slot). This is basically an additional item slot where you can carry one item that gives the soldier a particular bonus - e.g. extra armour plates to boost survivability, a tactical visor to boost Accuracy, a mind shield to boost defence against psionics, etc. As this system hasn't added as many interesting choices to the game as I'd have liked, I've spent this month updating the soldier inventory. Soldiers now have a Primary weapon, a Secondary weapon, and a single 5x5 "vest" grid which contains all the additional items they want to carry into battle (ammo, grenades, extra weapons, etc). Importantly, all the items that previously went in the special slot are now 2x2 items that fit into the vest grid like any other item. I've been playtesting this over the past few days and I think it's a really fun change. The backpack wasn't really being used that much before, but now vest space (and the carrying capacity of the soldier) are much more important, even at the start of the game. Is it worth giving up that spare ammo magazine and two grenades for +5 Accuracy? It all depends on how you want to set up your soldiers, and it's a system I'm looking forward to discussing and balancing further during the open beta. General Development Progress: Other than my work on the two systems mentioned above, most of my time this month has been spent discussing the gameplay experience with our community and ironing out various smaller gameplay / usability pain points in the campaign. General feedback on V24 was pretty good but there's clearly quite a few aspects of the game that are interfering with people's enjoyment of it; many of these should be improved in V25. There's been several content updates to the game, too - the Engineering screen has now been re-skinned into our new UI style, the updated Arid biome is now present (with eight entirely new maps), and the dropships have been retextured in the tatical combat. We've also been busy planning out the tutorial and creating the map required for it, and we'll start work implementing that in December. Finally, we've been working on the load times for the game, and have hopefully now fixed the issue where Windows would think the game had frozen and invite you to terminate the process if you had alt+tabbed out while the game was loading. So overall a rather productive month. I'll wrap up this update there, and hopefully we'll be seeing some of you in the open beta during December! If you want to sign up for the open beta, please post in the previous update thread. I'll be DMing people Steam keys via these forums when the open beta starts.

August has been a busy month for us here at Goldhawk. Although it's not been quite as crazy as the two weeks immediately after our Early Access launch, the last four weeks have been very intense in a different way. 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!

Hello everyone - it's been a busy month here at Goldhawk, and there's a lot to talk about in this update! Marketing & Communication: One of the main things we've been working on is how we can keep you guys better informed about our progress. I'm therefore pleased to announce a new face is joining the team to help us out on this front - Paul, who you will see posting under the name "nervous_testpilot". I've known Paul for a long time now, as he was originally one half of Mode 7 Games (who made tactical games such as the Frozen Synapse series and Frozen Endzone) who I leaned on for a lot of useful advice back when I was developing the original Xenonauts. Since then Paul has moved into the publishing world and has published various smaller games under the Mode 7 brand, such as Tokyo-42 or The Colonists. He's therefore the perfect person to help out by handling our marketing, sales and communications work so I can focus on getting the game finished. What does this mean for you? I've written some updated posts that outline what mechanics are currently in the game and what is planned before release (similar to the threads we had up during the Kickstarter) which will be unhidden early next week. We're also aiming to have project updates every two weeks focusing either on the development progress that has been made or diving down to analyse a specific new mechanic in more detail. The Steam page and our website is going to be updated with fresh media, and we'll start monitoring the Steam forums and posting our updates there. You should start to see a bit more coverage about Xenonauts 2 in the news media once we announce our Early Access date, and in general we'll be taking a more active approach towards telling people about the game. If anyone is particularly keen on Discord, we're setting up a Discord for the game where the updates will also be posted (although the forums will remain the primary community hub). If anyone wants to join that, the link is here: https://discord.gg/fG4Xr6q Gameplay Improvements: What have we been working on over the past month in game development terms? Lots and lots of things. Let's start by talking about artwork, because we're making progress on several fronts there. One of the things I feel is important is to replace some of the placeholder art that people encounter early in the game. We've got new background painted art on the Research and Engineering screen (as well as updated character art), and we've also had some additional art painted up for a couple of the early research projects. One specific painting that represents the Orbital Bombardment mechanic (i.e. a space station vaporising a city from orbit) turned out pretty well, I think! We're also working on the designs for the new UFO. We've reverted to the X1 style of UFOs, but we're not planning to just re-use the old designs. The Probe UFO shown above is just a revised version of the old Light Scout from the original game, but most of the designs diverge more heavily than that. Again, I think new artwork goes a long way to making the game feel fresh and interesting even if the fundamentals remain familiar. Finally, I've spent the last couple of weeks talking to some external artists about improving the visual appearance of the ground missions in X2. Although these experiments are still at an early stage, it does seem like we can make some substantial improvements to the visuals by changing our texturing style (the ground textures in particular could be improved a lot). We'll have to see how things progress, but some of the test scenes are looking really nice - with a nice X1-inspired handpainted feel, but with a more "high-res" 3D feel. Let's hope we can translate that into the game in the next few months! On the coding side of things, we've spent quite a bit of time getting the new UFO hull-hiding system set up in the ground combat. This is the system from X1 that makes the walls of the UFO disappear when you see the interior of the UFO, giving the "cutaway" feel. This is a complex system at the best of times, but we're also trying to incorporate destructibility into these UFOs in a similar way to the X1 Fire in the Hole! mod (essentially there are specific breach points on the hull of each UFO that can be blasted open). This work still isn't finished, but things are going well so far and we're hoping we'll be able to start work on the final UFO models in the next week or two. We've also been working on a number of smaller systems. We've set up the systems for night detection on the Geoscape, so the game will load a night mission if the Geoscape night shadow is over the mission site (all the night missions mechanics are still subject to testing). We've done a bunch of work on the soldier equip and dropship equip screens to improve the usability there. The anomalies / events spawned by UFOs as they fly around the map now contain the full variation of text that we have in X1, but now also have biome-dependent tags so we can disable events like forest fires or shopping malls being strafed from happening in the middle of a polar region, etc. I personally have spent most of my non-management time working on the threads about our plans for the game and the research text for the plot research, which so far is 12 research reports / plot-related pop-ups. There's probably another 5 or 6 optional research projects that I need to write that will unlock an alternate ending (for people who like reading research text). These form the foundations of who the aliens are and their capabilities and intentions, which then feeds into all the other research text. I'm aiming to get the early game research text done in the near future so the first 10-15 researches are all properly written up - again, I think it's important that the initial content is in place even if the entire research tree isn't written. Builds: The build I promised in the last update hasn't yet materialised, largely because the ground combat maps are in serious flux at the moment. There are several big changes happening to the levels are the moment which means I'm not that keen to spend time on our existing maps, as there's a good chance I'll have to throw my work away shortly: The biggest one is updating the designs and sizes of all the UFOs once the "hull hiding" system is in place. It's likely that the UFOs end up being significantly bigger, which will affect all the maps and require a redesign. I need to run through all the maps and re-export them to set them up properly to support night missions (as each map now has settings that define whether it can support a day mission or a night mission). Until I do this, no night missions will work. The visuals are potentially subject to some serious upgrades, which will probably also mean the level design will change. Finally, we need to set the maps up to support multiple possible UFOs and dropships that are spawned in at the start of the mission depending on what happened on the Geoscape. At the moment the dropships and UFOs are baked into the maps (a legacy from the days when we only planned one dropship) so if we want to support another dropship we need to make a copy of every single map where we swap the Chinook out for the new dropship, which is way too much work to be worthwhile (this is why the advanced dropships are currently disabled in the tech tree). Hmm, having written all that out, I realise now it probably makes more sense to release the next build as soon as possible using the old maps while they still work - because it's going to take us a while to work through all that code and make all the new maps! Maybe we will try to put out a new build in the next week or so then. I'll have a look into how feasible that is this afternoon, although it'll still feature the old UFOs in ground missions and the night missions won't function, etc. Anyway, that's more than long enough - there's lots going on here even if I'm not paying much attention to the forums right now!

With October over, it's once again time for our monthly update. The big news this month has been the release of Closed Beta V22, which is a fairly significant upgrade on previous builds. This is currently only on our Experimental branch but I think it'll be making its way to the main / default Steam and GOG branches in a week or two when it has had a bit more testing. We've done three hotfixes for this build since it was first released and there is a fourth due out shortly that should iron out the most serious remaining bugs we're aware of. Our priority for V22 has been to improve opening hour or two of the game, which we've done in several ways. The first is to establish the game setting more clearly right from the start of the game, which we've done by adding a short text intro that is played when you start a new campaign. Some of you may remember that we've set Xenonauts 2 a little before the alien invasion properly begins, with the player first having to deal with the Cleaners and transition from being an intelligence agency into being a military organisation, and this is the clearest way we could think of to explain this to the player. Of course, we've also put some further lore and explanation in the first Research project popup that the player gets (which I rewrote for V22). The second thing we've done is to continue to improve the visuals. The new UI visuals for the loading screen and strategy topbar have been added to the game, and all the Xenonauts are now using their final 3D models in the tactical combat. Another cool little detail is that we've added a lot more hairstyles to the 3D models, so now a soldier in the ground combat will change hairstyle and colour to (roughly) match the hair shown in their soldier portrait - something that took a surprisingly long time to implement, but makes your starting squad much more distinctive from one another. The visual updates to the tactical mission environments continue too, with the Polar biome getting some attention this month. I'm pretty pleased with how it's looking now - it's very clean and readable, but I think it also looks pleasant in an unobtrusive way. We'll be moving onto the fourth Biome (likely the Dock) next month. Thirdly, we've added another dozen maps to the game. There's a lot of Raid missions in the early part of the game, but there was previously only one Raid map per biome. There's now three Raid maps per biome which means there's way more variety in the early missions, something that will improve further once I set up the new mission types in the early game in the next major build. Finally, I also did some more writing / rewriting. I worked on about 10 of the early game research projects and either wrote them from scratch or rewrote them from what we already had. Anyway, all that content generation has been quite time consuming to do so I think that represents good progress for this month. I'm taking a couple of weeks off in November (it's a long time since I've had a break) but I'm still expecting a decent amount of progress to be made and hopefully we can get V23 out before we break for Christmas!

So, first thing to say - our Kickstarter will not be launching today (4th May), and is going to be pushed back a couple of weeks so we can finish up the video and the Kickstarter page. Things are progressing well but there's a few key assets that we want finished before the launch, as it'll make everything look a lot more professional - and I will of course keep the forums updated when we settle on a specific launch date. However, if you're interested in hearing about the Kickstarter then please make sure you're signed up for our mailing list. We very rarely use this list, but we'll be sending out a notification about the Kickstarter several days before via the mailing list and then sending another notification when we press the button and set the Kickstarter live! We're going to have an internal team meeting next week to discuss the draft page text / reward tiers, then later that week we'll be revealing more information to the community and asking for your feedback. A couple of major points of interest from the the last month: We've released what is possibly the final version of the free public combat builds (V0.23.0) on GOG Galaxy. We've fixed up a lot of the gameplay and stability issues and assuming nobody encounters any major issues, we'll be using this build for the free Kickstarter demo. It'd be great if people could test this because it would be nice to find any bugs before it goes out to the whole world! We've released a load of information on our planned changes and improvements in Xenonauts-2. These choices may continue to change and evolve during development, but those threads are fairly good guide to how the game will look in the closed beta - and then we'll think about further changes or expansion based on the community feedback from that. Onto general development news - things have continued to progress well, as we're predominantly working on adding content to the game these days. Although it breaks frequently because it's so complicated, the work on the merging of the strategy layer and the ground combat is largely done. Missions are loading the correct maps in the correct biomes with the correct combatants and equipment, and the correct items are being recovered and experience and health of your soldiers is now being tracked back to the strategy layer. What we're doing now is starting to add the various types of alien to the game and giving them their various different weapons and special abilities. Some of this has been rather straightforward, but other equipment / alien abilities requires new code to support the way it interacts with the game mechanics so is going to take longer - we'll probably be working on this in the background for another couple of months. We're also working on making the maps load the crashed / landed variants of UFOs correctly, which is kinda complex because the UFOs now have to support destructibility, but I think we'll have that working in its basic form soon enough. The strategy game also has all of the major mechanics in place now too - the base, the interceptors, the research / engineering projects, the soldier equip screen, etc. What we're concentrating on now is making small changes to existing mechanics to make the game play better - e.g. tweaking the Agent Actions, enhancing the new interception system, etc. The gameplay experience is steadily improving as time passes but it's certainly not ready for public consumption yet! There's a lot of places where the game is still lacking, but the biggest two issues with the gameplay are challenge and content. The combat AI is incredibly basic and doesn't present any real challenge to the player, which makes it somewhat difficult to balance the gameplay. The other issue is the lack of maps and differentiation between the aliens; it's possible to play a single mission and have some fun but we can't support a proper campaign until we have a good variety of maps and all the different variants of alien to fight against. These are two of the big areas that we'll be focusing on in preparation for the post-Kickstarter closed beta. We'll post more details up about the closed beta once our Kickstarter preparations are out of the way. There's lots for me to do so I'm going to get back to work now, but thanks for reading and I hope we'll be seeing you again when the Kickstarter launches!

X - Division New Dawn V 1.00.10 for 0.35.0+ XCE We are in the sky ... We are on the ground ... We are a paramilitary organisation ... We have the best of the best - with some personal issues here and there. Real characters as you say nowadays ... We do everything, from stealing to protecting transports, smuggleing weapons for those who can pay for it. We destroy organisations if the price is right and provide safe routes from A to B, even through hell if it has to be ... Sometimes we also do some good guy stuff, but dont ask for it, except you can put enough money on the table ... Our people are unhonorable discharged veterans or geniuses who dont feel quite valued in their former organisation. Some average guys as well who are attracted to the way we do things ... but honestly they have to be a bit crazy to be hanging around those guys ... say us ... ... everybodys a bit crazy here ... We have been hired by some wealthy individuals who think we can save the earth and believe in our methods. This group has put their faith in us ... and most importantly, their money. I guess it is time to do some good guy stuff again ! Whats my spleen ? World Domination ! Everybody ought to have a goal, no ? But if these aliens do as they please there will be nothing left to rule over. What is yours, commander ? Welcome to X-Division ! The Team Drages - Lead Modder and Art Manager Charon - Code Manager Draku - Debugger and Tester Sfarrelly - Writer AI Advisor and XCE Support - Kabill, Solver, Ilunak Dedicated Testers - Phoenix1x+52, Marandor1 Support - Max_Cain, Kabill Special Thanks - Nuclearstudent, odizzido, Xany, Squaddie Perseus, Woz2, asierus24, Blackwolf, Reactorcore, Alienkiller, CherryCoke, XCOMJunkie, Brandon, Maera, Trueman11 Special Thanks to Content Contributors: Max_Caine, the XNT team, Axiomatic, Pandi, Svinedrengen, Z01, We are thanking Chris for a wonderfully modable game and all the experience we could make because of this What people say about X-Division "Before all of this, the aliens were fighting seriously with jokes, then we gave them actual weapons and now they are fighting seriously, jokeing about you" - Drages "Your blinking dots on the hull look so awesome that its the first time i actually looked at the UFO in over 600 hours of gameplay time" -Charon Table of Content 1. Game Overview 1.1 Game Details 2. Questions & Answers 3. Installation 3.1 Latest Patch 3.2 Troubleshooting 3.3 Linux Installation Advice 4.Known Bugs 5. Some things before you start 6.Credits 1. Game Overview X-Division is a complete overhauled game experience, featuring an vast amount of different enemies to capture, a new and improved, aggressive AI, 288 new weapons including katanas, 9 vehicles and 3 mechs and 13 sets of armour. New revised Aircraft game , crafted by me which builds and extends on the existing aircraft mechanic and polishes it to the extreme. New mechanic, hit and run tactics, new alien weapons and more .. so totally not what drages planned :). 22 new aircrafts from which 5 are alien interceptor to recruit and 48 aircraft weapons. Enemies feauture different armor resistances, different strenght points and weaknesses. Every alien race is good and bad in and against something and you better find that out quickly before its too late, commander. Terror and base attack missions will happen frequently and will be of importance all the way to and in the end game. Captureing aliens is immensly important in this mod as it will open up all the vital and better tech for you. Unique specialists you can only capture at terror sites, crash sites or base attacks. Special UFOs with a special goals which carry special units into battle. Special Officier Units for every phase of the game to capture to give you that special research boost you need. Aliens will adapt to your style of playing with different strategies of aggressive overwhelming force. " Every phase will have their own weapon branches. Ths branches will be mostly energy or ballistic based. Addidition to this your arsenal will make updated versions we call as MK in the mod. You will get the MK 1 versions as prototype and easy. For MK-2 versions, you will need to capture alien specialist and for MK-3 ultimate versions you will need to get specific things. Vehicle Weapons, Grenades and Explosives will have updated versions too. Special UFOs with a special goals which carry special units into battle ! UFOs with their own puposes and missions. You will see huge ufos for terror and base attacks, nearly impossible to stop at the air. You will see shuttles and special cargo ships along others. You will see any kind of ufo nearly at every phase with their upgraded stats, weapons and crew. Near endgame, you will see the real force of the Alien menace with the all mighty dreadnought and motherships." - Drages An detailed manufacture and disassembling system for alien weapons, grenades, UFOs. A chance based, incredible intrigues, complex research tree featuring around 900 xpedia entries and lively maps with civilians and local forces appropriatelly equippted. All of this over 4 balanced Phases over the game presenting a long and hard journey to menkinds destruction or, temporary, survival. It is in your hands, commander. 1.1 Game Details Weapons and Ground Combat Aircraft and Aircraft Gameplay Manufacture, Research, Xenopedia Maps, Graphics and UI, Miscancellous Picture Gallery 2. Questions & Answers 3. Installation 0. The base vanilla version has to be 1.65+ . 1. To avoid complications unsubscribe to all other mods on steam, and delete your your whole mods/.. folder. Then make a fresh install of xenonauts. X-Division 1.00.00 is not compatible with earlier versions. 2. Install the latest XCE version. For windows steam users right click on Xenonauts in your library > Porperties > Betas > community - Xenonauts: Community Edition branch For GOG/linux steam users follow the latest installation instructions here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/forum/23-xce-release-announcements/ Linux steam users will need to run X:CE through WINE or a similar program. 3. If you downloaded the steam workshop support mod install it now. This is to show some support but has no other purpose than that. 3.5 Start up the game at least once and exit it properly. 4. Download all 3 parts of X-Division 1.00.00: Download ( Part 1 MD5: d46af869d5435a9c425d51acd1442897, Part 2 MD5: c57b4fb563ca419c9e455f0908701fe9 , Part 3 MD5: c8ca596b39d920e45a9a45fc71611892 ) 5. Deactivate your ANTIVIRUS/UAC program, it can intervene with the installation. As soon as the installation finishes you can activate it again. Have all 3 files together and open part 1 ( = unrar the multi rar archive ). Double click the .exe file. Follow the instructions of the installer. Winrar or Peazip have been confirmed to work. 6. The advanced installation has some options to choose from, namely: There are some optional mods you can activate/deactivate. Lets go through them one by one: 1. X-Division Easy Airgame/X-Division No Airgame There are 3 ways to play the airgame, 1. Manual 2. Autoresolve 3. No Airgame . No Airgame removes the necessity to play the airgame and replaces it with a 1 click solution. With No Airgame you only have to build the latest fighters and bombers and hit autoresolve. If you quickly want to jump into the Ground Combat this is the option of your choice :). Note that this tilts the balance in the favour of the player and is not representativ of the economic balance of the game. Recommended state: ON if you want to skip the airgame. 2. COM - Ambient Sounds/COM - Ambience Forest This mods add ambient sound and add the least amount of instability to the game - it still makes the game more unstable. Recommended State: OFF if you dont want to risk a higher instability for beautiful sounds. XCE 0.34.3 should fix the instability. 3. COM - [V1.08] Jsleezy's Real Fighter Portrait Pack Adds alternative soldier faces to the game. Deactivate Khall´s more Portraits if you are using this to avoid art inconsistencies Recommended State: OFF if you dont want to play with more realistic faces. XCE 0.34.3 should fix the instability. Checklist in case you want to change something later on: You only have X-Division Workshop Support if you subscribed and installed it from the steam workshop The modloader needs to be EXACTLY in the priority order the installer sets it. The modloader needs exactly this active mods. The mods you can still change after the installation are No Airgame, Khalls and Jeezlies different portraits ( only one active at a time ), both Ambient sound mods ( either active for ambient sounds or deactivated for more stability ) and the No Click sound ( removes mouse click ). You shouldn`t play X-Division with any other mods than stated. Only cosmetic mods are allowed and only if you know exactly what you are doing. Keep in mind every savegame is unique to its mods its saved with. 7. Apply the latest available patch - 3.1 Latest Patch section ^^. Every patch contains all prior changes as well. 8. Installation video by Mulligan/LeEdgyMemeKing if you need more help https://youtu.be/Jwwn9bU6y10 - Mulligan https://youtu.be/l439koiq0_8 - LeEdgyMemeKing 3.1 Latest Patch ( theres a patch history in the third post - with downloads ) Notes: X-Divison has gone the step to replace vanilla files. There has been an original file added for every replaced one in case you want to deinstall the mod. In case of doubt make a reinstall of the game or verify game integrity through steam. Before applying patches withdraw all scientists and engineers from their current projects. You can reapply them afterwards. You only need to download and install the latest Patch avaialble, it contains all prior fixes as well. The .00 to .01 patch is savegame compatible As a basic rule, never patch during Ground Combat Installation: The Base for this patch has to be version 1.00.00 or higher. This update is not available for versions lower than 1.00.00 . Download the X-Division 1.00.01 Update: https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/files/file/31-x-division-latest-patch-09945/ ( MD5: 489d03269506927ae5981dbb0de816be ) Deactivate your ANTIVIRUS/UAC program(s), it can intervene with the installation. As soon as the installation finishes you can activate it again. Start the executable provided in the file. Follow the instruction of the installer After you have used the installer there is no need to change ANYTHING anymore, everything has been taken care of, including scripts, modloader priority, and everything else you may think of. The only time you might want to change something is if you are activating/deactivating No Airgame or change the soldier models. Enjoy . For reference, this is how the modloader can look like after the installation, plus/minus optional mods on/off. DAY X Unofficial WiP Version 1.00.11c "New Dawn" Notes: X-Divison has gone the step to replace vanilla files. There has been an original file added for every replaced one in case you want to deinstall the mod. In case of doubt make a reinstall of the game or verify game integrity through steam. You only need to download and install the latest Patch avaialble, it contains all prior fixes as well. The .10 to .11c patch is NOT savegame compatible. If you want to make it savegame compatible you need to make a backup of your researches.xml, run the installer, and immediately copy your backup over the new file again. You will miss out on the fixed researches but you can continue the campaign. As a basic rule, never patch during Ground Combat Installation: The Base for this patch has to be version 1.00.00 or higher. This update is not available for versions lower than 1.00.00 . Download the X-Division 1.00.11c Update: https://mega.nz/file/lYwRBaZJ#Nu7Vt08i0LHEV2FqOTX9uCM9sVSHXoEl_Bee_3M_XqM ( MD5: e852cdedc43f0c7b6aaa4f4c60300601 ) Deactivate your ANTIVIRUS/UAC program(s), it can intervene with the installation. As soon as the installation finishes you can activate it again. Start the executable provided in the file. Follow the instruction of the installer After you have used the installer there is no need to change ANYTHING anymore, everything has been taken care of, including scripts, modloader priority, and everything else you may think of. The only time you might want to change something is if you are activating/deactivating No Airgame or change the soldier models. Enjoy . Changelog: DAY 978 Unofficial Version 1.00.10 "New Dawn" The .01 to .10 patch is NOT savegame compatible. Installation: The Base for this patch has to be version 1.00.00 or higher. This update is not available for versions lower than 1.00.00 . Download the X-Division 1.00.10 Update: https://mega.nz/#!dQQwCQRC!gzlksCzX9l91PAJfViyyAyXzd_VN0weUL1X5GZmeuvU Link ( MD5: f82bbe1f12c7e97a7b86c7ec3de19e11 ) Deactivate your ANTIVIRUS/UAC program(s), it can intervene with the installation. As soon as the installation finishes you can activate it again. Start the executable provided in the file. Follow the instruction of the installer After you have used the installer there is no need to change ANYTHING anymore, everything has been taken care of, including scripts, modloader priority, and everything else you may think of. The only time you might want to change something is if you are activating/deactivating No Airgame or change the soldier models. Enjoy . Changelog: You did it. Welcome onboard, Commander ! 3.2 Troubleshooting This mod is %98 stable. If you got any weird problems like aliens without guns, strange visual errors, game crashes, they should be about wrong install or mod loader issues. Be sure that you got X:CE, X-Division and X-Division Patch is installed and then come to our topic with your save game and we will help you. Sincerely yours, Drages I think i got a bug, can you help me ? If you want some help, make a bug report or think that something is not the way it is supposed to be, add a full screenshots of your whole modloader and your savegame ( geoscpae only ). I cant get the 3 multirar files to work, any help ? The first step to troubleshoot this on your own is to make sure your files are the correct ones. Generate your md5 sums of all 3 files and compare them to the official ones provided with every download. If they are the same, you got the correct data files. After that its just making sure all 3 files are in the same spot and open the first one with either WinRar or Peazip. Why does the first start take so long to load ? Thats normal. X-Division is quite a big mod so loading all of its ressources takes time. Help ! I cant click on anything in the geoscape ! Hotkey are working though. Make sure that everything is the way it should be and then: Simply start up the game, go straight to new game, start a new game, load your current save, save it, exit and restart the game. This should now be fixed. The top part of this Cruiser does not get transparent. What do i do ? You change your view option by pressing the button right beside your inventory one. Cycle through until you find one that works lets you see inside the UFO. 3.3 Linux Installation Advice We know that linux users love to tinker endlessly in order to get their software working, and we dont want to take that joy (and countless hours ) away from you. But if you are struggling and want to get some advice into the right direction, here it is. You will have to start XCE through a windows compatability layer, WINE or Proton for instance The installer might not work for you, because it expects Windows variables you dont have. The assets.7z contains all the X-Division data you need, and you can copy and overwrite your vanilla assets folder with it. You will need to manually rearrange the mod loading order. Section 3.1 should have some pictures how that should look like. Find the linux equivalent of %APPDATA%/Goldhawk Interactive/Xenonauts/internal/scripts and delete the scripts folder once after step 3.5. You propably know better what i am talking about than i do, because i dont keep track of 10 different distros and how they handle stuff. People have reported that that should lead to a working version, mostly depending on how well the windows compatability layer handles the sys calls. You can now celebrate that you have a working game on linux :). 4. Known Bugs ( at least until the next patch ) Units can spawn outside map tiles in base attacks - If that happens make sure you did in that mission what you wanted to do, then save and exit. Start the game with the Xenonauts_gc_editor.exe in mods/xce/... and load up your save. Press "V" to kill every non xenonaut unit. Save and exit and continue to play like normal. 5. Some things before you start 6. Credits A big thank you from the team for being such an awesome community. You made it possibly that we are able to release the final version of X-Division now. I especially want to thank the team who made it possible and accompanied X-Division through its various stages of development. @Solver Who is totally not a member of the X-Divison development team. I want to thank you for giving the much needed code support and all the new and fantastic features X-Division players are capable of experiencing now. Without him the growing of the game would have already stopped when custom Terror UFOs wouldnt obey the Terror Site Intervall. He made it possible that passionate modders can do what they do best, while silently removing obstacles from the back. In honour of your service i grant you the title of "External X-Division Teammember" @drages The main developer and creator of X-Division. Without him all of this Insanity would have never started. He had the vision, made the plan and strifed to fullfill it throughout many years. It is only because of him that we can finish this game today. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. @DrakuOne of the oldest members of X-Division. He did most of the grunt and testing work during the most active development cycles. Aint no Palace without somebody to actually do the work. @sfarrelly The string guy. He wrote most of the research preview entries. If you know what you are going to research than it is totally because of him. @Phoenix1x+52For doing the total insane hercules task of playing through the game from A to Z. He tested everything from the working things to the not so working things and recorded everyhing for sake of me examinating every pixel in the recordings. That X-Division is in such a bug-free and balanced state is mainly because of his work epic. He has been supporting X-Division through all its stages ( hm, installer ) and has been a loyal friend to the end. Many Kudos to you. @Maerafor giving moral support and a lot of enthusiams for new maps. @Marandor1 The second tester in command. He tried his hardest to convince me to make the game more fun than me trying to make it challenging. You can judge for yourself if he succeeded. @SvinedrengenFor making some good maps. and ofcourse ... @community for all the advice, suggestions, support and love that you gave for the game. Without you the journey wouldnt have been worthwhile. You created, enriched and made the game into what it is today. Thank you for being there on this journey. I will see you in the game . Thank you for everybody who i didnt mention but was still part of this journey. A big thanks to @Chris for making Xenonauts. Enjoy ! The next three posts were the continuation of the OP, please take a moment to glance over it.

Hello everyone - this month's update covers both December and January, as I was out of the office over new year. We've all returned refreshed from our Christmas break and we hope you all had a good festive season too! 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!

Having higher ground is one of the most basic advantages one can have in combat. As far as I know, it's not simulated in this game at all. As you can see in the (amazing) image below, the unit on the roof has 50% cover just by being higher, while at the same time having a 100% vision to the unit on the ground level. Being higher up should also reduce the amount of cover smaller props like rocks and fences provide on lower levels.

This is an update for the default Steam / GOG / Epic branches that contains all the fixes from versions 1.26 to 1.28 which have been tested on the Experimental build. The combined changelogs are shown below: Gameplay: Using shot preview move (Ctrl+Shift) no longer causes significant performance problems. Various smaller performance updates to both strategy and tactical layer (although these are unlikely to be noticable in an Experimental build due to the extra logging reducing overall performance) Added a "mission briefing" button to the Geoscape info panel for a tactical mission, which shows you the mission briefing on the strategy layer. Cleaner SMGs and Cleaner Accelerated Rifles are now recoverable and usable (by popular demand). The intro cinematic and the game mechanic popups are now enabled at the start of each campaign, regardless of whether the tutorial is enabled or not. Xenonaut Sentry Guns can now open doors, but are unable to crush objects. Reduced the spawn rate of Cleaner anomalies at the start of the game. Tooltips have been added for the various stat columns on the Soldier Recruitment panel. Snowmobiles should now explode when destroyed. Stalker Stealth Armour now displays as Gas Immune in Xenopedia. When hovering the cursor over the base icons in the top right, the base name is now displayed instantly rather than after a short delay. When hovering the cursor over a soldier in the vertical list on the dropship soldier arrangement screen, the popup showing their face / equipment is now show instantly rather than after a short delay. Key Fixes: Fixed a bug where the day 180 "Content Complete" popup was not being shown, and the game loss conditions were not triggering if you lost enough regions. Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to begin a crash site mission when there was a wreckage site also present on the Geoscape. Fixed a bug that could cause multiple popups to spawn when intercepting UFOs or sending a dropship to a tactical mission. In both cases this could cause crashes. Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur during the alien turn if the aliens were using hovering units like Servitors. Fixed two rare crashes that could occur in the Soldier Equip pool due to corrupted Kickstarter backer soldiers. Fixed a rare crash that could occur if you built over 50 planes. General Fixes: It's no longer possible to find undiscovered Cleaner Cells / Bases / etc by clicking on a UFO or mission that has spawned near to where they are hidden. Fixed grenades / aircraft missiles not properly upgrading if you skip the Alenium project and go straight for Fusion. Aircraft will now start to immediately repair Armour after being upgraded. Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly charging TU for you to pick an item up and then put it back in the same spot. Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly forgetting to charge TU if you moved the same item multiple times. TU costs for abilities are now rounded up rather than down. This fixed some odd situations where it was occasionally better to have fewer TU. It should no longer be possible to use a jetpack to fly between rooms in the Alien Base, or to jetpack through the roof of the Dragonfly dropship. Fixed an issue where it was not possible to redirect a dropship in flight to a landed UFO site. MARS vehicles now correctly display their names in the tactical combat. Disabled the day 300 Orbital Bombardment research report (which wasn't supposed to be in the game). Psyon VIP on Cleaner Cell missions no longer reports recovering both a Stunned Psyon and a Cleaner VIP if captured alive. Stalker Stealth Armour no longer shows the hair of soldiers floating inside their helmet. Dead Cyberdrones should no longer appear to be alive again after loading a save. Fixed some terrain objects in the Xenonaut base showing a bright pink error texture when destroyed. Fixed the Boreal sawmill building roofs so they correctly disappear if destroyed. Fixed typos in the strategy tutorial, Frag Grenade tooltip, and Ballistic Weapons and Fighter Datacore research text. Fixed the Engineering recruit panel having tooltips referring to scientists instead of engineers. Fixed a text overflow issue in the soldier memorial screen. Cleaner ballistic rifles no longer have an additional 5-round burst. Bomber UFO no longer incorrectly referred to as "medum-size" in Xenopedia. HEVY now displays its damage type as Thermal on tooltips. Tactical Inventory no longer incorrectly refers to the Tactical Vest as the Belt. Rush replace on aircraft now correctly costs the listed amount of money. Fixed an issue where you could drag any type of ammo onto any weapon on the Soldier Equip screen and it would accept it. MARS now correctly displays its name in the tactical combat. Fixed some Xenopedia / tooltip typos.

With Xenonauts-2 launching into Early Access, it's time to briefly explain all the new content we are planning to add on our journey towards final release! The list below explains our priorities, but it's not exhaustive as there's also lots of small improvements planned that aren't big enough to get their own bullet point. We'll also be listening to community feedback during the Early Access period, so this list may change or expand accordingly - if you want to see something else added, please feel free to suggest it! Additional Tactical Maps Soviet Town Biome Air Combat Revamp Alien / Civilian AI Revamp Cruiser UFO Harvester UFO Battleship UFO Operation ENDGAME Ending Cinematic Alien - Androns Alien - Reaper Bull Alien - Eternal Alien Psionics Ultimate Interceptor Ultimate Dropship Ultimate Armour Fusion Weapons Hovertank Mod Tools Fullscreen Borderless Community Suggestions If you have questions about any of the items on the roadmap, please post them up for discussion as a new thread on the general forums.

Closed Beta Build V26 has now been released on Steam and GOG. Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch (unless you're part of our Steam Playtest, in which case you don't have to change branches at all!) so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here). This build basically combines another hotfix we had planned for V25.5 with the work we did on our recent Steam demo. The game balance hasn't changed massively but there's still been some major new additions. We'll be taking a better look at the game balance for V27, which is already being worked on. Note that this changelog also includes the changes made in the tutorial, as that wasn't an "official" build. Changelog: Tutorial: the game now has a proper tutorial, which will play if you have the Introduction checkbox set. This explains the basic mechanics and some of the events leading up to the start of the game, and we're pretty proud of it - it's not particularly long, but hopefully still does a decent job of showing players the key mechanics (it has had a few visual updates and bugfixes since the demo release too). Esc menu now works in the air combat. Interceptors can now be selected with hotkeys 1-3 in the air combat. Time speed in the air combat and on the Geoscape are now controlled with F1-F4. Added new artwork for the following research projects: Cleaner Operations, Alien Alloys, Alenium. Visually restyled following UI popups: Launch Aircraft panel Squadron Information UFO Intercepted Squadron Intercepted Air Combat Result Abort Mission confirmation popup in tactical combat Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur if you clicked a save game on the Load Game screen while it was still loading the list of saves. Fixed a crash that could occur when changing camera level during a tactical mission after an alien was killed. Fixed a crash that could occur after an alien unit used a grenade. Fixed a crash that could occur when you disabled a newly-constructed Lab. Fixed an AI hang that could occur if a local forces unit was Mesmerised by a Psyon. Fixed various alien abilities getting messed up after loading a save game. Fixed a bug preventing players from being able to pick up corpses / stunned units and put them in their inventory. Updated the Geoscape region borders to be neater and less pixelated, and updated the cities and base icons to look a little neater too. Camera no longer centers on the selected soldier at end of turn. Performance should be increased on the Soldier Equip screen. Bleeding wounds minitab icon in GC now has a tooltip associated with it. Updated the Cleaner Intel Hub mission briefing and objectives so it is hopefully more obvious you cannot win the mission through elimination of all enemies. Balance Changes: The Cleaner Intel Hub mission now has dynamic difficulty depending on when it is revealed. If researched in month 1, the Cleaners present are equipped with SMGs rather than Rifles and have no armour. In month 2 they get stronger, and they get stronger again once you enter month 3. Reduced the cost of building aircraft weapons. Crushing crushable objects now costs +1 TU. Slightly increased the range bonus on most weapons, so you get more +hit bonus as you get closer to the target. Stun Guns are now quite a bit more accurate within 6 tiles of the target, but less accurate beyond 6 tiles. As always, please let us know if you encounter any bugs by posting them up on the Bug Reporting subforums, as we'll be releasing hotfixes to correct any major issues you encounter.

This hotfix addresses several more issues discovered within V25. You'll need to be part of our Steam Playtest or on the Experimental Branch to access the build. This update does break saves so if you want to continue your V25.1b playthrough then please switch over to the Experimental Legacy branch (just called "Legacy" branch on Playtest). Just a quick note to say thanks to all the new testers who have given us their thoughts on the game and reported bugs, we've been able to make a lot of changes in the past couple of days with your help. Many of them are quite minor changes but the layers of polish really start to add up over time. This may be be our last major hotfix this year, as both of our programmers are now on their Christmas holidays and won't be returning until the start of January, although I'll still be working for a few days yet so I can continue to improve balance and fix any asset-related bugs (and to be honest that's most of them these days). But please continue to post up bugs and provide feeback so we know what we need to work on when we're back! Bugfixes: Fixed a crash if you tried to produce the Vehicle Gauss Weapons engineering project. Fixed newly constructed interceptors not being equipped with armour. Fixed an issue where alien abilities did not function after loading a tactical save (including causing the Wraith accuracy penalty to be permanently active). Fixed the player incorrectly getting a massive +hit bonus against the Sebillians as a result of their poor eyesight. Fixed Sectons being able to fire their weapons significantly beyond their usual range, which was causing 0 damage on hits due to damage dropoff. Balance / Gameplay Changes: Servitors no longer self-heal. Sentry Guns can no longer use the MARS Cannon or MARS Rocket weapons, and are now correctly limited to infantry LMGs. The first Observer UFO has been pushed back one UFO wave. The crew of Observers is now a mix of Soldiers with magnetic weapons, and Elites with plasma weapons (previously it was all Elites with plasmas, which was too much of a difficulty spike). The minimum sell price of items has been increased from 25% to 40% of their original price. Each recovered abduction tube now correctly grants 5 Alloys and 3 Alenium. Previously it gave one or the other. Wraiths no longer have grenades, as these appeared to be causing crashes. We'll fix this issue in the next major build and return the grenades afterwards. The range bonus on the MARS Cannon was far too high before, and it has now been reduced to be in line with other weapons. There's now a deployment region in the starting room of the Cleaner Base. Sentry Guns can no longer gain medals. The missiles in the hangars in the Xenonaut Base defence missions now explode on destruction. Interface / Visual Updates: There's some new art for the Cleaner Headquarters research project. Attempted to fix the Farm hedgerows being visually messed up. The Geoscape pop-up that provides information on ground combat missions now contains a line for "Mission Type" The Toogle Roof button in the tactical UI should no longer disappear when toggled on in some instances The Quickload key (F9) will now hire only the most recent Quicksave (F5) from the current campaign, rather than the most recent save from the current campaign. The scientists / engineer hire screens no longer automatically hire selected staff if you navigate away from the screen without pressing the Hire button. Fixed a number of incorrect tooltips, and added several new tooltips to the Engineering screen. Updated the tooltips / engineering project descriptions for various advanced soldier modules so it's a bit more obvious what they do Updated the research project descriptions for alien interrogations Updated cliffs so that their sides should not z-fight.

Hello everyone - time for our monthly update. This month we've been working hard on the tactical demo we put out for Steam's Tacticon event earlier this month (still available on our Steam page for anyone that wants to play it), and we're now concentrating on finally getting Build V24 out. If all goes to plan that will be arriving towards the end of next week. A lot of this month has been spent on testing, bugfixing and polishing, so most of the progress this month is on improvements that were already underway. Grenades in particular have continued to sap a lot of our time as we keep encountering all sorts of weird edge cases with them where the arcs go wrong or don't make sense (somewhat to be expected when you try and put a curved arc onto an abstract tile grid) but I think we're nearly there now. The main changes are: The Soldiers screen on the strategy layer has now been reskinned in the final UI screen. The Research screen comes next. We've finished the tiles for the Xenonaut Base biome, and these now need to have their destruction effects added. We're finishing up a few loose ends on the Jungle, Farm and Dockyard biomes at the moment and then we'll move onto the last two biomes that need work, the Arid and the Soviet Town. I've written another 10 or so research reports. Lots of small improvements to the ground combat that aren't technically bugfixes - for example, we've updated the fire paths so miss shots fly off up into the sky much less often, which makes grenade launchers and the MARS rocket launcher much more useful. As for our Early Access plans, they're still unchanged. We're planning for a EA release in the first quarter of 2023 with February roughly pencilled in as the date. Our goal is to have the entire basic campaign playable from start to finish by this date, although there is likely to still be a few rough edges (some research projects not having artwork, perhaps difficulty settings not enabled, etc) in the game at this point. Anway, I'm in the process of playtesting V24 now and it seems like we're on track for a release next week. There's not really much more to say beyond that; it's been almost five months since our last public release so hopefully everyone will see a big improvement!

Apologies for the delays to this update. Some big news this month - we're planning to launch the game into Early Access in February next year, and I've been underwater with preparations for that. We're also going to be putting out another tactical mission demo as part of a Steam event later this month, which is also eating into my time. I'll be writing a much longer post later this month explaining our plans for Early Access in detail, so I'll just focus this post on what work we did last month. Abduction Missions: The biggest feature we've been working on are Abduction Missions, which are a new type of tactical mission intended to provide a bit more variation to the ground combat. In these missions the aliens have captured a number of civilians and imprisoned them within teleporter pods, and you have a certain number of turns to free as many civilians as possible - once the timer runs out, all surviving aliens and any pods that have not been opened teleport away. You win the mission by rescuing at least 50% of the civilians, so these missions are no harder than a "normal" mission where you kill all the aliens. However, you receive a small amount of money resources for each opened pod and killed alien (as they do not teleport away) so the player can potentially obtain more rewards on these missions by playing more aggressively than normal. Personally I think this makes them an interesting change of pace from some of the other mission types. These were way more effort than I was expecting them to be, but they're basically done now (just ironing out a few bugs) and so should be included in V24. Grenades: We've now done the final part of the grenade implementation - setting them to use arcs, so they can be thrown over walls or intervening cover. This is surprisingly tricky from a design perspective (arcs and abstract 3d tile grids don't go together well) and even more of a pain to implement, but we know it's an important feature to a lot of players. We're just fixing up a few bugs and some issues with the visualisation, but this feature is also pretty much done and should be in V24. Achievements & Cloud Saves: Achivements are now complete, including artwork, and set up on Steam and GOG. You'll be able to earn them (well, most of them) starting in V24. I'll also shortly be turning on Steam cloud saves, but because our save games were previously absolutely enormous (up to 20mb for some tactical saves) we've spent some time optimising the files so they are much smaller. They should now only be about 20% of their previous size, so only a few mb each, and won't totally destroy anyone stiill on a metered connection. Terrain Tiles & Maps: Last month I spent a bunch time fixing all the problems with the UFOs in the game, using a new tool to find and fix all the line of sight "holes" which could cause the interior space to be revealed by soldiers who were still outside. I also fixed the non-walkable tiles that occasionally appeared inside the UFOs, and finished setting up the styling on the Harvester and Battleship UFO interior spaces. I've also added a LOT of new terrain tiles to the game. These will be most noticeable in the Xenonaut Base biome, which is now mostly complete and looks much more polished than it did in our last public release (there's just a few more rooms left to complete). This is also reflected in the Cleaner Base plot mission, which has been completely restyled and now looks much better than before. UI Updates: We're continuing to work towards having the strategy UI refresh complete for our Early Access launch in February. I've implemented the new visual style for the Main Base and Stores screens, and we're nearly done with designing the Soldiers screen. Once that is complete we only have the Research, Engineering, Aircraft and Soldier Equip screens to implement. Additionally, we're working on an updated visual style for the Geoscape map itself. This won't be dramatically different but we want a map that looks a bit more distinct from the one in the first Xenonauts, and is just a bit neater and less noisy. We're still at an early stage of this but I'm hoping it'll come out well! Campaign / Tech Tree: In preparation for V24 I'm doing another balancing pass on the campaign. One small thing we implemented here was the ability to randomise the spawn times of missions and UFO waves, which has helped make things less predictable, and in general I've just been working through the game and ensuring everything unlocks correctly so you can actually make it to the final mission. I'm looking to get the tech tree locked down for the Early Access release shortly, as there is still quite a bit of art and writing that needs to be added. However this month I did write all the research entries for the entire alien / Cleaner plot chain from the start of the game right up to Operation Endgame (this was about 15 entries in all). This means the hardest part of the writing is now done, as "normal" research entries are less narratively connected and much faster to write. I think that's everything. We are working on V24 still but I'm not going to give a firm date for when it'll be released as I'm conscious I've got the demo to sort out first. But hopefully in the next couple of weeks!

With June complete it is once again time for our monthly update. There’s three main things to talk about: accessibility, the end of the game, and the release of V24. Accessibility: We recently noticed that a lot of players were misunderstanding game mechanics, and given the people currently playing the game are Kickstarter backers who usually know the first game well this set some alarm bells ringing at our end. As a result we've added a lot more information to the game this month, which should help experienced players easily understand how the different mechanics are interacting and should (hopefully) make the game much less intimidating for new players. The first element of this is a "hit calculation" panel in the tactical combat, which explains exactly how the hit chance of a shot is calculated (see above). This is a relatively simple change that makes it much easier to understand the ground combat, as it previously wasn't always obvious what you could do to improve the hit chance of a shot. The second improvement is to the Xenopedia (research) reports, which now show the stats of the corresponding alien / UFO / aircraft / piece of equipment / etc. To make things even clearer, we've also added in a section for "abilities" that allows us to explain any unique properties - e.g. the basic Sebillian aliens have the "Regeneration: 20" and "Scaled Hide: 5" abilities and hovering over either of these displays a tooltip that explains exactly what those abilities do and how they work. The result is a clear summary of what each thing in the game does. Importantly, this does not require the player to read the wall of text that comes with each research report - although lots of players like reading the lore, I suspect there's also a lot who would rather not have to! As a final improvement here, we're also working on making the Xenopedia accessible in the tactical combat via the Esc menu! Next, we’ve added mission briefings at the start of tactical missions that make it clear what the objectives and any special rules / alternate win conditions are. Previously this wasn't required because almost every mission boiled down to "kill all the aliens" but now we've started adding more mission variety via more complex objectives it is definitely needed - we were finding a lot of people were getting confused on the non-standard missions. Lastly, we’ve re-enabled the loading screen tips and added quite a few new tips. These are surprisingly useful to communicate minor gameplay or usability features that even some experienced players are not aware of. What comes next on usability? The two main things we're currently planning out are the tutorial and little pop-up notifications that explain mechanics to players as they play (e.g. you can right-click on a door from an adjacent tile to open it, etc). I'm hopeful the game will be fairly easy to learn and play once those systems are done, given our tooltips are already in a reasonably good state! Operation Endgame: We've been working on the final mission of the game for a while now. Last month I blocked out the maps and we did the fundamental code required to support two missions back-to-back. This month I was doing proper gameplay testing on the mission which has led to a lot of bugs being fixed and quite a few amendments to the levels and the balancing. Anyway, it's now possible to unlock the final mission and win it. However, we want to make the experience of winning a game slightly more rewarding than it was in the first Xenonauts, where the game just flashed up a couple of lines of congratulatory text and then booted you back to the menu screen. We've been implementing a campaign stats panel to show the player (e.g. "Total Aliens Killed", "Total Soldiers Lost", etc) and I'm also planning a more substantial epilogue to the game too. Build V24 / Public Release: We're hoping to release our next closed beta version towards the end of this month, likely some point during the week commencing 18th July. The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the things we're working on at the moment are some of the biggest things blocking an open beta / Early Access release (people need to be able to understand the game and win the campaign), and this is not entirely a coincidence. I'm not going to publicly announce any plans yet but we're making a concerted effort to get the game ready for sale soon. Perhaps we'll have some dates to announce next month. Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone - apologies for this update being a little late, I had a couple of things I wanted to finish up before I started telling everyone about them. The first thing to discuss is public builds, and the fact we haven't released one recently. We've been working on a couple of big systems that required a significant campaign rebalance once implemented, some systems that required UI updates, and we've also been working on the Cleaner missions that happen right at the start of the game. Anything we put out before that work was finished would have been almost unplayable. Hopefully the next public build will be coming in about two weeks - but with all these changes, I'm expecting it to need several iterations on the Experimental branch before it becomes a better gameplay experience than the most recent V22 build! The first big change we've been working on is the Armour system. For simplicity, we've now unified the armour system in the tactical combat and the air combat so Armour is a flat reduction on incoming damage (e.g. 30 damage hitting a target with 10 Armour does 20 damage). However, there's a wider variety of armour penetration and armour destruction on the various weapons in the tactical combat compared to the first Xenonauts, so the player is now presented with more decisions about the best order to use their attacks. We've added a new grenade that inflicts limited damage on units but is excellent at removing terrain and shredding armour, and we'll be experimenting with armour-piercing ammo for ballistic / Gauss weapons this month too. These armour mechanics have also been applied to the Air Combat, along with quite a few other changes. I've done another balancing pass on the air combat because Xenonauts 2 has added a new type of weapon to the air combat - the energy lance (alongside cannons, missiles and torpedoes). Previously this weapon type lacked any real individual identity and part of the rationale for the armour changes was to give all four types of weapon their own niche: Cannons are short-range, high DPS (damage per second) weapons with 40 ammo. They do low damage per shot so armour reduces their damage significantly, but they also shred armour relatively quickly. Cannons will kill most things but require you to get in close and stay there, which can be very dangerous against UFOs with powerful weapons. Missiles are long range and high damage weapons, but only have 4 ammo. They do excellent burst damage so are great at destroying unarmoured UFOs (e.g. Fighter UFOs) before they can attack you, and can also quickly kill other types of UFO if another weapon is used to strip the armour off them first. Torpedoes are long range weapons with excellent armour destruction, but only have 2 ammo and are slow and easily avoided by agile UFOs. Hitting an armoured UFO with torpedos will quickly strip away its armour and leave it vulnerable to other types of weapon. Energy lances are medium range weapons with medium DPS and good armour destruction, and 15 shots. They act somewhat like torpedoes, but trade a shorter range and a slower rate of fire for more ammunition, more versatility, and the ability to hit agile UFOs. In addition to this, there's been two other major changes to the air combat. Firstly, there is now a "deployment phase" at the start of the air combat where you can set your interceptors up anywhere around the edge of the map, allowing you to group them together or split them and approach the UFO from multiple sides. The type of tactics you want to use are likely to vary based on the type of UFO and the fire arcs of its weapons (and whether it has weapons capable of attacking multiple interceptors at once). You don't get to deploy freely if UFOs on an air superiority mission attack you, however! Secondly, I've reverted the change where interceptors are always built in squadrons of three. We're back to the original system where aircraft are built individually, and our new approach to balancing the air combat is that UFOs gain some additional HP and Armour for each additional interceptor taking part in the battle. It's still advantageous to send more interceptors into battle against a UFO, but this just gives the player more flexibility in their approach - a single well-equipped advanced interceptor can often now be just as effective as a full squadron of three more primitive interceptors (the latter was almost always better in X1). The convenient lore explanation for this is larger squadrons are more easily detected as they approach the UFO, giving it more time to power up its emergency shielding and prepare for combat. I'm aware this doesn't 100% make sense, but I think the gameplay benefits are worth it. The other significant new mechanic has been the introduction of the morale system in the tactical combat. This a similar system to the first Xenonauts but has a few improvements to make it easier to understand and interact with, and hopefully to make the alien psionic abilities feel less random. There's also now a "Focus Mind" button that allows a soldier to spend TU in order to boost their morale, which gives the player a way to defend themselves against potential morale events or psionic attacks if they want. The problem here is that our current tactical UI design has been straining under the weight of all the new mechanics and UI elements we've added since we implemented it 2-3 years ago, and having to add Armour / Morale bars and this new Focus Mind button has been the final straw. We've therefore been working on the final tactical combat UI design that brings the visuals up to final quality and properly integrates all the new stuff. This is a massive job because it's one of the most important and complex UI elements in the game, but I think we've found a layout that works well - it displays more information than the current UI does and uses less space to do it! This post is getting really long now, so I'll just mention a few more things in passing - the Cleaner missions at the start of the game are now a pre-set sequence of four missions with some unique mission objectives to mix things up a bit (as opposed to randomly generated missions that filled a meter that eventually revealed the Cleaner base) a few more screens have had a UI facelift, a few more 3d civilian models and alien armour models have been created and are waiting to be rigged, and we've created some stone ruins to add a bit of variety to our jungle maps - and I'll just leave all the smaller things out entirely. So we've been busy, and we're working on a lot of big things. Apologies for the lack of public builds but when the next one eventually arrives, I think you'll all be impressed by the progress!

As November draws to a close it's once again time for our monthly update. This month we've mostly been working on turning the experimental builds of V22 into something ready to be released on our main Steam / GOG branches. This has involved a total of 6 hotfixes, which might be a record for us! Anyway, V22 is now out. This is the first major update on our main branches since March (sorry!) and I think anyone who hasn't been playing on the Experimental branches is in for quite a treat given how much the game has changed since then. The reception to the V22 Experimental builds overall has been very positive, both in terms of comments and the pattern of play that we're seeing from users. Part of the reason that we released so many hotfixes for V22 was that many of our testers have been playing much further through their campaigns than previously, so they're encountering bugs in areas of the game towards the end that haven't yet been tested (or balanced) properly. A couple of the late-game UFOs had broken teleporters that meant you couldn't actually complete those missions, for example. It's very encouraging to see that people are already able to spend 5+ hours playing a campaign, when we as developers know we've still got a lot of improvements left to make. There haven't been too many new features added this month. The coders have been busy fixing bugs and I was off for a couple of weeks on paternity leave, so there's not been too much time. Nonetheless a few pieces of new content have arrived - a couple more research projects have been written up, some new terrain tiles have been added and more destruction states set up on existing tiles, various corpse art for the aliens has been done, and a little bit of new UI art has arrived. We've done quite a bit of work on 3D characters this month too. Now the Xenonaut models are complete, we're working on the final high-quality 3D models for the local civilians in each map. This is quite a big job as there's probably about 30 different clothing items that need to be modelled and combined in different ways to give us all the variants we need to have realistic-looking locals across the many different biomes in our game, but the progress so far is looking good. We're also starting to work on the rank / armour variants for various aliens, which we want to look a little more distinctive than they did in Xenonauts 1. We've now finished the Psyons and will be moving onto the Sebillians next. The one new code feature we spent some time on this month was trying to make controlling multiple soldiers easier in the tactical combat. We've done this by setting up Spacebar to accelerate unit movement - pressing Space while a unit is moving causes them to finish their move pretty much instanteously. Pressing Space when a unit isn't moving causes the game to mark that soldier as having finished their turn and automatically select the next nearest soldier that hasn't finished their turn (of course, you can re-select "finished" soldiers manually if you want). Once all the soldiers have been marked as finished, Space will end the turn. You can now play through a turn relatively quickly if you want, which can often be useful towards the end of a mission. That's pretty much it from me. With December including the Christmas holidays we'll be having another truncated month but with V22 done I'm hoping we can get some cool new features in for you guys to test in January!

Hello everyone - with August now finished it's time for me to write the monthly update. I know it's been a long time since our last release but we've been hard at work on Closed Beta V21 and we're planning to release it this week (hopefully in the next few days). The biggest new feature in V21 is that we've implemented the final visual style for the Main Menu / Game Settings screen, and all the related sub-panels (Settings, Load Game, Save Game, etc). We've been working on this new UI style for quite some time now, and it's nice to finally be able to put it in the game - but there's also been a lot of time an effort spent on improving the usability and general polish of the screen too. This includes everything from adding support for mass-deletion of save games to adding new UI sounds. Overall, it's a much more slick and stylish experience and it should make a much better first impression when you first boot up the game. We'll continue to roll this new UI style out to other parts of the game as development continues. We've also worked on a number of things that haven't really made it into V21, but will be arriving in V22. We've updated the early game so the war against the aliens starts a couple of months into the game, and you begin the game fighting the infiltrator faction called the Cleaners who are intent on suppressing knowledge of the alien invasion. Because the Cleaners are spread across the planet and have numerical superiority over the Xenonauts, this allows us to have mission objectives that don't make sense when you are fighting the aliens. For example, wave survival maps, VIP escort / assassination missions, extraction missions, objective capture, etc. Some of these should arrive in V22 and make the early game a bit more varied and exciting! More work has also been done on the visual side of things. The updated Xenonaut models aren't quite ready to go in the game yet but should be fine for V22, and we're now working on modelling up a series of hairstyles for them so your units are more varied and easily recognisable. Work also continues on the tactical combat environments. The final visual pass on the Western Town tiles is now mostly complete (one of the biggest environments due to the number of different buildings in it) and we'll put them in V22, after which we'll move onto some of the other environments that need some visual upgrades. There's also been some work on wall destructibility, as once a tile is visually finished we can do the final destructibility setup on it and then put it in the game as a finished asset. The wall "frill" system is designed to ensure destroyed walls have a natural-looking irregular edge (rather than the perfectly straight-edged hole you get if you just remove the wall). However, we also don't want these "frills" floating in the air if there's no adjacent wall for them to attach to, so we needed to do some work detecting whether there was a suitable wall on either side and only placing the frills if so. Anyway, the important thing is that our destruction system should now be finished, which allows us to start doing the final destruction states on all of our finished assets. We also implemented a couple of smaller tasks this month too - difficulty settings are now complete, and there's a number of options we have to customise difficulty. However I've not done this yet because I've not balanced the full campaign yet and I think tweaking difficulty levels needs to be done once I'm happy with the "standard" difficulty. The other new system is directional sound, which is intended mostly to allow us to play sounds when certain things are on screen (fire noises, the noise of engines running on vehicles, etc). Again, this is just useful for making the game feel a bit more alive. Finally, we've made a start on the soldier dialogue / barks system. This is a simple system that generates (non-interactive) text dialogue from your soldiers based on things that happen on the battlefield. As a basic example, a soldier might say "I'm hit!" if they are shot by an alien. We're hoping to implement that in its basic form next month with some test dialogue to see if it's a good addition to the game (there's potential for it to be annoying if we get it wrong), and we'll spend some time making it as varied and natural as possible. I'm hopeful that this system is going to make the combat feel a lot more reactive to your actions, but we won't know for certain until we've had a chance to test it! That's probably enough for this update now, as I need to get back to work on V21. Thanks for reading!

From what I gather, there's been a lot of talk about how armour should be handled in the game. Whether it should be ablative (HP), whether it should work like a spring (% damage reduction), or whether it should work like armour. A scifi setting can justify ablative armour, or DUNE like armour that increases defence according to the level of the threat. But when you're talking about human armour, you're talking about level III kevlar vests using level IV ceramic inserts. It makes sense for human armour to be well within our understanding and seem plausible. Otherwise, what makes the alien scifi armour special, if you start with inertial dampeners or pseudo-magical armour? % Based Armour The issue with % based armours is they feel downright magical, and that any improvement in armour has massive effect, and yet is pretty darn pointless and useless at lower levels. If you have 100 HP and a 5% reduction to damage (we'll ignore types for now), there is very little it can do for you. Any hit above 105 damage will incapacitate you. If damage averages high relative to your health, those 5 points don't make a difference. And if damage averaged even as low as 1 HP of damage, it just means it will take 105 hits to kill you, instead of 100 hits. Meanwhile, if you make it 80%, boy does it look weird. A pistol that inflicts a maximum of 60 damage now only does 12, shaving off 38 points, but still taking off more than a tenth of your health. A .50 cal rifle of 500 max damage is reduced to 100, shaving off 400 points. So, with any damage variance, you can quite easily survive a shot from an anti material rifle, yet can be killed by 9 pistol shots. Balancing % based armour is also really annoying, and it's the same work as balancing straight-damage armour. Ablative Armour Chris covered one of the points against this in the past, HP-based armour. Skilled players make good use of cover, so rarely get shot. Ablative armour is also basically a free hit, which allows you to perform suicidal tactics. If you know you can take three hits before dying, then you might as well act like a maniac until you get hit at least once. You can then rotate other troops in with full armour, until everyone has had a turn playing Rambo. This might be interesting for an action game, but for a tactics game it's just a droll sort of meta game strategy which makes you feel totally secure while fighting 'horrifying' aliens. It also has the issue of turning everyone into MMORPG style bullet sponges, as the game progresses. If you have an armour upgrade, of course it will give you more HP. Whereas before gunfire might've been dangerous and intimidating, it becomes laughable. The suicidal tactics I mentioned become the obvious strategy, as there's no reason to fear Reaction Fire as you rush through the open. To get things back on track, you add in guns with massively more damage, fixing the armour and undoing what it did. Soon, you all wear increasingly bigger pauldrons and use sillier looking axes, until you look like this. The weapons at the start of the game become toys, and you enter an epic league beyond human interest. Balancing ablative armour isn't really hard, it is just pointless. It's great for padding out recent games by turning them into mind-numbingly boring RPGs, that sell XP boosters so you can get them over with faster. Real Armour Real armour has some of the qualities of the above. Like the Ablative, you can try to tank some hits, and play things more riskily. And it is risky, Since like % armour it is possible to be killed by enough pistol shots, so long as one of them goes through your visor. You can't ignore tactics, you still want to use cover and avoid fire, in case your armour fails you. Yet you still get that feeling of power, from wearing armour that lets you shrug off attacks that would surely kill your unarmoured allies. Still, you never shake the feeling of dread, of when an enemy sends a plasma bolt your way. There's not a lot to say about genuine armour... because there isn't anything wrong with it. Straight-damage armour serves its purpose, and it does it well; even if it does it without the fanfare and flashy numbers of modern games. Balancing this isn't as easy as Ablative armour, where you can just pick whatever numbers you feel like, but it is straight forward. Armour is built to withstand certain levels of gunfire, and weapons are designed to pierce that armour, each piece of equipment has its class and its uses in the tactical meta. Additional details: Below are some additional ideas and details for the handling of armour.

You're saying this as if an improved Xenonauts is a bad thing and it has to be something completely different.

I have to say this shows why Goldhawk is an amazing studio. There's a real willingness to try new ideas, but without necessarily committing to them - you can admit when something simply doesn't work. And offering refunds to people who specifically wanted now-changed features is very admirable and honest. On the gameplay front, while I liked the bold ideas behind the "shadow war" on the Geoscape and all that, I'm also really pleased with where the game is headed now. X1 is one of my favourite games, and I'm definitely in the camp that will be pretty happy with an improved X1. While the strategy layer is currently an almost exact copy of X1, I'm very happy about the improved tactical layer. There's a bunch of really small improvements but it adds up, and the boxy destructible UFOs are my favourite feature.

We're probably overdue another development update, so here's a quick post letting everyone know what we've been working on recently. Quite a bit to talk about actually! Firstly, a public service announcement - we're going to be ending the Xsolla pre-orders on our site on August 29th. Anyone who has an Xsolla pre-order at that point will then be sent an email asking their preference for a Steam key or a GOG key, which will be sent to them at the end of September (non-responders get a Steam key). We're doing this partially because Xsolla is proving a pain to maintain relative to Steam / GOG, and partially because we want to build up a backlog of interested customers prior to our Early Access launch. We're still not completely sure when Early Access is going to happen. The game is continuing to progress but I'm sure most of our beta testers would agree the game isn't ready for primetime yet; we're just going to keep adding things and fixing things until it is. The first thing we're working on right now is implementing the remaining missing or broken parts of the game - e.g. night missions, base defence missions, multiple dropship support, updgradeable dropships, further expansion of the air combat, etc. Switching back to the classic X1 base mechanics has been quite a bit of work but the job is largely done, we're now just at the stage where we're updating the other systems that have changed as a result of this - e.g. we've had to update the Aircraft systems now they are stationed in actual bases and need to appear in Hangar base buildings, and need to support construction to them and relocation between them. The second thing we're working on is overall usability and game balance. Over the past month or so we've been regularly talking about balance issues with the community and making adjustments, but we've also been fixing various gameplay bugs and design issues (such as suppression not functioning correctly, TU values being flat rather than %s, etc). We've nearly finished the tooltip system, too, which should make the game far easier to understand than it currently is ... right now there's not even a way to view the stats of a piece of equipment! Finally, we're also spending a bit of time looking at the visuals of the game. In the ground combat we've switched to genuine isometic / orthographic camera rather than a perspective one trying to mimic it, which makes the battlefield a bit easier to read. On the strategy layer I'm looking at doing a pass on the UI to clean it up a bit, removing a bit of the visual clutter and probably moving to a visually similar but more modern font that renders more cleanly (and supports lowercase letters and special characters). The visuals of the game are a lower priority right now than finishing off the game mechanics, but the issue is on our radar and we are slowly improving things. So, where does that leave us? I'm not exactly sure when Closed Beta V7 wil be due, as we first need to work through all the bugs / changes forced by the base update. I've also got another quite significant upgrade planned for the air combat that shifts the combat from a 1D grid to a 2D gride with "proper" movement. I'm guessing V7 is likely to arrive towards the end of this month, so we may release a (highly) experimental build in the interim that has a semi-broken strategy layer but will let us test some of the updated ground combat mechanics / balance changes. Anyway, thanks for reading - we'll keep you guys informed about our plans as they progress!

By the end of this month everyone who backed the Xenonauts-2 Kickstarter will have their Steam / GOG keys and going exclusive with Epic wouldn't involve taking them away, so using that logic I'm assuming you wouldn't actually mind us signing an Epic exclusive deal? Everyone would have got what they paid for and no promises to backers would have been broken ... but in reality I think there'd still be a big backlash if we did so. I personally find the whole Epic Store debate quite interesting. In principle I like the idea of Steam having more competition, because whilst overall they've been a huge boon to independent developers, they represent about 90% of our sales and yet our only contact with them is one guy who probably replies to our emails less than half the time. Having a competitor to keep them on their toes and make them more responsive to what users and devs want from them can only be a good thing - but then having games be exclusive to just one platform is kinda annoying as a consumer (although Battle.net / Origin / UPlay / whatever have been doing that for a long time so it's hardly a new phenomenon). Anyway, I suspect Snapshot were offered more than enough money to make the backlash they are facing worthwhile. I think it's a very dangerous thing to break promises to your backers and I can certainly see why people are angry, but everyone has their price and if there was enough money on the table then I could also see how that would be tempting for the dev team.

I don't think we'd be given the chance to have that kind of deal, even if we wanted it - we're not as sexy a game as Phoenix Point, who have already signed a lot of deals with various parties for a lot more money than we have. So I doubt there's any risk of us ever becoming an Epic exclusive!

Hello everyone - hope you all had a good Easter! It's time for our monthly update on the progress we've made on Xenonauts 2. 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!

The "access lift" upkeep is actually the representation of the core cost for the base itself. That's why it costs so much. You can think of it as the cost to maintain the lift, ventilation, surface access entrance ways/buildings, surface security etc. Then the cost as a comparison makes more sense.

Hi all, To help me with Modding for Xenonauts 2 I've created a Mod Loader based on a forum post by asdfcyber (https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/topic/28131-first-v25-modding-impressions/#comment-192760) It uses mono.cecil to patch the Assembly-CSharp.dll and inject code that loads mods from a folder of your choosing. Essentially you run the Mod Loader exe and it'll inject the Mod Loader code if needed and then starts Xenonauts 2. It will then call a LoadMods method in the Xenonauts.XenonautsMain constructor. The repo also contains an example mod that shows how to override existing methods using Harmony (https://github.com/pardeike/Harmony) and how to format the mod so that the Mod Loader can detect it. The repo can be found here: https://github.com/38Simulated/XenonautsModding Not sure if there are that many people out there looking into modding the game, but I thought I'd post something just in case it was of any use to anyone.

I love base defense missions - in theory at least. They are tough, tense and offer nice variation between offense oriented missions. However, current X2 base defense missions are somewhat dull and one note assaults where the bulk of the conflict is often resolved in one huge, non tactical firefight in on one or two of the hangars. Here's few thoughts to improve them: Add a command room to defend like in X1 Aliens should have other objectives than to just kill all Xenonaut units like destroy rooms to disable them so the player needs to repair them later, assault command room for direct loss, kill scientists etc. to force player to be active defending them. Aliens should have few free turns at the start to better spread out. AI improvements needed of course. Room design is a bit dull and repetitive. Especially with adjacency bonuses, you often have three or four identical rooms side by side which looks fake and makes gameplay boring. On geoscape, UFO's on the base attack mission should spawn later in the wave to be more of a threat and be possibly companied with air superiority UFO's. (Same with terror and base build missions which spawn too infrequently) Thoughts?

If you are going to push Cleaners to be more significant part of the game, making them come and clean UFO crash sites after certain time period would also be a nice and organic way to make player choose between night and extra cleaners and also give a tangible reason for their existence. First few cleaners could be added to crash site after 5(?) hours and a couple more after 10(?) hours. Crash sites could also be "cleaned away" from geoscape instead of player being to sell it to local forces until Cleaner HQ is finally destroyed. This kind of additional organic layer of gameplay and choise would IMO add a lot to the game.

So, just completed Build 1 and I liked it a lot! Obviously still has work to do but in great shape. So I'm going to be posting some ideas. All are free to use, I don't want any rights or credits, etc. etc. Anyway, I love research from capturing aliens. It was so fun in XCOM, it was fun in the Firaxis games, it's just fun! It's a little bit of flavor. Obviously there's the advanced medkits and regen module, and the mentarch, but here's some more ideas. Mantid - Compound Eye Module Engineering project, tactical module grants 180 (or 120 or 270) degree vision. Cool, flavorful, fun. Not sure it's great, but hey that's where this should be. Secton - Squadsight Module Allows anyone with a Tactical Module to fire at anyone in LOS of another person with a tactical module without penalty. Could be hard to code, just my idea based off their ability. Alternatively, +3 accuracy if within 5 spaces of another person with a Secton upgraded module. Psion - Mesmer Grenades Small radius, cause non-robotics to stand up, lose all time units, and walk a few squares in a random direction. Reaper - Reaper Claws Absolutely deadly close range weapon. Like really super high damage. Bonus if it uses the idea at the end Servitor (requires EMP to allow capture) - Heal Beam Secondary weapon, lets vehicles carry a 3 range medkit that can heal other vehicles too. Cyberdrone - Cyberdisk Vehicle Floating/hovering version of the Mars rover. Bonus idea - Rather than unlocking everything for manufacturing, manufacturing the upgraded modules requires captured aliens. So more Stalker or Healing modules requires more captured Stalkers/Sebillians, Reaper Claws need Reapers, etc. Gives a good minigame for capturing, and makes capture stuff more enticing to bring. Anyway, great game. Want ot post more thoughts after I have more time to digest.

Hello everyone - we've reached the end of July, so it's time for our monthly development update. It's been an exciting month, with Xenonauts 2 finally launching into Early Access on July 18th. The launch has been a huge success, with the game selling over 40,000 copies in the past two weeks, and the whole development team is really grateful to anyone who supported us by buying a copy! Here's what we've been up to this month and what we have planned for the coming month! Critical Bugs & Performance Fixes: Almost all of this month has been spent fixing critical bugs like crashes or anything else that ruins the gameplay experience for players. We actually thought the game was pretty stable going into Early Access, but going from a pool of twenty to thirty regular testers to having tens of thousands of players exposed a LOT of issues we were previously unaware of. The last couple of weeks have therefore been rather intense, as we've had to patch the game numerous times to address these issues. Thankfully the worst of this should now be behind us; we released 1.28b on Friday which improved performance and has fixed the bulk of the critical bugs. Work continued over the weekend and we've now fixed the memory leak players have been encountering and also (finally) managed to find and fix the annoying bug where terrain objects would sometimes get destroyed but not visually update (leading to units being able to shoot or move through what appeared to be a solid object). Our immediate priority is to finish up the last couple of crashes we're aware of, and fix a couple more serious gameplay bugs - e.g. grenades missing when displaying 100% chance to hit. This should leave the foundations of the game in good enough shape to move on to other tasks. Loading Times: Once that is done, we'll be starting work on optimising the load times - hopefully this will happen towards the end of this week. There's not much more to say on this point beyond the fact that we're aware of the issue and we'll be working on it soon. Milestone 2: We're then planning to spend the remainder of the month working on Milestone 2. This will be the first major update for the game and it will involve changes to the campaign, which unfortunately means it will break save games (although you can continue to play your Milestone 1 campaign on the Legacy branches if you want). As the programmers have a lot of bugs and usability improvements to be working on, I'm planning to focus on the air combat balance and the pacing issues in the existing campaign for Milestone 2. This is likely to extend the playable time beyond 180 days but it will not introduce additional UFO types to the game - it's more likely that we'll be expanding the role of the Cleaners at the start of the game instead. The first Milestone 2 build will likely arrive on the Experimental branch in the next two or three weeks, where it will go through a number of iterations based on player feedback before being released onto the standard branches. Expanding the Team: Finally, the income from our Early Access launch means we can now expand the team to speed up development. The first positions we're looking to fill are that of a Level Designer and a Gameplay Programmer. If anyone is interested in applying, I've linked the job posts below: Level Design job post Gameplay Programmer job post Overall, July was a great month for the project and we've really enjoyed seeing people playing the game we've been working on for so long. We look forward to delivering more upgrades in August!

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Gameplay Changes: The intro cinematic and the game mechanic popups are now enabled at the start of each campaign, regardless of whether the tutorial is enabled or not. Cleaner SMGs and Cleaner Accelerated Rifles are now recoverable and usable (by popular demand). Xenonaut Sentry Guns can now open doors, but are unable to crush objects. TU costs for abilities are now rounded up rather than down. This fixed some odd situations where it was occasionally better to have fewer TU. Reduced the spawn rate of Cleaner anomalies at the start of the game. Key Fixes: Fixed a pathfinding crash that had been introduced in 1.26, which usually crashed during the AI turn but also could affect the player. Fixed a bug that could cause multiple popups to spawn when intercepting UFOs or sending a dropship to a tactical mission. In both cases this could cause crashes. Fixed a crash that could occur on the Soldier Recruitment panel due to a corrupted Kickstarter backer soldier. Fixed a bug where the day 180 "Content Complete" popup was not being shown, and the game loss conditions were not triggering if you lost enough regions. General Fixes: Fixed grenades / aircraft missiles not properly upgrading if you skip the Alenium project and go straight for Fusion. Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly charging TU for you to pick an item up and then put it back in the same spot. Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly forgetting to charge TU if you moved the same item multiple times. It should no longer be possible to use a jetpack to fly between rooms in the Alien Base, or to jetpack through the roof of the Dragonfly dropship. MARS vehicles now correctly display their names in the tactical combat. Disabled the day 300 Orbital Bombardment research report (which wasn't supposed to be in the game). Psyon VIP on Cleaner Cell missions no longer reports recovering both a Stunned Psyon and a Cleaner VIP if captured alive. Stalker Stealth Armour no longer shows the hair of soldiers floating inside their helmet. Dead Cyberdrones should no longer appear to be alive again after loading a save. Fixed some terrain objects in the Xenonaut base showing a bright pink error texture when destroyed. Fixed the Boreal sawmill building roofs so they correctly disappear if destroyed. Fixed typos in the strategy tutorial, Frag Grenade tooltip, and Ballistic Weapons and Fighter Datacore research text. Fixed the Engineering recruit panel having tooltips referring to scientists instead of engineers.

Yes the point blank aiming calculation could do with some work, standing next to the target with a shotgun and getting ~80% chance is just BS when in reality you couldn't miss without divine intervention... overall the current 45 degree misses etc. are kinda off putting and could be solved with a bit more refinement on the aiming calculations. And yes I also agree that kneeling down should increase accuracy, I also found it very strange that the only use for it is for cover, or in special case you can shoot over a crouched dude if the shooter is behind him and standing. Regarding that I'd like to add that not being able to shoot past teammates in adjacent squares freely regardless of stance seems kinda dumb. The squares are 1x1m or so at least, the soldiers have training, they should tell the teammate to get down etc. and not shoot before it's clear. No instead in this game they'll fire the whole burst straight at the back of the teammate standing next to them "you were in the line of fire" and not hit anything that was aimed at, after which the shot in the back character gets suppressed and kneels down out of the way.

One of my favorite moments so far playing X2, was when a farmer with a shotgun charged into a downed alien ship (a Destroyer or Cruiser I think) and managed to blow his way through the defenders and reach the command room before getting gunned down. Absolute Mad-Lad and I hope I can still see things like that in the future hahahaha! Never posted on the forum before but much love and support to you and the team for sticking through with the development of this!

Closed Beta Build V26 has now been released on Steam and GOG. Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch (unless you're part of our Steam Playtest, in which case you don't have to change branches at all!) so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here). This is a major update for the game that includes a lot of changes, both in terms of new content and updated balance. The changelog isn't comprehensive, particularly with regards to the balance changes! We're planning to start locking down the game to new features in preparation for Early Access now, and we'll be concentrating on bugfixes, adding new art / writing to the research tree, and creating some new levels. I'll also be making balance tweaks as required, but nothing transformative. Please let us know if you encounter any bugs in the game. There's quite a few known bugs in the tactical combat we're aware of but just haven't had time to fix yet, so I've provided a list of known bugs at the bottom of this thread - there's no need to report these bugs if you do see them. Summary: Campaign Difficulty Options: when you start a new campaign, you are now presented with a large number of options that show what each difficulty setting is changing. You can also change these manually to make your own custom difficulty setting if you want. VETERAN DIFFICULTY NOW DISABLES THINGS - e.g. units no longer show their HP above their heads, it costs TU to rotate while firing weapons, etc. It's therefore much more of a "classic" (and much more difficult) experience than Soldier difficulty. Updated Soldier Equip & Aircraft Screens: these two Geoscape screens have been restyled in their final look, along with all their child screens (like create new loadout etc). There's also been a significant number of usability changes on both screens. Cleaner Network: the Cleaner missions have changed, and are no longer linked to research. The Cleaner Intel Hub mission now spawns automatically about a week into the campaign, and once that is complete the Cleaner Network progress bar is shown. Once this reaches 100%, the Cleaner Base is revealed and can be attacked, which ends all Cleaner activity if successful. However at 100% all Cleaner activity also inflicts 50% reduced Panic so it's worth revealing the Base as quickly as possible even if you don't launch the mission straight away. You get +1% progress per day passively once the Cleaner Intel Hub is completed, but each Cleaner Data item recovered from the Intel Hub or the new Cleaner Cell missions will provide +2% progress each. Capturing the VIP alive at a Cleaner Cell provides +15% progress. Cleaner Cells: these are three optional missions unlocked as soon as the Intel Hub mission is completed. They are elimination missions where the objective is simply to kill the VIP and then return to your dropship, grabbing as much Cleaner Data as possible on the way. Destroying a Cell will permanently stop Cleaner activity in the two linked funding regions. Each of the three Cells has a unique buff - either the enemies have more powerful weapons, are better armoured, or are backed up by Sentry Guns. The Cleaner Base has all three of these buffs, but destroying the corresponding Cell will remove that buff from the Cleaner Base. Conversations & Text: I've added a number of character conversations in the early part of the game, and reworked some research text as the result of tech tree changes. I'll be adding more of both as we release the hotfixes for V27. Changelog - Strategy: General - the tech tree has been reworked quite heavily again. General - Autopsies and UFO datacore research projects now go straight into the Xenopedia without being displayed. This is mostly to prevent the player being spammed with too many popups after a mission. General - added a number of new buttons to the Main Menu that link to our social media channels and what will become the game's wiki (feel free to start filling this in if you want). General - Cleaner activity now comes in the form of anomalies, rather than just being a monthly popup. Early game anomalies are generally more subtle to fit the "secret war" theme. General - added the Smoke Launcher back into the MARS. General - weapons with ammo regeneration (e.g. Advanced Lasers) now display this on the tooltip. General - fixed the mission debrief "Aliens Killed" line not including captured aliens, which was confusing people. General - fixed various visual issues with the UI on 21:9 screens. Main Base - demolishing a building on the Main Base screen now lists the amount of money to be refunded. Engineering - projects that can only be built once now display "Unique" in their quantity field. Soldier Equip - the soldier category tabs now all have icons (with unique icons per dropship type), and all display the number of soldiers there. Soldier Equip - there's now an Auto-Fill Dropship button that means you don't manually need to assign soldiers to all empty slots. Soldier Equip - display the soldier HP in brackets after their name if not at full health. Soldier Equip - closing the Create New Loadout panel can now be done with Esc, and no longer creates the new loadout anyway. Soldier Equip - Armour attachments (like the Jetpack) now show the appropriate tooltip on hover over the button on Soldier Equip screen. Aircraft - on the dropship panel, right clicking any soldier in the list will remove them from the dropship. Left-clicking an empty slot will open the soldier assignment panel. Bugfix- you can no longer avoid a base defence mission entirely just by pressing Esc to close the "Your base is under attack!" popup. Bugfix- Cleaner Base mission can no longer be targetted by alien Resupply missions. Bugfix - fixed Strength modifiers not correctly updating the carrying capacity of the soldier. Bugfix - fixed the Recruit Soldier panel reversing the sort order every time you clicked a new heading or recruited a soldier. Bugfix - fixed the base defence turret damage seemingly not being randomised correctly. Bugfix - fixed the Base Defence squad not allowing you to assign soldiers to it in some circumstances. Bugfix - fixed a bug where items being transferred to a base would appear on the Soldier Equip screen, but then not be interactive. Bugfix - fixed various bugs with the Sentry Gun and its equipment. Changelog - Air Combat: Air Combat default speed is now setting 2, with setting 1 now being half speed. Air combat deployment area is now the frontal 180 degree arc of the UFO, rather than a full circle. Aircraft Armour is no longer instantly healed after combat, but is repaired back at base like HP. Bugfix - UI toggles like Retreat / Afterburners now visually toggle on correctly if you activate them via hotkey. Bugfix - missiles in air combat no longer sometimes hit their target instantly, rather than having to fly over to it. Bugfix - weapons in air combat (particularly missiles) no longer sometimes fire at the wrong target. Changelog - Tactical Combat: Combat shields have been updated to work like they did in Xenonauts 1. However, the shield on the Cyberdrone has not changed and still provides a directional Armour boost rather than a HP boost. Injured soldiers can now be sent into battle again, provided they are over 50% health. The Hidden Movement screen has been hidden by to popular request. Flashbangs no longer suppress through floors / roofs. Improved the pathfinding so it should reliably choose the optimal route to a location. The "Suppressed" label is no longer shown if the suppressing shot kills the affected unit. UFO doors now autoclose at the start of the turn before line of sight is updated, so you should no longer be given vision on enemies inside the UFO behind the closed doors. The camera is now locked during the enemy turn. If you're playing in a window, the camera should no longer move once you click onto another application. Weapons that are not loaded with ammo now display an empty ammo counter and their fire modes, so it's more obvious what the issue is. We now display an explanatory pop-up the first time a unit takes Stun Damage, falls unconscious, drops and objective item, and on the first night mission. There's now a visual indicator in the topbar for unconscious soldiers (so it's obvious they're not dead). Rotating towards a target is now allowed if a unit is berserking. The Cleaner Intel Hub mission now accounts for unconscious soldiers when deciding whether to automatically end the mission on successful completion. Moving items around in a soldier's inventory will no longer be free if the soldier is moving. Fixed an issue where a ring of tiles at the tops of cliffs would sometimes not appear revealed. UFO Power Core explosion on destruction is no longer quite so large. Inventory items destroyed by explosions no longer show an undamaged 3D model on the ground. Obstruction shading for neutral units like civilians is now in white rather than green. Added some new Portacabin tiles for the dockyard. Added destruction states for various terrain objects. Bugfix - fixed the annoying looping sound issue that could be triggered by hovering units. Thanks to everyone who helped us track that down! Bugfix - fixed a bug where Xenonauts outside the evacuation area could survive a mission where they were left behind. Bugfix - the Battleship UFO's hull should no longer be transparent in some circumstances. Known Bugs (which you don't need to report if encountered): There's a known memory leak in the game, which means you'll need to restart the game every couple of hours to avoid performance issues. Grenades can sometimes hit the edges of cliffs / roofs / shipping containers even when showing 100% hit chance. UFO interior is occasionally revealed in the shroud on night missions. Soldiers often contort / rotate strangely when firing weapons at very short range. The radar rings can disappear entirely when placing a new base if you scroll the Geoscape too far left or right. Blood puddles are not being hidden when you change camera level. It's not possible to crush a prop using the MARS by moving onto it, you instead have to move through it onto a free tile on the other side. The currently selected soldier will remain selected even if you end the turn and then they are killed during the alien turn. Reloading a weapon will re-order the weapon fire modes in the UI.

This is a personal design choice of course but I really disagree with this one. Map variety (the lack thereof) was one of the biggest issues in X1 as originally released. It's a major issue in X2 now, even though more maps will surely come. But even now in X2 (and I haven't played that much), I know what the entire map is like on turn 1. Oh, terror mission and I walk out in front of a gas station? Okay, that's the one with a restaurant on the next block and the roof of the grocery store that offers great firing lines. Woods map with one car in front and a workshop to the right of the dropship? That's the lumber yard map, trains up in the corner provide good cover and another workshop building on the opposite end is tricky to clear. X1 was the same initially, I knew the farm and industrial maps like the back of my hand. The problem with hand-crafted maps is that they take a lot of time to create and you need many to get the replay value up. Xcom-style games are very replayable but that replayability requires map variety. And it's not easily addressed by adding another two maps per biome, you need an extra dozen maps per biome to make any difference. To me, the possibility of "every building is an office" sounds great! Why couldn't I have one fight in a dense office tower district? I would consider the solution that X:CE adopted. In X:CE, there are the base game maps, the wonderful community-created static maps, but also random (actually procedural) maps. The key being, random maps are only picked when there are no other maps to choose from, there's also a repeat-tracking system (it's actually a bit probabilistic IIRC but that's details). With that, map repetition is not a thing in X:CE, you're very unlikely to encounter any repeats within a single campaign. Procedural forest/desert/arctic maps work wonderfully. Yes, the procedural maps can suffer from illogical placement in urban areas and it's visible with examples like a gas station with no entrance as you mention. But I find that to be a far, far lesser violation of my immersion than heading to the third terror mission in the same city block, where I blow up the same gas station again before turning to aliens in the same diner as last time. By the way, Firaxis learned this as well. Their first Xcom had static maps, which may have had a minimal degree of randomization with how cover was placed. That was consistently pointed out as one of the game's main weaknesses. Their Xcom 2 went for procedural generation, and that was very well received despite the occasional weird placement of stuff.

Hello everyone - time for our development update for March. Apologies for this being a few days late, the intention was to time the update to coincide with the release of V23 but we've found a couple of crashes that need fixing that have pushed release back. For those interested, we'll be releasing V23 on our Experimental branches at some point this week. The main thing I've been working on this month is the campaign balancing, which is always a significant undertaking given a full campaign playthrough is probably 15-20 hours long (i.e. at least two full working days). Each attempted playthough results in a number of balance changes that need to be made, bugs that need to be fixed, usability changes to be made, gameplay mechanics that need to be checked out because they may not be working properly, etc. We therefore don't have many "big" features to talk about in this update but there have been a lot of smaller ones. Strategic Pressure / Orbital Bombardment: The main new change on the strategy layer is an attempt to introduce more strategic pressure. The Orbital Bomardment mechanic has made a return in a somewhat altered form, and it's now effectively a monthly performance target communicated in a slightly more thematic way. I know people have been a bit concerned about it in the past but I don't think there's much to worry about in its new form! At the start of the month Orbital Bombardment increases Panic in all regions by a certain amount (e.g. +25 Panic) that increases as the game progresses. If any region has over 100 Panic at the end of the month is surrenders and is lost to the aliens, so the player must try to generate enough Panic reduction during the month to cancel out the Panic gain. Monthly funding from a region is tied to its Panic, so success means funding goes up and failure means funding goes down. Panic reduction is achieved by defeating the alien invasion - shooting down UFOs and completing ground missions like Terror sites. These generate a local Panic reduction, but also a global reduction. The regions you are protecting best will have the lowest Panic but even undefended regions will have lower Panic if it looks like humanity is winning the war against the aliens. The gameplay effect of this is much like the monthly funding evaluations that appear in every X-Com game, but it serves to reduce the amount of damage that can be caused if UFOs spawn repeatedly in undefended regions due to simple randomness, and it also ensures that the game ends more quickly if the player was underperforming (it was always a bit silly that it took 3-4 months to lose the game in Xenonauts even if you never shoot down a single UFO or win a tactical mission). Base Defence Missions: We've spent quite a bit of time this month fixing gameplay issues to do with the Xenonaut Base Defence missions, as we've introduced a base attack on your main facility by the Cleaners to increase early-game mission variety. While this biome still looks a bit ugly (it hasn't had the visual pass yet) the gameplay is more solid. The first thing was to get the Sentry Guns set up. These are the cheap and durable vehicles are only used in base defence missions, and they had some display issues that have now been corrected and their LMGs should now be upgraded appropriately as the player progresses down the tech tree. The second thing was the spawning / deployment phase of the mission, which had apparently got broken at some point in development. The player can now deploy anywhere in their base at the start of the mission except in the rooms that the aliens have spawned into, and the alien crews are now correctly splitting into assault teams and choosing the correct type of room to spawn in. Most types of aliens spawn into Hangars as normal, but certain other types of alien (e.g. Reapers) are able to spawn in random rooms due to their ability to climb through vents or teleport. Other features: We also spent more time this month on updating various strategic UI elements to our new style, and I've got the updated graphics for the tactical combat UI sitting in front of me too so there's a chance that might make it into V23 too. The Air Combat has also had a few more updates to ensure the new formation / deployment system works properly, and we've also set up the autoresolve up to allow the player to manually fight the air battle if they don't like the result the autoresolve gives them. The protects players from the situation where the autoresolve unexpectedly destroys all your planes (usually due to low fuel). The balance here has changed a bit too. There's now four classes of weapons that have different roles - cannons, missiles, torpedoes and energy lances. These have varying ranges, ammo capacities, and damage profiles vs armour and HP. The ability of an interceptor to perform the evasive roll maneuver is now also tied to the weapons they have equipped, so while energy lances are relatively powerful weapons they also make the interceptor carrying them more vulnerable to certain enemy attacks. Finally, we've been working on the blockouts for the final mission this month too. I won't give too much away but there's a few unique rules on this mission that have required a bit of code work too. Hopefully the final mission will be playable in V24 even if the final art pass on the map probably won't happen until closer to release. This has turned into quite a long post so I'll leave it there as I need to get back to working on V23. Thanks for reading!

Heh, I guess this is karma for the sort of posts I used to make back when I was a modder What you say is true to some extent. Development on X2 has been harder and taken way longer than I expected. There’s quite a few things I’d do different if I went back in time - maybe I’d even do something else entirely with my time and money. Nonetheless, your post seems written from the perspective of a modder - someone who comes in when the game is complete. You’re working with mature tools, a mature set of game mechanics and a complete set of game assets provided by the game developer. That’s the sort of work that gets done in the final 5-10% of development, and without wanting to diminish the good work modders do, it’s a lot easier than the stuff that gets done earlier in development. You’re not dealing with any moving parts. It’s not possible to write a list of features that will be in the final game early in development, nor do the same for the final assets. Game dev is an iterative process, and the more complex and interconnected the project the harder it is to identify exactly how well any part works until you can test it. And you can’t *properly* test anything until you’ve implemented the whole game and connected all the different pieces to one another. That’s why so much gameplay iteration is happening now. Minimal code changes are required to change the armour model, and I can play and test the mechanics in a proper campaign in a way I couldn’t a year or two ago, let alone near the start of development when the game was just a few boxes on a grid. We’re doing the final civilian assets now because we know the final technical requirements for them, because we know the final lighting setup we’re using in map, which itself is tied to many things including the final method of how we handle terrain destruction, etc. Doing them earlier risks throwing away 30+ models. I don’t agree there’s been no visual improvement over X1 either. Maybe you disagree, but playing a mission on one of our finished biomes I’m personally struck by how much better it looks than the first game. Anyway, I wish the game was finished as much as anyone. I know it sucks it has taken this long. But there’s no point us coming this far and releasing something bad, and I’m sure most people will forgive us the delays if we release something good.

June is coming to a close so it's time for me to post up the monthly development summary for Xenonauts 2. This month saw the release of Closed Beta V20 on our Experimental branches, which saw further improvements to the skeleton of the game campaign and some general gameplay improvements. This month I added the tactical combat tiles for the Battleship and Harvester UFOs (the two largest types) and also added the tiles for the two advanced human dropship types, and played a campaign all the way through to Harvesters. I made quite a few balance changes along the way, and I think we now have a rough skeleton in place for the campaign. There's still a lot of fine tuning left to go but there is some basic challenge to the game and it's reasonably enjoyable to play - assuming you can look past the similarities to X1 and the obvious rough edges! The focus for the next month is the content. I've shuffled the research tree around a lot in the past two or three months, so even some of the initial research projects are "dummy" projects without text or research artwork. As I'm now reasonably happy with the shape of the research tree I'm going to start filling those in, and updating any existing research text to reflect any mechanical changes we might have made since they were written. I'll also be doing a proper pass on the tooltips and making an effort to ensure all objects, buttons and concepts are written up and accessible in the game. This will hopefully put us in a decent place to do the first stage of the open beta. Recently we've also been working on various other things that should improve the playability and usability of X2. The first thing is improvements to the AI, which is still basic but is getting steadily better. The AI in the first Xenonauts was purely dynamic so aliens would read the battlefield and choose where they wanted to position themselves based on preferences (i.e. being in cover vs out in the open, etc) whereas in X2 we've moved to a system where aliens have waypoints set around the map that designate good places for them to move to / lurk in (when a hostile unit is sighted they go into dynamic "combat" mode and ignore the waypoints). All maps are now set up with these waypoints. The effect of this is that in X2 you the alien movement should be more varied and dynamic, and you'll encounter enemies in a variety of positions (more like in classic X-Com). They might be stood in the open, or crouched behind cover, or looking out of a window with a good field of fire. In X1 they tended to run into corners and just stay there because those were the "best" locations based on their preferences. We've also been working on trying to fix the really stupid behaviours the AI makes - which usually revolve around times when there's a really obvious way for it to kill one of your soldiers but doesn't. In future builds we'll be doing further work on this, but also trying to add more advanced behaviours like allowing us to partner up aliens that have abilities that work together so they form a little squad on the battlefield. As always, we're also working on some odds and ends. The soldier medals system was largely implements a couple of years ago now but never quite finished, so we've finished that and set up the 8 medals your soldiers can earn in battle (each one gives +1 to all soldier stats). Mind Control has been rebalanced so its effectiveness drops off with range, which should make it less annoying. We've also implemented proper drag-and-drop functionality for the engineering queue and the soldier lists on the Soldier Equip / dropship screens. There's various other small usability changes too, plus further work on the tactical combat camera to ensure it tracks the action better during the alien turn and some more work on the Reapers to make the zombifying / Reaper hatching effects work better under all circumstances. In summary, I think once I've done the early-game research writing we'll be able to say that Xenonauts 2 is a playable (if unfinished) game. The standard disclaimers apply - the game needs another pass on the art (which we're working on in the background), we still need to do more to differentiate it from X1, and there's still more polish and content to be added. But the game is already quite fun to play as long as you're not expecting a finished game and it'll only improve as we continue our work on it!

As April is now almost over it's time for our monthly update. As mentioned in the last monthly update, I spent some of March and most of April working part-time as I had to deal with a death in the family. Although I returned to full time work at the beginning of this week, progress has been slower this month as a result of my absence. The coding team have mostly been working on features that didn't require my input over the last month - large "backend" tasks that need to be done at some point before release, but weren't major gameplay priorities. The first of these is the final part of the change from a single-base Geoscape to a multi-base Geoscape, which is the final separation of the base stores so that each base is pulling from its own inventory just like in the first game (previously items, soldier equipment, etc were shared globally across all bases). This is now done and bases have been fully seperated from one another, but this is quite a significant change and it's almost certainly caused quite a few bugs. The second thing was adding "nested tooltips" that contain hyperlinks to other tooltips, similar to those seen in Crusader Kings 3. It's tricky to explain this in words, but you can see a quick example of it in action in CK3 here. Basically this system allows us to simulatenously reduce information overload and increase the amount of explanatory information in the game, as you don't need to explain everything - you just display the most relevant information in each tooltip, and if a player is unfamiliar with how a particular concept within that works (e.g. they don't know exactly how Armour works) they can hover over that word and get a new tooltip that explains it in depth. Each tooltip ends up being shorter and more focused, but more overall information is available than before. The third major thing is setting the game up to support translation. This is actually a very big task, but we figured we'd tackle it now given we're going to have to write a lot of text into the tooltips. Essentially we have to find every piece of text in the game that is displayed to the player and reference it into a single giant file that can then be translated into other languages. This system is made more complex because this system also needs to combine with our planned modding system, so that new text added in mods could also be translated if needed. In terms of art, we've started work on the final set of Xenonaut 3d models and we've been working on an updated design for the alien Gun Drone. We've also been working on the final designs for the two advanced dropships (up to this point we've just been using the old X1 designs as placeholders). There's also been some work done on the 2D art for the aircraft weapons and equipment, and further work on the new strategy UI concepts we've been working on for a while now. We should be able to start putting public builds out again in May. I need to get on top of all the design work that's accumulated over the past six weeks before I start thinking about that so I'm not sure exactly when, but it shouldn't be too long!

I think @Sheepy said it best here, the random drops should be only for creating attachments to your weapons, armor upgrades, specialized weapons but nothing more than that. Most baseline weapons should only be crafted with Alenium and Alien Alloys. That will make a game session more varied and replayable as the drops are entirely random. Some more active examples: - Combat stimulants: give a soldier back 50% of his/her APs back for a 20% loss in health. Can only be crafted with Sebilian Serums. - Mind Jogger: a taser-like weapon that can cure mind control, single use only. Can only be made with a Neural Mapper. - Escape grenade: can be used with only a tiny amount of APs, let a soldier teleport to a random point on the map to escape danger. Can only be crafted with Intact Wraith Glands. - Heat bayonet: an attachment for your gun, a handy melee weapon when an enemy surprise you from a corner and you don’t have enough APs to switch to a shotgun. Can only be crafted with a Vibro Heater. - Air stabilizer: an upgrade to your Jetpack armor, allow your soldiers to shoot while hovering. Can only be crafted with Quantum Gyroscope. - Chameleon field: an upgrade to your armor, make you invisible for a single turn in a battle (I.e. cannot be shoot at by aliens in overwatch). Can only be crafted using Nanothread and a Ceasan Psychic Enhancer. This combined with regional/factional missions (to do favors for certain countries), could create a choice for the player to support certain regions based on the drops they give you as a reward and the exclusive weapons that needs those drops to be made.

This is more of a "feels over reals" kind of explanation, but bear with me. I wanted to show a match wih my modded stats, but Bandicam seems to hate X2 and will crash it without fear or remorse. It's the start of a new game. It's a wood map. You turn a solider in the chopper and spy a Psyon maybe slightly half a tile away. Perhaps 16 spaces or so. It's in the open. You take aim with a solider, aimed shot, 83% chance to ht. You hit, congrats! That's 26 damage. The Psyon returns fire. It hits, that's 55 damage, instant death. You sigh. You get some more soliders out of the chopper and a few more shots later, the Psyon who killed the first soldier is dead. It's now the alien turn. A Psyon appears. It targets a solider who isn't quite in position. The Psyon hits, does 67 points of damage. That soldier is dead. You grit your teeth. Another Psyon appears. One of your soliders takes an overwatch shot. She misses. The Psyon returns fire. A miss! The Psyon fires again. A hit. that's 59 points of damage. Instant death. At this point, you're ready to cinduct experiments on the terminal velocity of monitors vis. 3rd storey windows. Early game, every fight with a Psyon can go pear shaped very, very quickly. The impression, and please forgive my language, is that you don't fuck around with Psyons. If I know that I'm fighting Psyons, I'm carrying lots of smoke. I have my lines of exit clear. The third man (I never fght in twos against Psyons if I can help it) is always ready with smoke in case the other two morons manage to mess it up. I would rather spent all my TU and re-position my team to lure a Psyon to me than get into a shooting match with a Psyon, because I know I will loose that fight. That's all thanks to the plasma rifle. You learn to respect it very quickly, and the plasma rifle gives the Psyon character. Now, same situation. You're facing Sebillians. The Sebillian fires off a burst. One catches the solider. He takes 32 damage. You think "I can handle that". The Sebillian fires off another burst. Another shot hits, that's 25 damage. That's a kill. But it feels different. You feel like the Sebillian has spent a lot of effort trying to kill the solider, that it's been blasting away even though it's actually only spent the same amount of TU and effort that a Psyon does firing the same number of shots. You feel like you can take Sebillians in a shooting war, and you better be able to because Sebillians soak a hella lotta damage, so you have to be able to hold your ground against Sebillians. Shotguns are a vital weapon in the fight against Sebillians, and you need to be able to go over the top to get in close enough to kill a Sebillian. The mag rifle could give the Sebillian as much character as the plasma rifle gives the Psyon, ust based on how it feels to fight them. Or look at it like this. The mag rifle. As dangerous as the plasma rifle. In the hands of an enemy with 45% more health (100% more health for the Brute) who can regenerate. Seriously? I'd almost rather face Androns. I mean, I notice there are both modifiers for armor penetration and armor destruction in the weapon.json master file. Linear weapons are noted as much for their penetrative capabilities as their power. It's one of the common memes in computer games, that railguns typically can penetrate several enemies at once and/or terrain. Perhaps fiddling with armor penetration/destruction as easy numbers to alter would be of value? EDIT: For those interested in my edits, I append my currently edited files. You'll have to replace the current files with the edited ones, which means 1) make backups and 2) don't report bugs with edited files, because even though this is just number editing, editing numbers can have unforseen effects in-game. Xenonauts2Mods.zip

This has been interesting to read, but I have a question to ask. How many people here have played ALTAR Interactive's AfterX series of X-Com-like games? ALTAR Interactive tried doing many of the things that people have suggested here. In Aftershock, there was a large array of competing weapon types - projectile, laser, plasma, psi, sonic and warp, with each type being introduced later in the game. Each weapon tier was different in terms of damage, range and accuracy. They also introduced ammo types and modifications for each weapon type, and every enemy type had different resistance types to the different weapon tiers. But the takeaway from AfterX was people used projectile weapons throughout most of the game. Accuracy didn't matter. Want an accurate weapon? Make a scope and a gyrostabiliser and stick it on a rifle. Raw damage didn't matter. Put AP or explosive or Acid rounds in a projectile weapon and go for headshots (the only kind of shot) with your snipers. ALTAR did to Aftershock what usually only modders do after a game has been released but it was easy to boil down from the massive list of STUFF which weapons were the most accurate, fired the most shots and did the most damage with the appropriate mods (it was projectile weapons - the first tier that you get - all the way). In Afterlight, they dialed back the weapon types, but projectiles STILL lead the way. The ALTAR experiment over 3 games shows that trying to vary things based on key statistics doesn't work. What happens is that the weapons with the best stats bubble up from the pool and everything else is ignored. You end up with perhaps the sniper rifle from lasers, the assault rifle from projectiles, the shotgun-esque weapon from plasma etc. etc. If weapons from different tiers were intended to be the same but different, then those differences have to be radically different but not keyed to stats, as keying them to stats didn't work in the AfterX series. Furthermore, the differences in later stage tiers have to be sufficiently enticing for people for put work and time into them. Let's take.. plasma weapons, for example. A nice late-tier weapon. If a plasma weapon did as much damage as an earlier stage laser, what would set it apart? Perhaps the plasma weapon sets things on fire. cover, for example. Or people. Perhaps instead it instantly destroys terrain, so you can destroy cover quickly with a plasma weapon Perhaps all plasma bullets have a 1-tile detonation radius. Perhaps it does everything. Take lasers. Why would I put research into lasers when I have guns? Perhaps lasers are a beam rather than a bullet style of weapon, which affect every tile they cross into. Perhaps laser have infinite ammo, and overheat harming the operator. Perhaps lasers can blind enemies. Perhaps all of the above. Who knows! But for different tiers to be the same but different, extra effort would have to be put into having those tiers behave differently on the battlefield.