Chris

Thanks. Yeah, I'll update those things for the next build.

Thanks. I'll rename that button then. BTW, you can just right-click on the End Turn button if you want to skip the end turn check!

Closed Beta Build V22 has now been released on Steam and GOG. Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here). It has been five weeks since V21 came out and we've been trying to focus on polish with this build - or, at least, making the game a bit more playable in the early stages. There's several new features that have already been wholly or fully implemented (the soldier morale system, the new tactical mission types at the start of the game, etc) but I didn't want to try and introduce them into this build because there were more pressing gameplay issues to fix. If all goes well I'll be introducing them with V23. Key Highlights: New UI (Loading Screen & Geoscape Topbar): we've rolled out the final UI for the loading screen and the Geoscape topbar, which look quite a lot slicker than what we had before - however I've just realised that these don't display very well if you're not using a 1080p resolution (I'll have to look at that for the next update)! 3-Aircraft Squadrons: the air combat is always more fun when you have more than one plane, so we've set up hangars to hold up to three interceptors and made interceptor construction also to happen in squadrons of three. The game will therefore now be balanced assuming you are sending three interceptors into every air combat! Early Game: we've spent some time balancing the early game, and adding more tactical maps so there's more variety. This part of the game covers the period where the Xenonauts are transitioning from a covert organisation to one capable of fighting a war against the aliens, so for example you don't start with interceptors and have to research them while battling the Cleaners so you can be ready for the aliens when they start to appear. New Visuals / Content: the final Xenonaut 3d tactical models are now in the game, and they support different hairstyles and hair colours too. We've also continued to update some of the environment art (mostly in the Polar and Boreal biomes this time). Ten early game research projects have been written or rewritten, and eight new Raid maps have been added. Unassigned Scientists / Engineers: to stop unused scientists / engineers being such a dead weight on your finances, these staff now generate $50 each per hour when they do not have an assigned project. Effectively, they're just helping out around the base and reducing your maintenance costs. Major Changes: General - added new UI for the Loading screen and the Geoscape topbar. Strategy - scientists and engineers that have lab / workshop space available but have nothing to work on will now generate income for your organisation, rather than just doing nothing. You currently earn $50 per hour per staff member, which is enough to cover their monthly wages and still make a small profit. Strategy - hangars are now 2x2 buildings which contain either one dropship or three interceptors. Constructing an interceptor now gives you three interceptors of the same type. Strategy - if an aircraft is shot down in air combat, you can either wait for it to be replaced for free or pay a resource cost to have it replaced in a couple of days. Strategy - aircraft now use a "carry weight" system to control the equipment they can carry. This is visualised on the Aircraft screen. Strategy - 10 early game research projects have been written or revised to ensure they are consistent with the current game lore. Strategy - there's been quite a bit of strategy balancing done on the early stages of the game. Tactical - the final 3d models for all Xenonaut armours have been added to the tactical combat. Tactical - Xenonaut soldiers in the tactical combat now have a variety of available hairstyles / hair colours, so the 3d model should (mostly) match the portrait of the soldier. Tactical - new environment art has been added to the American Town biome, and to the Polar and Boreal biomes. The latter two will get more updates in the coming weeks but should already look a lot better than before. Tactical - some new art for the alien plasma weapons Tactical - added eight more Raid maps to the game, which means the Polar, Farm, Desert and Boreal biomes now have three Raid maps each instead of just one. Air Combat - added the afterburner to human aircraft. Your aircraft cannot fire weapons while using the afterburner. Air Combat - weapons can now be set to face in a direction other than forwards, and rotating weapons can be set to only rotate within certain bounds (this is mostly for use on UFOs). Air Combat - units now preserve their turn speed even when they change direction, like they did in X1. This means they feel a lot more responsive to new orders. Minor Changes: Strategy - added an indication when engineering progress has been stopped due to lack of storage space Strategy - UFOs that don't generate crash sites now produce wreckage on the Geoscape which awards items to the player 24 hours later. Strategy - "Building constructed" popup now lists the base at which the building was constructed Strategy - the biome name on the mission information panels now shows the name formatted correctly Strategy - recovered items (including when your dropship is shot down) now tell the player what items are recovered Tactical - some visual updates to the Valkyrie dropship ground combat tiles just to tidy it up a bit. Bugfixes: Fixed an issue where no aliens spawn after day 149. Fixed projects that have another project (research or engineering) as a requirement showing an unintelligible file path rather than the project name. Fixed all UFOs having a $150k crash site airstrike reward, rather than it increasing with UFO size. As always, please let us know if you encounter any bugs by posting them up on the Bug Reporting subforums, as we'll release a hotfix if necessary.

Hello everyone - September is now over and it's time for another update. We released V21 earlier this month with a number of cool updates and are planning to release V22 in the next week or two. Progress this month has been slower than normal, as two important members of the team were on holiday for a couple of weeks and other members of the team ended up getting ill (sadly I was in the latter group rather than the former!), but nevertheless we have made some improvements. As well as doing a number of bugfixes on V21 after its release, we have mostly been working on the strategy balancing / air combat and some of the new art assets for the tactical combat. Improved Tactical Art: Firstly, the new art. We've done a texture pass on the entire Western Town biome now, which is one of of the biomes used in Terror Missions. This had some very inconsistent visuals before but it's now looking much neater and more detailed in general, and we're now working on the final damaged / destroyed states for all of these tiles. Next up is the Boreal biome, which has already seen a lot work done to the sawmill building. Hopefully both biomes will be ready for the release of V22. We're also in the process of hooking up those final Xenonaut 3d models. They're now all rigged and have the various hair models set up, but we need to do a final bit of code work to ensure that soldiers display the correct ethnicity / hairstyle / hair colour in the tactical missions to match the portrait of that soldier. Again, hopefully this will be done in time for V22. Strategy / Air Combat: Next, the strategy balancing. I spent several days doing this, which involves multiple campaign playthroughs of the game where I manually fight all the air combat battles but automatically win all of the tactical battles (because that way a campaign only takes an hour or two, rather than an entire day). During this time I was experimenting with various ways of making the air combat more interesting, and I've settled on a number of changes. The first is that interceptors are now built in squadrons of three, which all share a single 2x2 Hangar (dropships are build individually and also fill a 2x2 Hangar). Once constructed, these interceptors are controlled as normal so it's possible to send a squadron out with fewer than three aircraft, or even send out a squadron with a mix of different interceptor types. If an interceptor is shot down, you can either wait for it to be replaced automatically as normal or you can pay a certain amount of cash (plus alloys / alenium in the case of advanced interceptors) to replace it within a few days. I've made this change because 1v1 air combats are much less interesting than 3v3 battles, and it's easier to balance the air combat if you know the player can always send 3 interceptors to fight a UFO squadron if they want. It also makes it faster when building a new base - in X1, building a base in the early game usually forces the player to build at least three planes and possibly more if you want a mix of capabilities (e.g. you might want 3 Condors and 2 Foxhounds, which is 5 interceptors to build). Under the new system you just build a single squadron, or perhaps two if you want a mix of capabilities. The second major change is to give the aircraft a wider selection of equipment, but also give them a maximum weight capacity. In X1 if you wanted an aircraft with heavy torpedoes, you had to build an entirely aircraft capable of carrying them. In X2, the starting interceptors are actually capable of carrying heavy torpedoes, but they need to unequip their cannons and light missiles to do so. The advantage of this is that it gives the player more options to react to a changing situation - if alien capital ships start appearing, you can rearm your existing aircraft rather than having to build an entirely new set of interceptors. It just makes the strategy layer a bit more flexible than before. The actual air combat has seen a few additions, too. The combat now supports rotating weapons with limited travel, which means we can have side-firing weapons or turrets that track your aircraft. The Afterburner ability from X1 has also been added to all the interceptors. Other Systems: We also added a couple more systems to the strategy layer. The first is a solution to the problem of your engineers or scientists sometimes not having anything to do: now any idle engineers or scientists will automatically generate income for the player at a rate high enough to pay their wages and still generate a small profit (it's assumed they're helping out with maintenance work you would normally have to pay for, etc). This is a lot like the ability to manufacture and sell items for profit in classic X-Com, except it requires less micromanagement and is a bit more intuitive for new players. The effect of this is just to smooth out the difficulty curve on the strategy layer a bit, as having idle staff could previously be financially crippling. There's also been more work done on the tactical combat morale system. We need to do a bit more work to get the actual panic / berserk / etc effects working correctly, but there's now a proper morale system like there was in Xenonauts 1 and the original X-Com. This also ties into the Stress system - when we reactivate this system, soldiers will suffer Stress based on what has happened to them in combat and their Bravery score rather than just suffering a flat Stress penalty for going on a mission like they did previously. This is getting to be quite a long post now so I'll leave it there. The team is back to full strength next week and we'll start planning for the V22 release as soon as that happens!

Thanks! We'll take a look tomorrow and hopefully we'll be able to figure out what's happening based on that data.

It's hard to say exactly. My suspicion is that it's just that even 5-6 phrases is likely to repeat very quickly and start to get annoying if it's for a common action like movement or killing an enemy, but there's probably quite a few "pools" of those phrases. Maybe in some games every character has 5-6 unique kill phrases and so there's a total of 50+ in the game, but lots of your kills come from a particular character? You'd end up with a lot of repetition at that point. Also, yeah, you probably bump up against the fact there's only a limited number of ways you can say "Yes Commander, I will move to the desired location" or whatever. That said, if you think about games with good or memorable sound design, for me it doesn't necessarily feel like those games always had loads of variation. The dialogue units had in something like Starcraft for example - it's not like each unit had loads of different lines so much as they just had lots of character. I'm sure a game like Company of Heroes (or any other Relic game) also repeated plenty of dialogue but it was good stuff and I never got sick of hearing it. As you say, the audio is really meant to be a background thing - I think it's better to stay on the side of being generic rather than adding dialogue that is distracting and immersion breaking.

Thanks. We looked into your file and were able to identify the issue, but we need a little more info to fix it (see post linked below). If you've not played the game much since this crash happened, can you attach the old log files shown in the linked thread? They might have the data we need in them. If you have then don't worry about it, but if you see the bug again then let us know!

Hi - thanks. Yeah, that's a known bug and it's actually one we need some help fixing, I've made a post on it here: It'd be great if you could read this thread as well, because bug reports are much more useful if you provide logs / saves

Hi everyone. There's a known crash that's still in V21.2 that was reported by at least a couple of users in V21.1 which we're having some difficulty fixing. The issue causes the game to crash at the end of the ground combat mission and it will occur whether you win or lose. The reason why this crash is happening is because there is an "orphaned" alien projectile in the map somewhere. Projectiles are usually removed a few seconds after they are fired, but these projectiles are somehow surviving and have also become corrupted (losing all the data they carry about who fired them, etc) and are then written into the save game. The game will always crash on mission completion once this happens. The save games that were provided in the last hotfix allowed us to figure out what was happening, but although we can see the broken projectiles in the save game we don't yet know how they became broken. We therefore need access to the combat logs that go back right to the start of the mission. If this bug affects you, please post up the save and logs as normal but also include the older logs from the game too. These are the files called "output.log.1" etc in the same directory (see screenshot). Just stick them in a zip file and include them along with everything else. That should hopefully give us what we need to get this issue fixed. Thanks!

This hotfix addreses some more issues in Beta Build V21 that weren't fixed in the last hotfix. Again, you'll need to be on the Experimental Branch to access the build. Fixed a tactical combat crash that could occur in lots of different circumstances (from throwing a grenade, to moving a MARS, to during the alien turn). It was a problem with the game trying to cache sounds that would then become corrupted, so it could occur at random at any point after a number of sounds had been played - likely this bug caused most of the crashes in the previous version! Fixed a strategy issue where the game could get corrupted, preventing you from doing things like placing buildings. This fix is also likely to solve a lot of different issues. Quickload now works again (just press F9). Unassigned soldiers are now correctly displayed on the Soldier Equip screen if there is no dropship at the base. Vehicle engine noises and fire sounds are now controlled by the Ambient slider rather than the Sound Effects slider. Xenopedia screen title text is no longer misaligned. Please let us know if you encounter any further issues with V21 as we will continue to make additional fixes as required.

Thanks. Hmm, yes, that's an interesting point. I'll have a chat to the team about it.

Thanks. So just to clarify, the bug you experienced was that during a mission all your soldiers were killed and the mission didn't end? Or you killed all enemies and the mission didn't end?

Thanks, I can reproduce that from this save now. We'll get that hotfixed!

Thanks for the reports and logs guys!

Thanks, this save game and screenshot is great. We can reproduce the problem and should be able to hotfix it now!