Chris

Sorry for the slow reply. Are there major gamebreaking bugs (rather than missing content) that still need to be fixed in V13.2? I must admit I've been knee-deep in the new map stuff so I've not really been paying too much attention. I'm not entirely sure when the next major build is coming yet, as the maps are undergoing major surgery at the moment and we've made some big changes that should make the game much better but are gonna take a bit of time to work through the system. Realistically I guess about 4 weeks from now we should hopefully have enough assets and maps to put out a new release with the new UFOs and visuals?

This is the second hotfix for Beta Build V13, fixing a several more important bugs. You'll need to be on the Experimental Branch to access the build. Changelog: Fixed a crash bug where if you saved and then loaded a ground combat mission the game would crash at the end of the mission. Fixed a crash bug where certain desert maps would crash at the end of the mission. Fixed a bug where the upgrade projects were not working for aircraft or for the MARS. Fixed a bug where the MARS rocket weapon fire costs were absolute values, not relative values. This meant if you equipped the heavy armour the weapon was too expensive to fire. Equipping heavy armour on an aircraft increases the max HP of the aircraft, but you now need to repair up to that new max HP. This means it is no longer possible to heal aircraft by swapping between normal and heavy armour and back again. Sell price of the MARS is now $50k instead of $10k. Please let us know if you encounter any further issues with V13, as we will make further hotfix branches if necessary.

Perfect, thanks. I'll take a look at that and see if I can figure out what's going on.

Thanks. Did you unlock the research / engineering project that allows the unlocking of Laser Weapons V2 by any chance? Because the upgrade process basically deletes all the old laser weapons and their projects and then recreates new ones that give you the upgraded weapons instead, so maybe that's part of the issue?

Oh yeah - there's meant to be goodies. But I'm not sure all the research etc that's meant to be unlocked is ready to go, so I'll fix that in the next big build rather than in this hotfix.

Thanks. We've fixed a few bugs as a result of this - the MARS sell value, the MARS rocket launcher using absolute fire costs rather than % TU fire costs, and the aircraft items not unlocking correctly. One thing I'd like a bit more info on if possible is 4) about the disappearing laser rifles and shotguns. If you have any more info on when that occurs that'd be great. If not then it's not a big problem - I'm sure I'll encouter it when I start doing my balancing playthroughs, but it'd be good to have some idea where to look.

If it's based on the blue psyons specifically I've probably screwed up the loadout or the corpse items dropped by that unit - but the logs suggest it's actually linked to the map (could be a false positive). But we'll look into it - hopefully that in-mission save will help us track it down if not. Thanks.

Thanks. This stuff isn't working for me either, I guess we've somehow broken the upgrade logic. We'll get it fixed.

Hi everyone - it's only been three weeks since my last update, but the plan is for me to do these updates here on the forums on a monthly basis now. That will then allow Paul to edit them into something a bit more appropriate for a wider audience (i.e. less detailed, more art) and post them everywhere else. Development Progress: Over the last three weeks we've been working on a whole bunch of different things. The biggest news was probably the release of Closed Beta V13 on our Experimental branch, which is our first new build in quite a while. Unsurprisingly the build was kinda buggy and has already had one hotfix, but we'll be releasing at least one more hotfix as there's still several more serious bugs that have been reported. However it's always good to have people testing the game and finding the problems. Personally I've spent a fair bit of my time on the writing. I've completed twenty three of the research reports over the past six weeks or so, and there's a number more that are half-finished or were written previously and just need a little updating to mesh with the new setting. I feel like I've already done most of the hard work in terms of creating an internally consistent setting for the game, and now I'm just slotting things into it - which means the writing is going faster than when I was having to think long and hard about how to answer all the "big questions" in a logical way. A couple of these projects are starting lore projects that are already unlocked in the Xenopedia at the start of the game, and don't pop-up on the Geoscape (explaining the updated Iceland Incident story, plus the details on why your starting interceptor is so much more effective against alien technology than other aircraft). Anyway, this has required a few simple code changes, and in the next month we're also planning to spend a bit more time on the Xenopedia in general. At the moment the UI styling is inconsistent and every project is just added into a big unsorted list, whereas it should be set up so that each project goes under a category heading that is expandable / collapsible. The other major area we've been targeting are the ground missions, but the progress here has been a bit slower. We're continuing to work on the new art style and hopefully soon we'll have the first set of maps built with these new tiles. I suspect most people will consider the new art a visual improvement, but even if not the new style is undeniably more restful on the eyes - it's much easier to see the important things on the battlefield (the aliens and the cover objects). For all of its faults, one of the strong points of the terrain art in X1 was that it was relatively clean and clear. Anyway, I'll probably be showing some of this new art off in the next update. We've also continued to work on the code for the ground combat. Getting the hull-hiding system for the UFOs working properly continues to be a pain, but it's mostly working now. The night missions are largely functional but need a couple of fixes and we still need to add minor details like the headlights to the vehicles, etc. If we have time we also want to spend some time looking into fixing a few of the rough edges in the ground comabt - the camera jerking around and not showing the action during the alien turn and the fact that units take a couple of seconds to play their death animation after suffering lethal damage are two things that spring to mind. Finally, we've been spending time on the preparations for mod support. Making something moddable requires us to save the data in editable text files rather than having it hardcoded in the game's code, and since our last update we've moved the base buildings out into text files. We're also in the process of moving all the unit loadouts, UFO crews and UFO missions into text files too. Once this is done pretty much everything in the game will (theoretically) editable by modders - but in practice, modding the files is going to be hard without a mod editor tool to help you. We've therefore also been chatting to Solver about community involvement in the mod tools, because the tools we use are embedded in Unity and aren't exactly user-friendly. Goldhawk is planning to do a bit of work to prepare the code interface so external coders are able to build tools that can easily read and write to these text data files (and eventually hook into our mod management system), and then we'll let the community coders have a look at it and see if they're able to build anything useful on those foundations. There's no guarantee that anything will come of this, but I think it's definitely an opportunity worth exploring! Early Access plans: We're still not ready to set a formal Early Access date but our plans are progressing. We've decided to target an "Early Access build" that is time-limited to only contain the first three months or so of the campaign, which in X1 terms will take you roughly up to Landing Ships. The "full" builds will be accessible on a seperate branch for anyone that wants to play the whole game, but the default build people encounter when they buy the Early Access for the game will be this time-limited build. The reason for this is that it's much easier to get the content in place the first third of the game than it is to do it for the whole game. For Early Access we want to give most players a quick taste of the game that makes them confident that they've bought a game that they will enjoy once released, but doesn't allow them to accidentally play into the sections of the game that contain missing content or have balance issues that might spoil the game for them (or even just to burn through all the content before the game is ready to properly play). Anyone that wants to test the full game can just switch branches, but they'll hopefully do so in the knowledge that they're going to experience much less polished content. I'll be announcing an Early Access date for the game once I've finished writing all the research reports that appear in this part of the game and also created three maps per biome for each of the UFOs / ground missions in that section of the game (these maps will need to include the new UFO style and support night missions). At that point, we'll announce a date 2-3 months in the future and frantically start polishing the game to make the Early Access build as enjoyable as possible. The big unknown is still the maps right now. We're going to need another couple of weeks for the new art to solidify before we can make a decision on how best to move forwards with them, unfortunately. Anyway, hopefully that wall of text gives you guys a fairly clear idea of what we're working on at the moment!

Thanks, we'll take a look at this and try to hotfix it!

Yeah, I broadly agree - although capturing a Sebillian alive so you can extract all its blood more efficiently is a bit dark :P That said there's only so many items that can be created. Adding a whole new screen where you can manage what happens to each alien individually and chop them up into different parts is a nice idea but I think is turning a relatively simple system into something much more complex, and really I'm not sure there's going to be THAT many different types of armour that the game can support. To be honest, it's probably already going to be a struggle to think up a useful item that can be extracted from every type of dead alien!

Please send Xsolla customer support an email, as they should be the ones handling the migration - if they don't respond in a week, send me an email at the address in my signature below and I'll take a look.

If it does, please post up the logs or a save so we can try to fix it!

Thanks for these reports. We'll have a look into why the armour isn't working properly, as I'm also seeing those problems!

This is the first hotfix for Beta Build V13, fixing a few bugs including those to do with signal uplinks. You'll need to be on the Experimental Branch to access the build. Changelog: The game should no longer crash when a signal uplink mission / aerial terror site is failed. UFOs will no longer incorrectly attack every signal uplink mission you construct. Instead, a mission will periodically spawn that will attack one of your signal uplinks. Aircraft armour now functions correctly again. Fixed a crash if you threw a gas grenade into a region that already contained poisonous gas (i.e. anywhere in the Icelandic Outpost map). Autocomplete researches like autopsies and UFO datacores no longer force a pop-up aftwards that says "no new research unlocked". Added research autopsy text for the Wraith, Reaper, Psyon Engineer and Sebillian Brute. Psyon Engineers now don't spawn until the second UFO type, and Sebillian Brutes don't spawn until the third UFO type. Corpse items and their research triggers have been rationalised a bit; there's now only one corpse item for each size of Pyson on the strategy layer. Fixed an issue with the Orbital Bombardment research art being incorrectly sized for the window. Please let us know if you encounter any further issues with V13, as I suspect there are plenty more bugs in there - I've just made these fixes because they were preventing a lot of players from getting very far into the game!