Chris

Hello everyone - hope you all have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year in whatever form you may celebrate it! Although progress on the project has been a little slower than we would have liked over the past month or so, things are still moving forward. The biggest roadblock for recent releases has been this bug on the Experimental branches where the game sometimes freezes up on the loading screen when you try to start a new game. This is obviously quite a serious bug but it has proved rather difficult to track down - and it's now looking like it may be an issue with Unity rather than Xenonauts 2 (it's an issue that occurs when we try to quickly load multiple Asset Bundles at the same time). We're still considering our next move; it's not an easy problem to solve. I've spent most of my time working on writing the research projects in the game, including the plot-related research that drive the game forward. Unfortunately this is something that requires a lot of focus; I can't write effectively if I'm being distracted every ten minutes (this is why I've not spent much time on the forums recently). I've come up with acceptable explanations for fundamental things like Alien Alloys and Alenium, and some of the key alien technologies - if all goes well the next build the early stages of the game will have the first draft of their research text in place rather than just blank space or bullet points! At the same time I've been doing basic testing of the tech tree with regards to the strategy layer. This involves playing the game but using the developer cheats to just auto-win every ground combat without playing it, so it primarily ensures that all the UFOs are spawning correctly and dropping the correct items that unlock the appropriate research which itself unlocks all the correct items and aircraft at the appropriate time. However as I am playing the strategy layer "properly" it has exposed quite a few issues on the Geoscape and in the Air Combat that I've now fixed, e.g. it was previously almost impossible to get beyond the point where Destroyers began appearing (they were just instakilling all your planes at great range), and there were still some missions floating about where powerful aliens were appearing far earlier than they should, etc. The rest of the team have been working on several features that are mostly complete but not yet functional, the biggest two being the Modular Armour system and the support for vehicles (the MARS / ARES one-tile vehicles). The coders responsible for these features are now off on their holidays but both features have already been fully implemented in terms of game logic, and we're now just at the stage where we're fixing bugs and usability problems with them. It's impossible to know how long this process will take with any given feature, so both systems might be in the game and ready to play with a couple of days after we return to work ... or we might still be battling through the bugs a couple of weeks later. Let's hope it's the former! The other thing we've mostly completed is setting up all the Kickstarter backer soldiers and portraits. This is a big task that involves a lot of data processing and quite a lot of code work to hook the properties of the custom soldiers up to the rest of the soldier systems that control "normal" soldiers, but it's mostly done - again we're just working through the bugs (like none of the custom soldiers having faces). I expect this feature will only take a few more hours of work to be completed. To conclude, I expect the early parts of January will mostly involve finishing off all these systems and hooking them up to the research tree while I try to fill in as much of the text as possible. That will form the basis of the next public build, at which point I will start working on testing the game as a whole ... which I suspect is going to involve a lot of map design work!

Thanks. I've found the offending map now and it'll work correctly in the next update.

In what sense are they bugged - are they not working for you?

Thanks.

Unfortunately this bug isn't actually fixed - I encountered it myself when testing V10.1 so I know it's still occuring. Sadly the current logging we have doesn't give us any info about what is going wrong beyond the loading process having hung for some reason, so we'll have to add more logging and release a new patch. Annoyingly, the bug doesn't seem reproducible. After encountering it myself I restarted the game and then it loaded fine, so I'm really not sure what could have triggered it. If anyone notices a pattern then let us know, otherwise we'll just have to patch in the improved logging and work from there.

This is a very small hotfix for the Beta Build V10 that we released on the Experimental Branch yesterday, fixing the broken buttons on the Geoscape (which was a stupid mistake I made when updating the UI). Changelog: The three buttons on the Geoscape (Build New Base, Launch Aircraft, Funding Report) are now functional again. Please continue to report any bugs you encounter in V10!

Thanks for the report. This is a strange one because the logs don't show any errors - but I believe your account of what happened because a 24% freeze happened to me a few days ago (which at the time I assumed was just an error from switching branches so I didn't look into it further). It's a little difficult to know how to proceed at this point. Does the error go away if you play 1080p windowed rather than fullscreen? I'll be pushing a hotfix tonight for some other issues so perhaps that will somehow fix it too.

Thanks. And those soldiers are definitely in the mission? You can press the hotkeys to access them etc? A save would indeed be quite helpful if you see this happen again.

The text area auto-sizes and can support up to 21 characters before it starts truncating the name, so this isn't actually too bad a problem. Only custom / modded soldiers will have names longer than 17 characters though because I don't see any reason to include names long enough to trigger it in the base game.

Thanks. Do you know what UFO type and map type (e.g. Jungle, Polar) it was?

Oh, yeah, you're right. I broke the UI while updating the styling on those buttons. I'll get that fixed ASAP!

Do you mean the hidden movement painting that appears during the alien turn, or something different?

Closed Beta Build V10 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). This build contains a number of updates to the game mechanics, the most important being the fixes to the air combat that prevent some annoying behaviour happening (such as the UFOs just circling your aircraft at long range until they run out of fuel and crash). We've also added in support for upgrading items via research or engineering projects, one of the last remaining major features missing from the tech tree. There's also some new visual styling of the Geoscape UI pop-ups which is intended to make everything feel a bit cleaner and easier to read, allowing players to focus better on actually playing the game. Sadly I've not had as much time to play the game as I would like, so I suspect the campaign balance is still a bit of a mess. Depending on how progress goes with the implementation of vehicles and the new Modular Armour system (the two big features we're currently working on), V11 may arrive relatively soon to replace V10. If not, I might consider including some balance changes in the V10 hotfixes. Either way we'd appreciate you guys giving the game a quick test to see if there's anything obviously broken so we can try to fix it up as soon as possible! Gameplay Changes: The Geoscape pop-up windows have been reskinned in a new style that is very similar to the equivalent X1 style, which you can see above. The style is placeholder but the idea is just to remove the visual noise that existed in the previous UI so you can focus on the key information (i.e. it's easier to read the buttons etc), and then we can make it look prettier at the end of development. The game now supports upgrading items as a result of completing a research or engineering project. We've made a number of updates and fixes to the air combat so things behave in a more sensible manner: The Evasive Roll maneuver has been added back into the air combat. Aircraft and UFOs now have a Turn Acceleration value, which represents how long it takes for them to start turning at full speed. In X1 it took aircraft and UFOs about three seconds to reach full turning speed, which made the combatants (particularly the larger UFOs) feel a bit more ponderous and "real" than in the previous X2 air combat build. The pathfinding of the UFOs will now allow them to slow down if appropriate (e.g. they are turning to reach a target that is behind them). Combined with the above change, Scouts should no longer fly endless high-speed circles around your aircraft until they run out of fuel. Weapons now have a seperate missile lock range, so they are once again starting to lock on some time before they enter firing range. Aircraft now have a speedometer on the air combat UI. It is now possible to set the size of the air combat battlefield on a per-UFO basis, and also whether the battlefield has fixed boundaries or whether they move relative to the position of the UFO. If you tell your aircraft to keep fighting in air combat after running out of fuel, the aircraft no longer survives the battle. It also only recieves the additional fuel it was saving to get back to base (previously it just gained unlimited fuel, which effectively caused a softlock if you had a Scout UFO endlessly circling beyond weapon range). We've reverted to the Chinook dropship, mostly due to the navigation problems that occur if you have a dropship with a "floor" that is 1m off the ground (it was very hard to click the tile behind the raised floor). There's now space in the dropship to move your soldiers around in the 5x3 troop compartment. The human aircraft and UFOs now exist in JSON templates in the game files, rather than being hardcoded. These aren't exactly easy to read at the moment but this will nevertheless be important for moddability in the future. Added some new research text for Alien Materials and Alenium researches. The new UI now supports renaming of soldiers, aircraft and bases. Double-click on their name and a pop-up will allow you to rename them. The starting squad of soldiers now has a mix of roles / loadouts, and the stats of each soldier is somewhat weighted towards the expected stats for their role (e.g. snipers have relatively high Accuracy but low Strength). Aircraft on the Geoscape now fly a proper predictive intercept path based on the current heading of the UFO. UFO movement on the Geoscape is now constrained to the visible area of the map, so Alien Base Resupply missions should no longer spawn off the top or bottom of the map. Aircraft now have (placeholder) in-construction artwork on the Aircraft screen and in their hangars on the Base screen while they are being built. The text on the Save Game screen now correctly updates as you switch between different games. When you load a save game you should no longer see doors swinging open and dead units collapsing to the ground when the mission first loads up, as this is now handled as part of the loading process. If you mouseover a non-adjacent target with a medikit or melee weapon, the game now displays the TU cost including the cost to move over to that unit. Clicking the target will cause your unit to move and then heal / attack. Pilots now have a callsign rather than a name. Soldier names are now effectively limited to 17 characters, as I have removed any first and last names with more than 8 characters and put an input limit on the rename soldier box of 16 characters. There is now a "Select New Target" button on the "Target Lost" interceptor pop-up notification on the Geoscape. We've fixed some of the performance issues that would occur in the GC when moving the camera. Added the "alert" sound to a bunch of Geoscape pop-ups when they appear. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash from V9.3 that was occuring on Terror Sites. Smoke should no longer become invisible after loading a saved game. Fixed a bug that was causing units to aim lower than required. This means units should no longer aim at the feet of their enemies when at close range. Fixed an issue with the progress bar on the Research screen not accurately reflecting the level of progress. Fixed a bug where starting a new campaign in the same gameplay session could cause the starting Alien Invasion research to go missing. Fixed an issue where blood would sometimes look white (this was due to reflection from the sun). Fixed some alignment issues with the trails on plasma projectiles. Balance changes: All aircraft are now produced via engineering (including the starting Falcons). A whole bunch of engineering and research tree tweaks, including the following: All engineering projects take longer. Alenium Missiles / Torpedoes are no longer automatic upgrades but now have to be built individually in the workshop. They cost Alenium to produce. HEVY launcher is now starting equipment. All aliens use Magnetic weapons for the first couple of UFOs, before transitioning into the familiar Plasma weapons. Researching these Magnetic weapons is a prerequisite for unlocking Gauss Weapons further into the tech tree, but at the start of the game it unlocks an "Accelerated Ballistics" upgrade for your starting weapons. In the next build there will be Accelerated versions of all of the weapon tiers (these are just one-off upgrades that mean the weapons do a little extra damage).

We're still looking into it and experimenting with how quickly it can be implemented. Problem with allowing floors / roofs to be destroyed is that units and items that are on a roof or floor need to drop down to the level below if the floor is destroyed, and any props need to be completely removed (i.e. not leave floating debris behind) if the ground they are on is destroyed. So it's not quite as simple as we initially thought! Hope you get better soon!

Thanks. This will be fixed in V10.