Chris

Just to be clear, your soldiers are healing up correctly, right? You'd just like a building that would speed the healing process up a bit? No, it's not currently scheduled for the next build, it's part of a larger task to ensure units can only survive particular types and amounts of damage on the ground combat etc that I don't see as high priority compared to the other stuff we need to do (we'll be starting to ask what features people think we should prioritise in the relatively near future though). If soldier healing is too slow in general and it's making it hard to play the game the way you want to then by all means discuss it; it doesn't take long to tweak the heal speed value.

Thanks for the report. It's very difficult to know what might have happened there without a little more information though - are you able to provide the game logs at all?

One of the most helpful things you can do when you encounter a crash or bug in your game is to provide us with the log files or a save game that allows us to see the bug for ourselves. This post gives brief instructions on where you can find these and when they are useful to us! Both of these can be found in their respective subfolders within: My Documents/My Games/Xenonauts-2/ Save Games: The save games are pretty self-explanatory, as the files share a name with the name of the save game within Xenonauts-2. Giving us a save is particularly helpful if it allows us to reproduce a crash - for example if attacking a particular UFO Crash Site always causes a crash, it's really helpful when we get a save game that allows us to attack the Crash Site and cause that crash ourselves. Game Logs: The logs contain information on all the recent things that have occurred within your game, and they are also the place where any crash errors are dumped to. This means the logs are extremely useful in most situations because they let us see what your game was doing immediately before the problem occurred (and often where in the code a crash occurred). In most cases you'll want to grab the file called "output.log", but it's important to know that this always contains the logs for your most recent game - so if you've booted the game up again after the crash (even just to the Main Menu) then the game will have started a new log. The previous log will then be called "output.log.1" and you'll need to provide that instead.

Thanks. Yeah, I can reproduce this - basically it happens when you miss everything with the grenade launcher and it can't find a valid target to hit, so the game is left waiting forever for the grenade to hit something and explode. We'll look into it.

Yup, the save games and logs are in /My Documents/My Games/Xenonauts 2. The red text you see coming up on the screen when the game crashes should get printed into the logs as well, which is why they're so handy for us

Yeah, that's actually a very good point. I'd not really considered that. It's interesting to see the number crunching go on in this thread anyway and there's some interesting ideas there for how to differentiate the weapons, like snipers ignoring cover etc. It's possible that we could split out the accuracy formula a little more too so there's a flat element of the weapon accuracy, as I guess it's a bit limiting that everything except proximity is affected equally by the soldier's Accuracy. It might be interesting if weapons like the shotgun had a higher base accuracy but gained less bonus from the soldier Accuracy, whereas the Rifle or Sniper Rifle might require a higher Accuracy soldier to use effectively. I'll check back when I've got a bit more free time and think things through in a bit more detail.

Thanks. I suspect this is the alien shield crash, which should now be fixed in the update we just released (Hotfix V4.2).

Thanks. I think this one is now fixed in the latest update, Hotfix V4.2.

Ugh, yeah, that really shouldn't be happening. Thanks for letting me know - I guess they're getting experience from the Training Room or something. Not an urgent fix but I'll log it up.

Today we're releasing a second hotfix for Beta Build V4 from last week - there were quite a few crashes left in the game so we've taken a bit of time out to fix the worst offenders. Hopefully this will be a much more stable experience for everyone to enjoy. Changelog: Fixed a crash that would occur at the end of the first turn of any combat mission that contained an alien with a shield, as the AI previously wasn't set up to handle it. Fixed a crash that occurs at the end of a ground combat mission (this was related to the soldier fatigue system we'll be introducing soon). Fixed a crash that would occur if you took a Laser Rifle or Laser Shotgun into battle (turns out I'd accidentally set these to regenerate HP rather than ammo). Fixed an issue where the soldier assignment list for Strategic Operations would not display correctly on non-16:9 screen resolutions. Fixed an issue where aliens would sometimes go into a T-pose for a few seconds when crouching or uncrouching. If a soldier is killed in battle, their slot now remembers their equipment so you can easily replace them with someone new. Personnel screen should now show the correct TU values for soldiers, rather than the values they had at the end of the last turn on their previous mission. Added a missing move path preview tile for a soldier making a diagonal move onto the bottom of a ladder. I think those three crashes accounted for most of the crashes people were experiencing in the game, but please let us know if you experience more crashes. I'd rather not spend any more time on hotfixes unless there's more big crashes we don't know about... but we'll see what bug reports come in and make a judgement on that. Incidentally, the bug reports over the past week or so have been really helpful - we added a lot of content in this build and it wasn't practical for me to test it all, so it's been great having you guys keeping us informed on what doesn't work properly

I think you've hit the nail on the head when you say this would make the soldier progression boring / non-existent; I understand your argument but I think most players would prefer to watch their soldiers grow and develop rather than just being at full effectiveness right from the start of the game and therefore both interchangeable and expendable. This is something that would be very easy to mod if you'd like to play that way, by the way (I just suspect the gameplay experience that results won't be very enjoyable). There's also some problems with having aliens that take quite a few shots to kill, for example overwatch fire is basically pointless if the aliens can't be killed in one or two shots because then they can still burst through a door and kill one of your soldiers even if you have half your team facing the door with TU available. A lot of people complained that the late game in Xenonauts 1 was less interesting because the enemies were more bullet-spongey than at the start of the game and I think there was some merit in their argument; I have noticed recently that the original X-Com has much faster and deadlier combat. So, yeah, I get your point of view but I feel the artificiality is justified by the more interesting gameplay it generates.

Those two things jump out at me as being interesting ideas - the former has occurred to me before, and it's not too difficult to implement a "night vision" visual range that is independent from the day visual range that might be quite interesting. Maybe it would be a good idea to fight certain aliens at night, but not others... The second idea would be harder to implement in practice, but is a very cool idea in principle - the idea that your soldier could just stand still and not move or shoot and become invisible to certain types of aliens would be pretty awesome. It might be a bit abuseable in practice but who knows - it's something that I might be willing to try out as the game gets closer to release. It'd certainly stop the aliens feeling so interchangeable.

So I did actually manage to reproduce it once by accident this morning when I was working with our 3D artist to try and fix an animation issue; I've got the developer logs from it but I've not had a chance to dig into it with the coders yet. At the very least it's good to know that it can be reproduced in the Unity editor as that will make it much easier to find / fix than if it only existed in the build, it's just a shame that it's not something I can reproduce reliably!

You're right, but this is fully intentional - the old X-Com games have quite a strong tension / horror vibe to them and a lot of that is generated by the fact your soldiers can't see very far and have quite narrow view cones. You can contrast that with the modern XCOM games by Firaxis where your soldiers have 360 degree vision and there's basically no horror element at all, and the tension present is a very different kind of tension. I understand it might not feel natural to you, but an X-Com spiritual success kinda has to go down that route if we want the game to feel like X-Com. The good news is it'll also be easy to mod this in Xenonauts 2 if you don't like it; the vision angle is a value you can set on combatants.

The long-awaited air combat update is planned for after the ground combat saving, so it should be arriving in the relatively near future (for obvious reasons - even I don't think the current implementation is good!)