Chris

This is another hotfix for Milestone 5 that fixes a few crashes and other gameplay issues. We're still tracking a small number of stability issues in Milestone 5 and will continue to release patches when we have fixes for them. Please do report any bugs you encounter on the bug reporting subforums and we'll do our best to look into them! Gameplay Changes: End of turn autosaves are now enabled by default, and we've cleared all existing user settings to ensure this feeds through. We're going to keep this enabled for a few weeks because we're getting a lot of end-of-turn bugs reported that we can't track down because we don't have an appropriate save. If you find these extra saves annoying, you can manually disable them in the game settings. The camera is no longer forcibly locked to moving soldiers - the camera will now only move / change height level if the moving soldier is selected and the player is not manually moving the camera. This should hopefully remove the annoying camera lock while still allowing the camera to track soldiers in situations where the player would want it to happen (going through teleporters / climbing up onto roofs / etc). Please let us know if there's still situations where the camera is behaving awkwardly! Combat shields no longer take damage when the soldier carrying them walks through poison gas. Added new artwork for the Alien Singularity Core research project. Sped up loading times when loading a tactical save from the Load Game screen. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a tactical mission. Fixed shot modifiers (heavy armour penalty, injury accuracy reduction) sometimes being double applied. Fixed soldiers initially being invisible after moving up a level via a teleporter. Fixed the Sebillian heal animation playing on aliens that aren't visible. Fixed transferred soldiers not being able to change armour if the type of armour item in their planned loadout is not present at the new base. Fixed the soldier HP bar for wounded soldiers on the Soldier Equip screen incorrectly rounding up, so showing some soldiers at full HP when they were still slightly injured. Fixed some of the objective text for the UOO Sabotage and UOO Bridge Assault missions not correctly disappearing after completion of those missions. Fixed various visual issues with the Western Town biome, the largest being the long-running issue with the restaurant interior walls rendering pure black (even when visible). However, there were several other more subtle rendering issues in this biome that we've also fixed that should clean up the visuals of Terror Sites. Fixed there being some "holes" in the walls of alien bases (this was just one particular wall tile not rendering correctly). Fixed some issues with the walls flickering in certain Farm barn buildings. Removed a filing cabinet that was obstructing an office window (but still allowing you to shoot through it) in a particular terror map. Fixed an issue with the text for a certain Geoscape anomaly in the German translation. Fixed the MARS showing age as -1 years.

Hmm. Yes, I think this is a holdover from the days when weapon fire costs were calculated off modified max TU rather than the raw max TU value, but we've fixed that now. So we might be able to refund the TU now. I'll have a think about it.

Thanks. This isn't a bug; it visualises the fact that the base value is actually higher than the base 98 value is. I can see the argument that you'd want the red negative modifier section displayed at the end of the bar rather than the start, but then you run into issues when soldiers have both positive and negative modifiers active at the same time, because positive modifiers are shown at the end of the bar (and actually increase the length).

It's called the Plasma Blaster everywhere, isn't it?

The intention is that the red area should just be overlaid on the stat bar, and shouldn't affect the length of it at all. We'll take a look.

This is a quick hotfix for 5.28.0 that fixes a single bug: Fixed a crash that could occur when opening the armory / soldier equip screen, including when launching a dropship.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Gameplay Changes: End of turn autosaves are now enabled by default, and we've cleared all existing user settings to ensure this feeds through. We're going to keep this enabled for a few weeks because we're getting a lot of end-of-turn bugs reported that we can't track down because we don't have an appropriate save. If you find these extra saves annoying, you can manually disable them in the game settings. The camera is no longer forcibly locked to moving soldiers - the camera will now only move / change height level if the moving soldier is selected and the player is not manually moving the camera. This should hopefully remove the annoying camera lock while still allowing the camera to track soldiers in situations where the player would want it to happen (going through teleporters / climbing up onto roofs / etc). Please let us know if there's still situations where the camera is behaving awkwardly! Combat shields no longer take damage when the soldier carrying them walks through poison gas. Added new artwork for the Alien Singularity Core research project. Sped up loading times when loading a mid-mission tactical save. Bugfixes: Fixed the previous Experimental version being unable to load tactical saves from 5.26.0. Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a tactical mission. Fixed shot modifiers (heavy armour penalty, injury accuracy reduction) sometimes being double applied. Fixed the Sebillian heal animation playing on aliens that aren't visible. Fixed transferred soldiers not being able to change armour if the type of armour item in their planned loadout is not present at the new base. Fixed the soldier HP bar for wounded soldiers on the Soldier Equip screen incorrectly rounding up, so showing some soldiers at full HP when they were still slightly injured. Fixed some of the objective text for the UOO Sabotage and UOO Bridge Assault missions not correctly disappearing after completion of those missions. Fixed the MARS showing age as -1 years.

Sorry for not replying to this earlier. Thanks for the thorough testing. We'll be looking into this at some point in the next few weeks, it's just been pushed back a bit because there's some more urgent stability issues we're dealing with at the moment.

Again, this is mostly your personal opinions on game balance rather than bugs. It's not a bug if I decide that a grenade has both a shrapnel element and a poison element to it, and it's not a bug if you take more damage from being caught in an exploding gas grenade blast than you do from walking through one tile of gas, and it's not a bug if there's no simple rule that the armour destruction is a fixed percentage of the raw damage. You can post your opinions on that sort of thing in the balance threads if you want, but please don't fill up the bug threads with it. The grenade explosion itself does 15 damage and causes 3 armour destruction. The poison gas inflicts 10 damage when it spawns into a tile, and for each tile a unit passes through. It also inflicts 20 damage if you remain in the tile at end of turn. There's clearly a problem with shields, as you've already reported. Thinking more about it, you probably took 2 armour destruction because the grenade didn't hit dead on your soldier, and the damage drop-off reduced the inflicted armour destruction. So the only actual bug I can see is that combat shields should be immune to the poison gas (but not the initial 15 damage caused by the grenade).

While I do see your point, it doesn't entirely replace the gas mask, because it doesn't prevent taking conventional damage from walking through poison. But in either case, this is a balance issue rather than a bug - healing clears all accumulated stun damage, so the system is working as intended.

You already can crush the Symbiotes!

Yes, we do need to unify this a bit. Thanks for the reminder.

Thanks. Yeah, you're right there's something strange going on with the way poison gas interacts with combat shields. We'll get that fixed. It shouldn't be taking so much damage on impact, and it shouldn't be taking damage on movement either. The damage calculation for armour seems fine for the initial impact, it seems to do 3 damage to tactical armour on impact. Maybe the armour you're testing has a resistance value too. I think it's fine for the initial explosion to cause armour damage but then the gas itself not to cause armour damage when you move through it. The grenade might contain more than just gas. I'll set poison gas to have a higher priority than smoke.

Best to mention this in the balance thread - I don't think it's a bug, because any healing also heals all stun damage?

Thanks for reporting this. It seems like this bug has happened because earlier in the campaign, you tried one of the UOO missions and either failed the mission or aborted it? There was a bug in an earlier version of the game (now fixed) that could break campaigns if you did that, and it looks like that's what's causing this crash. If that's not what has happened then please let us know and we'll look into it further.

Thanks, I've fixed that now. BTW, the Cleaner Device project isn't the Quantum Teleportation research. They're different objectives linked to different projects, so if they're displaying incorrectly then let me know - but I had a quick look and it seems to be set up correctly.

Thanks. I've also tried to reproduce this from your saves and I can't do it either, so this is very strange - as Kouki said, it'd be very useful if you could switch to the Experimental branch as then hopefully we'd get more information about exactly where the crash is happening/

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Bugfixes: Fixed soldiers initially being invisible after moving up a level via a teleporter. Fixed various visual issues with the Western Town biome, the largest being the long-running issue with the restaurant interior walls rendering black. However, there were several other (more subtle) rendering issues in this biome that we've also fixed that should clean up the visuals of Terror Sites. Fixed there being some "holes" in the walls of alien bases (this was just one particular wall tile not rendering correctly). Fixed some issues with the walls flickering in certain Farm barn buildings. Removed a filing cabinet that was obstructing an office window (but still allowing you to shoot through it) in a particular terror map. Fixed an issue with the text for a certain Geoscape anomaly in the German translation.

This is another hotfix for Milestone 5 that fixes a few crashes and other gameplay issues. As always, we're monitoring the bug report forums and we'll continue to release hotfixes for crashes and gameplay issues reported by players. Changes: All aliens in the Terror Site around day 70 should now use Magnetic weapons (previously a couple of aliens were incorrectly using Plasma weapons). Made some small changes to the Endgame part 2 mission, ensuring the outer walls of the mission are indestructible and placing earth tiles in any of the internal voids in the map. Also fixed some misaligned floor tiles. These map changes mean that any existing save games from Endgame part 2 will now be broken! Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur when a Servitor fell down a level while also trying to perform autoheal. Fixed the Autopsy: Symbiote research project not unlocking correctly. Fixed the "Recovering" state of wounded soldiers incorrectly displaying as "<1 Day" in some situations. Fixed the western town double-sided chair tiles not correctly disappearing when destroyed.

We've had a look at the logs and the cause isn't really obvious. As we're not really sure where to start with the a fix, we've decided not to spend any more time on trying to fix it - if it doesn't appear in the Release branches, and only appears on slow machines, it's quite a low priority bug. Thanks for all your testing on this bug, we appreciate it a lot.

Hi - thanks for this bug report. We looked into it today but we couldn't reproduce it, as everything seems to work as intended. Could you provide a save or reproduction steps on what you did to get the bug?

Hi - are you able to reproduce this crash from any of your saves? We've tried loading them and we can't get it to crash.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Changes: All aliens in the Terror Site around day 70 should now use Magnetic weapons (previously a couple of aliens were incorrectly using Plasma weapons). Made some small changes to the Endgame part 2 mission, ensuring the outer walls of the mission are indestructible and placing earth tiles in any of the internal voids in the map. Also fixed some misaligned floor tiles. These map changes mean that any existing save games from Endgame part 2 will now be broken! Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur when a Servitor fell down a level while also trying to perform autoheal. Fixed the Autopsy: Symbiote research project not unlocking correctly. Fixed the "Recovering" state of wounded soldiers incorrectly displaying as "<1 Day" in some situations. Fixed the western town double-sided chair tiles not correctly disappearing when destroyed.

Thanks. I'll be pushing an updated version of the game to the Experimental branch later today. Once I do, it'd be great if you could test that and post up the logs when you have - we've added a bunch of extra logging that might help us debug where the issue is occurring.

Yeah, it's still on my radar, thanks.