Chris

Thanks. I'll log it, but I'm giving this bug the lowest priority our system allows

Ugh, I'm not looking forward to doing that. I've literally got over 600 completed tasks to sort through, and that doesn't include most of the balancing work I've done...

Hello everyone - it's time for the November development update for Xenonauts 2. Read on to see what we were working on last month! Milestone 5 Prototype Update: November was a productive month for us. All the core systems for Milestone 5 are now complete and we're currently in the process of testing the initial prototype, which we'll hopefully be releasing onto the Experimental branch later this week. As always, the first Experimental build for a new Milestone is likely to be a pretty rough experience - although all the major new gameplay mechanics are present there'll probably be a lot of bugs, balance issues, and missing pieces of content that need to be patched in. If you'd rather have a more polished experience then it'd be best to wait until the final version of Milestone 5 arrives on the standard branches early next year! Before we move on, I just want to be clear - although players will be able to unlock the final mission and complete the campaign once Milestone 5 is out, this will not be the final update for Xenonauts 2. We still want to add more polish to the game, so we're planning another major update before final release (likely focusing on usability / visual improvements / AI & game balance / modding / etc rather than adding additional game mechanics). The Testing Process: Most of our work this month has been addressing the numerous gameplay and stability issues encountered in our testing. Each new batch of fixes has allowed us to play further into the game, and we're currently testing the last month or two of the campaign (so fighting Battleships and doing the final mission). So far we've been doing "strategic" playthroughs that involve auto-winning the tactical battles for speed (the average campaign is 30+ missions), but once we confirm it's possible to complete a "strategic" playthrough we'll shift to playing a full campaign including the tactical missions. Most game-breaking stability / balance issues tend to occur on the strategy layer, so hopefully this will go smoothly - but whether we release the prototype this week as planned really comes down to how many issues we encounter. One major benefit of this testing is that all of these campaign playthroughs have given us plenty of opportunity to playtest and iterate the new strategy mechanics. We actually found the first iteration of the new Geoscape mechanics weren't quite as engaging as we'd hoped, so we expanded them a bit more and came up with something stronger! Updated Geoscape Mechanics: I personally think the updated Geoscape mechanics are a major improvement on what we have before, giving the player more things to interact with and a wider selection of possible strategies without being too overwhelming. Players now gain a certain number of Operations Points per day (representing the off-screen work carried out Xenonaut agents), which can be spent on Strategic Operations or recruiting Supporters. Strategic Operations provide powerful instant effects, such as allowing the player to reduce Panic in a specific region or receive some extra cash / alien materials. They are not the most efficient way to spend Operations Points, but can still be very useful in the right circumstances! Each of the six funding regions contains four Supporters, which represent key figures in the local government who can become aligned with either the Xenonauts or the Aliens. If they fall under Alien control and become Infiltrators (usually caused by successful Infiltration UFO missions), they will generate additional Panic in the local region each month - but if convinced to join the Xenonauts they will instead slightly reduce Panic in that region each month and provide a permanent bonus to your organisation. Additionally, each region has a unique "region bonus" that is unlocked if you recruit all the supporters in that region (e.g. the North America bonus improves the quality of your starting soldiers, while the Soviet Russia one reduces your upkeep costs, etc). However, most regions also contain a single Elite Supporter who provides double the bonus of other Supporters of the same type; prioritising recruiting these Elite Supporters from the various different regions can be an alternative to racing towards a specific region bonus. Although I think these additions work well, my own personal opinion only counts for so much - we'll be really interested to hear what the community think of the new systems once the prototype is out! Other Additions: We also had time to work on a few miscellaneous things this month. Firstly, the tactical combat now properly supports objects falling, so we've been able to enable destruction on building roofs. Explosions can now collapse these and cause units and items to fall onto the level below. The illustration work is now complete on the updated Research screen background art (see above), and this month we'll be creating the "advanced" versions of this that are unlocked as you progress through the game and gain access to more advanced technology. We're continuing to revamp the visuals of some of the weaker parts of the tactical combat. We started work on some new models for the Sebillian aliens, and we've also updated the appearance of quite a few assets in the Farm biome. Neither of these updates are currently present in Milestone 5 but both should be patched in before we finalise it. We've made some further AI improvements and written some custom AI for the new missions added in Milestone 5, one of which is a wave defence mission. A few updated sounds have been added to the tactical combat for the new Biter alien, and also some new unique movement sounds for the MARS / ARES / Sentry Gun vehicles. We also set up the proper Game Over screen for the various types of victory and loss. The final victory cinematic isn't ready yet, but the new UI has unique art / text / music / campaign stats / etc so still it's a lot more atmospheric than the plain popup you got in earlier versions of the game. I think that covers everything. Well done for reading the wall of text, and hopefully we'll have a prototype ready to play in the next few days!

Hello everyone - as we're now into the early days of November, it's time for an update on what we were working on during October. The short answer is this: we made good progress in several areas last month, but frustratingly slow progress in one key area that delayed the Milestone 5 prototype. Milestone 5 / Strategic Improvements: Our main focus is still on getting our Milestone 5 prototype into a state where we can release it for public testing. We were hoping that would happen last month, but we weren't able to make enough progress on the new strategy mechanics. There were a few reasons for this, but the main one was that we continued to find new bugs that needed fixing after the Unity editor update I discussed in our previous update. Thankfully, in the second half of the month we were able to better focus on implementing our new Supporter system. This system places four VIPs in each funding region who can be recruited as Supporters by the Xenonauts to provide your organisation a variety of strategic bonuses (more funding, faster research / engineering, etc) or turned into panic-generating Infiltrators by the aliens. If you can recruit all of the Supporters in each region, you also unlock a special regional bonus. The Supporter system itself is now mostly functional, but we're still unsure how long it'll take us to connect it to the other game systems. For instance, the new Doomsday Counter system that is now active in the early stages of the game also ties into the Supporter system (with alien Infiltrators generating enemy Doomsday progress, and Xenonaut Supporters slowing it). We will also need to update the Infiltration UFO missions to turn neutral VIPs into Infiltrators if successful (where previously they simply generated Panic like other types of UFO mission), etc. Given what happened last month I'm not going to make any promises about when the Milestone 5 prototype will be out - I'll just say we're working hard to get it into the hands of testers as quickly as possible (we should be able to release the first testing builds as soon as these strategic updates are complete). New Missions: Milestone 5 adds various new missions - crash sites for the Battleship UFO, the two-part final mission (Operation ENDGAME), and two unique new plot missions that take place on an alien orbital station (which appear around the point Cruiser UFOs start appearing). The Battleship assets and crash site maps were completed some time ago, and this month we finished the final art assets and map setup for both halves of the Operation ENDGAME mission. The first mission on the alien orbital station is also at quite an advanced stage, with the custom art assets for that map now complete, but there's still further work to be done on the second orbital station mission. Thankfully, this shouldn't cause delays - most of the remaining work is custom art assets, and we don't need the visuals to be final for the Milestone 5 prototype builds. Alien Updates: Last month we added a new type of alien to the game, the Biter. These small insectoid aliens are more of a living weapon than a proper new species, as certain alien units can fire them towards enemy units - at which point they will charge towards nearby hostiles and try to bite them to death. Biters will expire within a few turns of spawning and have very low HP, but a pack of them can still pose a threat - particularly against units equipped with weapons that cost a lot of TU to fire (e.g. sniper rifles). We also continued to make changes to our existing aliens to better differentiate them from one another. The main cannon on a Cyberdrone no longer acts like a giant plasma rifle, but is instead now a blast weapon that can inflict major damage across a large area (although it is now less likely to instantly kill a heavily-armoured soldier). We'll be finishing up some changes to the Mantid and Sebillian weapons this month too, which I'll explain next month. Illustrated UI Backgrounds: One of the coolest features in Xenonauts 1 was that the illustrated backgrounds of the strategic UI screens would upgrade as you progressed through the campaign, showing the way the new technological developments you had unlocked were changing your organisation - by the end of the game, the all characters had futuristic uniforms and the rooms were full of sci-fi equipment. Lots of players thought this really helped immerse them in the game. Although implementing this in Xenonauts 2 involves repainting our existing (perfectly fine) UI background art, we've decided the feature is cool enough that we've found some extra budget for it. Handily, all the programming for this feature has already been finished, so as soon as the new artwork is done we can just slot it straight into the game. We started the sketch work for the new Research screen background last week, and hopefully you'll be able to see some results either in the Milestone 5 prototype or next month's development update! I'll leave the update there for this month - thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll have some good news on Milestone 5 in the coming few weeks!

There's going to be a production update later today - I just didn't get around to it on Friday and then it was the weekend.

Thanks, that's a very helpful bug report. I can reproduce the issue from that save you provided so we'll get this fixed.

This is a small stability update for Milestone 4, which fixes a bug that can cause random crashes on both the strategy and tactical layers of the game. Although we are now fully focused on preparing our upcoming Milestone 5 update at the moment, please do continue to report any crashes or other serious bugs you encounter - we'll continue to patch Milestone 4 if necessary. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash linked to soldier / aircraft items becoming corrupted. However, this crash would not occur at the point where the item was corrupted, instead happening at the end of a tactical mission or the start / end of an air combat (and possibly also on the Armory soldier equip screen). Hopefully this fix will significantly reduce the number of seemingly random crashes experienced by players!

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! Although we're almost entirely focused on Milestone 5 at the moment, we're releasing another small hotfix for Milestone 4 because a recent community bug report allowed us to finally track down and fix a stability bug we'd been trying to fix for a while. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that was linked to soldier / aircraft items becoming corrupted. The crash would not occur at the point where the item was corrupted, and would usually happen at the end of a tactical mission or the start / end of an air combat (possibly also on the Armory screen). Hopefully this fix will significantly reduce the number of seemingly random crashes experienced by players!

Thanks for the feedback. To answer your points individually: 1) I'm happy to take a look at a couple of save games if there's specific shots you've tested repeatedly (please also ensure you've got "Reset Seed" checked when testing a save). We can see the random rolls in our logs and generally when this happens its just because of random variance - but as I said, I'm happy to check the rolls match the numbers displayed in the UI. 2) Yeah, if that's happened then it's definitely a bug. Please can you attach a save game where we can see it? (details on how in the sticky at the top of the forum) 3) Yeah, that's intentional. You can shoot over adjacent cover (including crouching soldiers), and if you can shoot over it then it's ignored for the hit calculation and so we also disregard it from the miss shot paths. If you don't do that, you get units shooting through windows from 20cm away hitting the windowframes etc. 4) It's not a flat 40% chance of hitting the intervening cover - it reduces the chance to hit against the target by 40% / 0.4x. So if you've got a 50% chance of hitting them, that hit chance goes down to 30% (so only a raw 20% reduction). None of the aliens are taller than 8 feet or so either (and most are around 6 feet), so I think 40% is reasonable in most cases.

Thanks, glad you're enjoying the game. I think you make a good point about the squadron intercepted / interception popups on the Geoscape, they should have the same button arrangement on them (and we can just disable the buttons that can't be used when enemy fighters attack you). I'll change that for Milestone 5. For the Terror missions, this is actually an AI issue and co-incidentally we were discussing it this morning. Basically what's happening is that aliens go into "combat mode" as soon as they sight an enemy unit, but this includes civilians and local forces too, so on Terror maps most aliens become hyper-aggressive right at the start of the mission because there's so many civvies around. Hopefully it'll be fixed in Milestone 5, with them going back to "normal" behaviour once they've killed the civilian. The grenade miss stuff we'll take a look at. I'm not that happy with the current grenade behaviour either.

I don't really want to get into a long discussion about it in this thread, but I'm not sure I see the problem? I think the XCOM system is pretty dumb where an object only offers protection if you're within a meter of it. If the shooter and target are in a straight line, it doesn't actually matter where the cover is along that line in terms of how much of the target is obscured. Broadly, the reason you'd want to get closer to it (both in the game and in real life) is because then the object offers protection from incoming shots in a much wider angle than if you were several meters away from it (when it's only good from attacks from directly in front of you). But that's already modelled in the game, I know the current system isn't perfect but I think it works pretty well within the limitations of an abstracted / non-3d system.

With September over it's once again time for our monthly Xenonauts 2 development update. Here's a quick rundown of the things we've been busy with this month! Milestone 5: Although we've continued to release hotfixes for Milestone 4 this month, our focus has been Milestone 5. If all goes well, we should (hopefully) have an early prototype of this update ready for testers to play later this month. Milestone 5 is taking a long time because we're making quite a few changes. Aside from the Phase system mentioned in the last update, we're also going to be testing a "strategic operations" system that gives the player more control over the Geoscape and opens up a greater number of strategic gameplay options. Essentially, the player gets a certain amount of "operation points" each day that can be spent on one-off missions to provide benefits (e.g. lowering Panic in a region, gaining an immediate cash injection, etc) or can be used to recruit Supporters in Geoscape regions who provide passive bonuses (e.g. increased monthly funding, reduced research / engineering times, etc). If you recruit all the Supporters in a region, you also gain a powerful Region Bonus for your organisation. Our goal for this system is to add a bit more strategic depth to the Geoscape, and provide players a way to reduce Panic in regions where they do not have aircraft or radar coverage. Choosing which types of Supporter and / or Region Bonuses players want to pursue should hopefully provide players some interesting strategic choices - we're looking forward to seeing what people think when they get to play it! New Missions / Terrain Tiles: Milestone 5 is intended to include the complete sequence of story missions, allowing players to play the entire campaign from start to finish. We've therefore been working on the final mission, creating some unique terrain tiles to reflect the setting in which it takes place. Similarly, we've also created some unique tiles for the areas where the player will encounter the alien leader species, the Eternals (the bridges of Battleship UFOs, and the command centers of the largest alien bases). We're also attempting to address feedback about mission variety becoming a bit stale towards the end of the game by adding two new story missions into the later stages of the campaign. These center around an orbital station the aliens have constructed high above Earth. This gives us an isolated environment where aliens outnumber humans, which is helpful because the presence of large numbers of enemy reinforcements means we can once again make use of some mission types that stopped making sense after the defeat of the Cleaners. We're still experimenting with these missions, but again we're hoping to have a basic version of them in the Milestone 5 prototype. Other Updates: We've also added various smaller systems to the game this month. Firstly, Xenonaut bases now cost varying amounts ($500k - $1.5m) depending on where they are placed. This means there's fewer places where placing a base is objectively a bad decision; the locations with optimal radar coverage are now also more expensive. It's worth bearing in mind this also affects the first base, meaning you'll have more starting funds available if you choose a cheaper location. In the tactical combat, we've added support for alien weapons capable of spawning clouds of (poison) gas on impact. This should allow us to equip certain alien species (probably Mantids) with weapons that behave a little differently from other alien units, while also making items such as the Rebreather a bit more useful. As you can see at the top of the screen, we've also continued to add new artwork to the game - the image above being tied to the Phase system and the updated storyline. Updated Game Editor: Over the last couple of updates I've mentioned our Game Editor upgrade, which is the first step towards having working modding tools for Xenonauts 2. Although work on the final modding tools won't start until after Milestone 5 is complete, this editor upgrade is now largely complete and will act as the foundation for our mod tools. That's it for now, I think - I had a few more smaller things I wanted to talk about, but this update has run long already so I'll leave it here. We'll post another development update once the Milestone 5 prototype is ready to play!

Yeah. That's the Valkyria Chronicles / Phoenix Point accuracy system, right? We tested it way back in the olden days of early X2 and we didn't like it. Any time you're basing hit chances on the actual 3d collision meshes of 3d objects rather than an abstracted "cover value", cover values because unpredictable. Everything works fine if you're shooting in a straight line - shots are more accurate if you're closer, less accurate if you're further away. But unless you're in a world made of cubes, taking one step to the left or right can dramatically affect the shot hit chance because an irregular part of one of the intervening objects (like a branch on a tree) may be added or removed to the fire path. Same is true for crouching, it can have a dramatic and unpredictable effect on hit chance. The problem is that this means that every soldier move involves using the preview mode to search half a dozen nearby tiles for the best hit chance on a particular enemy. Whereas in an abstracted system you know getting closer increases hit chance, and "flanking" to negate cover increases hit chance, and you can very easily deduce the pros and cons of moving to any given tile. The current system isn't perfect by any means but it is much snappier than a 3d system. Also, the final image you linked isn't quite right - the game only uses only the highest cover value from all intervening cover to prevent that problem occurring.

Thanks. I've taken a look at this and it's actually a very simple fix - you've started the Laser Battery project in your third base, but you've got no engineers there so it never completed and it's just sat there. If you cancel it there you can finish it at your main base instead. We'll have to add some kind of warning to prevent players getting into that situation in the first place though, so this was still a useful bug report. EDIT - actually, there already is a "no engineers at this base" warning, so I think this one may be on you

We've now released another small stability fix for Milestone 4 to the public branches while we continue to work on Milestone 5. Please do report any further bugs or stability issues as we will continue to release additional hotfixes if necessary. Bugfixes: Fixed a rare crash that could occur if a unit was killed during the enemy turn. Mesmerise will no longer trigger if a shot from the HEVY Launcher misses the target Psyon, but the blast kills the target anyway.

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 a rare crash that could occur if a unit was killed during the enemy turn. Mesmerise will no longer trigger if a shot from the HEVY Launcher misses the target Psyon, but the blast kills the target anyway.

Thanks, we'll take a look at this.

I'm not sure if it's been updated in Milestone 4, but in Milestone 5 those doors only have a 20% stopping chance. Given you're saying the enemies can shoot through them, it sounds like this might already have been patched in?

We've now released another small stability fix for Milestone 4 to the public branches while we continue to work on Milestone 5. Please do report any further bugs or stability issues as we will continue to release additional hotfixes if necessary. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that would occur if you selected the MARS / ARES Rangefinder item during a tactical combat mission, then pressed Ctrl. Fixed a crash that could occur if you destroyed a Cyberdrone near an environmental item that would also explode (such a vehicle, or petrol station). Fixed the Sentry Guns in the Cleaner Base not correctly playing their death animation when destroyed (this issue keeps reoccurring, so we've tried a new approach that will hopefully fix it for good). Fixed an issue where units could waste TUs performing an unneccessary rotation if their planned move+shoot action was interrupted by spotting a hostile alien. Fixed an issue where an interrupted grenade throw would prevent the soldier re-equipping their weapon, leaving the grenade selected but without the UI showing it. Fixed it being possible to walk out into the empty tile directly above a ladder, leaving a unit floating in mid-air.

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 a crash that would occur if you selected the MARS / ARES Rangefinder item during a tactical combat mission, then pressed Ctrl. Fixed a crash that could occur if you destroyed a Cyberdrone near an environmental item that would also explode (such a vehicle, or petrol station). Fixed the Sentry Guns in the Cleaner Base not correctly playing their death animation when destroyed (this issue keeps reoccurring, so we've tried a new approach that will hopefully fix it for good). Fixed an issue where units could waste TUs performing an unneccessary rotation if their planned move+shoot action was interrupted by spotting a hostile alien. Fixed an issue where an interrupted grenade throw would prevent the soldier re-equipping their weapon, leaving the grenade selected but without the UI showing it. Fixed it being possible to walk out into the empty tile directly above a ladder, leaving a unit floating in mid-air.

Hello everyone - hope you all had a good August. Here's our monthly update on what the team here at Goldhawk have been working on. Programming: This month our technical director spent much of his month on honeymoon, and the rest of it fixing the trickier bugs discovered in Milestone 4 by the community. Our other senior programmer split his time between bugfixes and working on our updated internal game editor (mentioned in last month's update), which meant we only had one programmer available to work on feature implementation. Aside from the weekly stability fixes we've released for Milestone 4 and various small usability changes / AI improvements, we added a few useful gameplay features to our upcoming Milestone 5 update. One was a much-requested update to the item sale price system, allowing sale prices to slowly regain lost value as time passes, and another was expanded options for "difficult terrain" which makes it more costly for soldiers (but not vehicles) to walk through and crush plants like hay. This may allow things such as shallow water that can be waded through on the Jungle maps, making the different biomes a bit more distinct from one another. Invasion Phases: I've spent a lot of time this month on the new "Invasion Phase" system. This divides the alien invasion into five escalating phases, with a narrative event and some artwork and a short conversation with the Operations Director and Chief Scientist at the start of each one. The goal here is to tie the lore together and explain how the invasion is escalating, what the aliens are doing differently and how the world is reacting to it. It also allows us to more clearly explain the shifting role of the Xenonauts thoughout the conflict, starting as an clandestine organisation fighting a secret war against an unknown enemy and ending as an elite military organisation leading the fight against a full-scale alien invasion. This coming month I'll be experimenting with several mechanical changes that we're hoping to tie to the Phase System, making the Geoscape mechanics a bit less static throughout the campaign. I'm quite excited about these, but I also don't want to talk about them yet in case I disappoint someone - they're still at the prototype phase, and could be changed or abandoned entirely based on playtesting. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this next month! Other: Other areas of the game continued to progress over the past month. We partnered up with a couple of new illustrators, one of whom painted the new "Funding Report" artwork at the top of the post, and the other is working on environment concepts for the tactical combat. We've also added lots of small things like some new 3D weapon models, some updated textures for certain alien combatants, and new tactical biome ambient sounds. That's everything for this month - thanks for reading!

We're continuing to release weekly stability patches for Milestone 4 while we work on Milestone 5. This patch makes a couple of minor balance tweaks and fixes a few more gameplay issues reported by the community. Balance Changes: Weight on Automed Unit reduced from 12 to 8. Deviation on missed HEVY shots now occurs within an arc of 50 degrees from the intended target, reduced from 80 degrees. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a tactical combat save when fighting inside late-game UFOs (this was caused by smoke tiles being spawned off the top of the map, usually caused by explosions in the upper levels of large UFOs). Fixed certain Harvester maps having unwalkable tiles inside the ground floor of the UFO. Fixed a (rare) missing move path tile.

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! Balance Changes: Weight on Automed Unit reduced from 12 to 8. Deviation on missed HEVY shots now occurs within a maximum arc of 50 degrees from the intended target (was previously 80 degrees). Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a tactical combat save when fighting inside late-game UFOs (this was caused by smoke tiles being spawned off the top of the map, usually caused by explosions in the upper levels of large UFOs). Fixed certain Harvester maps having unwalkable tiles inside the ground floor of the UFO. Fixed a (rare) missing move path tile.

We've released another small patch onto the public branches for Xenonauts 2 that contains a few more fixes. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash on the Soldier Equip screen when changing equipment. It was previously possible to drag items using both left mouse and right mouse button, occasionally leading to situations where you could be dragging two items at the same time and one would be in an invalid state. We've fixed this by disabling right-click dragging, which we don't think should cause players any inconvenience - but please let us know if we're wrong! Fixed an issue where the upgraded Colossus Battlesuit would revert to the un-upgraded version after a battle. Fixed the Gauss / Plasma turret base defence buildings and upgrade projects so they have a consistent cost and completion time. Added a loading screen tip about how to use TU Reserve (right-click on the desired fire mode or crouch button). (Hopefully) fixed an issue where the interior walls of the Western Town restaurant buildings would not render on certain PCs.

This is a bug, we'll get it fixed. This already happens. Not in exactly the way you've written, but the effect should be the same. It's probably just that we're not escalating Abduction missions fast enough to keep pace with the player's advancement. Thanks for the lengthy feedback, I appreciate it! Yeah, reducing the number of soldiers in a dropship is possible. We originally increased the number because it gave another point of distinction from the smaller teams in Xenonauts 1, but ultimately there was a reason we settled on those numbers in the first game. We might end up reverting to 8-10-12 but then allowing 16 in the final mission. Might have to ask the wider community what they think about that though. Have you played the game yet? Lasers have a scaling accuracy boost compared to ballistics, heavier weight, increased armour destruction but lower armour penetration, and lower capacity (but recharging) ammo magazines. Obviously it's subjective if that makes them feel sufficiently different from the earlier tier of weapons for them to be interesting, but it's also not true that they're mechanically the same barring the damage number like they were in X1.