Chris

We've released another hotfix for some additional stability problems and gameplay issues players have encountered in Milestone 5. Please do report any bugs you encounter on the bug reporting subforums and we'll do our best to look into them! Bugfixes: Fixed an issue where the Phase 1 conversation at the start of the game incorrectly triggers twice. Fixed an issue where it could be impossible to throw a grenade (despite having enough TU) if the throw arc was passing through too much smoke. Fixed an issue where the objective "Objective: Complete Quantum Teleportation research" was being displayed even after you completed it. Fixed the rocks in the Endgame surface mission being not visually being removed when destroyed. Fixed an issue in the Japanese translation where OP costs of strategic operations was unclear, as there was no space between the value and the "OP" suffix.

Appreciate you taking the time to write out your thoughts. Glad to hear you enjoyed the experience I'll check back to the thread later this evening and read the less good parts too.

This is a quick hotfix for 5.38.0 that has no effect on gameplay - it just fixes an issue with the bug reporting system!

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 an issue where the Phase 1 conversation at the start of the game incorrectly triggers twice. Fixed an issue where it could be impossible to throw a grenade (despite having enough TU) if the throw arc was passing through too much smoke. Fixed an issue where the objective "Objective: Complete Quantum Teleportation research" was being displayed even after you completed it. Fixed the rocks in the Endgame surface mission being not visually being removed when destroyed. Fixed an issue in the Japanese translation where OP costs of strategic operations was unclear, as there was no space between the value and the "OP" suffix.

We've released another hotfix for some additional stability problems and gameplay issues players have encountered in Milestone 5. Please do report any bugs you encounter on the bug reporting subforums and we'll do our best to look into them! Bugfixes: Fixed an issue where UFO crews were not randomising correctly, so you'd keep encountering the same species over and over (usually Sebillians). This behaviour was accidentally introduced a few weeks back in 5.32.0.

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 an issue where UFO crews were not randomising correctly, so you'd keep encountering the same species over and over (generally Sebillians).

We've released another hotfix for some additional stability problems and gameplay issues players have encountered in Milestone 5. Please do report any bugs you encounter on the bug reporting subforums and we'll do our best to look into them! This update contains the fixes from both 5.35.0 Experimental and 5.36.0 Experimental consolidated together. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash in the air combat that would occur if a Xenonaut interceptor was shot down while you were hovering the mouse over its evasive roll buttons. Fixed what we think is the source of a lot of mysterious crashes on the Armory screen, which seems to be a bug linked to placing HEVY ammo back into weapon selection UI on top of itself, which caused it to get "stuck". Trying to remove the ammo would then cause a chain of things to start going wrong and various parts of the Armory would stop working correctly, but any crash would usually only occur when you tried to leave the screen. Fixed a rare crash that could occur on the Aircraft screen when viewing a dropship and re-ordering the soldier list. Fixed a rare crash that could occur during the autosave process. Fixed an issue where the "New Projects Available" Geoscape popup would sometimes incorrectly appear before the research report that is supposed to trigger it. Fixed a bug where the camera at the start of a tactical mission could end up showing an empty black space (as the camera was incorrectly accepting scroll input under the last few moments of the loading screen). Fixed a bug where combat shields would sometimes not visually disappear from the soldier's model if destroyed. Fixed an issue where moving soldiers would sometimes not interrupt their move correctly after sighting an alien when rotating midway through their movement. Fixed an issue where the HP / Armour bars above the heads of alien units would not appear after loading a save if the camera was above level 0. Fixed some strange UI behaviour that some users reported when they had a controller or joystick plugged in. Fixed an issue where the game would not load correctly for some Linux users.

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 on the Aircraft screen when viewing a dropship and re-ordering the soldier list. Fixed an issue where moving soldiers would sometimes not interrupt their move correctly after sighting an alien when rotating midway through their movement. Fixed an issue where the "New Projects Available" Geoscape popup would sometimes incorrectly appear before the research report that is supposed to trigger it. Fixed an issue where the HP / Armour bars above the heads of alien units would not appear after loading a save if the camera was above level 0. Hopefully fixed an issue where the game would not load correctly for some Linux users. Hopefully fixed a rare crash that could occur during the autosave process.

Yeah, the weight still matters.

Hello everyone - as we're now a few days into June, it's time for our regular update on what we were working on last month! New Assets: We've added a lot of new assets to the game over the past month. The most notable of these are the new 3D models and animations for the alien Sebillian and Cyberdrone units, and while the visual improvement is hopefully clear from the screenshot below, the Cyberdrone in particular also benefits from having proper animation set (e.g. movement / shooting) rather than just being a static lump of floating alien amour. The various ranks of alien are also a bit more distinctive now; again this is most obvious with the two Cyberdrone variants! Work is currently continuing on more of these new alien models. Both the Heavy Mentarch and the Heavy Servitor units are currently just palette swaps of the corresponding basic unit, but we're aiming to have distinct designs and 3d models for both in place before Milestone 6 releases. Further progress was also made in other areas too. We finished another research illustration this month, leaving three remaining (one of which is already in progress). The inventory tile artwork and 3d model for the recently-introduced Alien Bio Rifle is nearly finished. We've added some new sound effects to some of the aliens to help make them more distinctive, and we finished up our level design work on the updated Tropical biome and started adding various new tiles and maps to the new Soviet Town biome. Aircraft Paired Slots: One of the major goals for Milestone 6 is a refresh of the air combat that improves the visuals and polishes the gameplay. The first part of this has been to improve the UI on the Aircraft screen, so we can use our new "paired slot" system to replace the existing "Hardpoints" system (the blue numbers on the aircraft weapons that previously sat alongside the Weight values). This work is now complete. The Hardpoint system reflected the size of different weapons, with each aircraft having up to four hardpoints and missile / torpedo weapons filling one and cannon / lance weapons filling two. Rather than represent this numerically, we can now pair weapon slots together to produce a linked double slot. Putting a cannon / lance into a paired slot will fill both of the linked slots, while missiles and torpedoes only fill a single slot - effectively the same system as before, but much easier to understand. This change is also beneficial from a design standpoint, as it gives another method of differentiating interceptors. For instance, we may decide to give the basic Angel interceptor four weapon slots, with only two of them being paired together - this would limit the plane to only being able to carry a maximum of one cannon / lance. More advanced aircraft could have two sets of paired slots, allowing them to carry dual cannons. These extra options should help with the balancing work we'll be doing as part of the air combat refresh! Bugfixes: Once again, we ended up spending significant amounts of time last month on bugfixes. We released five more stability hotfixes for Milestone 5 last month, fixing a lot of crashes and other gameplay problems - including several annoying bugs we'd been trying to track down for several months, plus a number of older bugs that predated Milestone 5. Our work on Milestone 6 also includes bugfixes, and one of our programmers spent rather a lot of last month doing the painstaking job of tracking down the numerous places in the game where text was not being properly translated and figuring out why. Hopefully we'll be finished with this by the end of next week and non-English users will have a fully localised Milestone 6. Modding: Our technical director spent some time fixing the remaining issues with our mod loading system last month, so it's now possible to create and share "mod packs" that modify the game files. The Mod Loader panel on the Main Menu screen will now read and apply these mods correctly. From a purely technical standpoint, we can now officially say that Xenonauts 2 supports modding. Additionally, we've added support for code injection - basically, mods that can change the code of the game itself (e.g. one user has been experimenting with changing the game code so flight paths on the Geoscape follow the realistic curvature of the Earth). There's now a proper C# framework for doing this, and the process is integrated with the mod packs so that Steam Workshop will be able to distribute these mods once enabled. We'll be creating some documentation and an example project for this system in the next couple of weeks. However, it would still be misleading to claim that Xenonauts 2 is a genuinely moddable game right now - we won't start work on the official mod editor until after Milestone 6 is complete, so modding the game remains painful and difficult due to the format of the JSON files we use to store data. It'll still be a few months until most users can start making mods! Milestone 6: So when will Milestone 6 actually arrive? Sadly, it's still hard to say. Milestone 6 contains a lot of small / medium sized tasks, and the much larger task that is the update to the air combat. We've made good progress through all the smaller tasks, but we've not yet begun work on the core parts of the air combat refresh. We'll have a better idea of how long it'll take to complete once we get started on it, which we're hoping to do in the next two weeks. Of course, that timeline may slip if more hotfixes are needed for Milestone 5. While I think prioritising stability has been the correct decision, it has unfortunately sucked programmer time away from working on the planned new content. Thankfully, the number of bug reports has started to drop off recently - hopefully that's an indication we've dealt with most of the bugs and can switch focus to Milestone 6, but we'll just have to wait and see. I think that's plenty for this update. Thanks for reading!

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 in the air combat that would occur if a Xenonaut interceptor was shot down while you were hovering the mouse over its evasive roll buttons. Fixed what we think is the source of a lot of mysterious crashes on the Armory screen, which seems to be a bug linked to placing HEVY ammo back into weapon selection UI on top of itself, which caused it to get "stuck". Trying to remove the ammo would then cause a chain of things to start going wrong and various parts of the Armory would stop working correctly, but any crash would usually only occur when you tried to leave the screen. Fixed a couple of strategic UI crashes that were only occurring in the Experimental builds that were linked to dragging soldiers around in the soldier list on the Armory screen, and on the Aircraft screen (when a dropship was selected). Fixed a bug where combat shields would sometimes not visually disappear from the soldier's model if destroyed. Fixed a bug where the camera at the start of a tactical mission could end up showing an empty black space (as the camera was incorrectly accepting scroll input under the last few moments of the loading screen). Attempted a fix for some strange UI behaviour that some users have reported when they have a controller or joystick plugged in.

Have you got earlier saves from the campaign, perhaps? One from before the mission? Even a save from the mission itself might be useful. Either you already had 5 Symbiote corpses in your base stores before the mission began, or for some reason the game has sent the corpse items to your base stores instantly after the mission.

We've released another hotfix for some additional stability problems and gameplay issues players have encountered in Milestone 5. Please do report any bugs you encounter on the bug reporting subforums and we'll do our best to look into them! Bugfixes: Fixed a very complicated bug where explosions could indirectly reveal areas of the shroud that the player should not be able to see (this bug has been responsible for quite a lot of strange behaviour in Milestone 5). Fixed the displayed TU costs for the medikit / melee weapons incorrectly not including soldier rotation costs if the soldier was already adjacent to their intended target. Fixed a common 2x1 alien console prop not correctly disappearing when destroyed. Fixed the ARES heavy armour variants incorrectly using the MARS movement sound.

Yes, sounds like this is a bug. The camera is meant to track the soldier automatically unless you've moved the camera manually, at which point it should stop tracking it.

Thanks, this will be fixed in Milestone 6.

If you get a reproducible case for the issue, please attach it. We've not found one yet.

We've released another hotfix for some additional stability problems and gameplay issues players have encountered in Milestone 5. Please do report any bugs you encounter on the bug reporting subforums and we'll do our best to look into them! Bugfixes: Fixed an AI hang that could occur during the alien turn during tactical missions. Fixed a crash that could occur starting the Endgame mission (only on Experimental branch). Fixed an issue where re-ordering engineering projects would sometimes not save correctly when you exited the engineering screen.

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 very complicated bug where explosions could indirectly reveal areas of the shroud that the player should not be able to see (this bug has been responsible for quite a lot of strange behaviour in Milestone 5). Fixed the displayed TU costs for the medikit / melee weapons incorrectly not including soldier rotation costs if the soldier was already adjacent to their intended target. Fixed a common 2x1 alien console prop not correctly disappearing when destroyed. Fixed the ARES heavy armour variants incorrectly using the MARS movement sound.

Don't worry, it's something we're already aware of and planning to look at again once Milestone 6 is done. I don't think we made any major improvements to loading times in Milestone 5, but I think we've already increased load times by 30%-40% from the original Early Access launch version of the game. Out of curiosity, what hardware are you playing the game on? You've got the game installed on a solid state hard drive, right?

Thanks for the extra details. I'm not sure this bug would have been caused by the monitor - the logs confirm the crash was the same one as we "fixed", which is a UI raycast is incorrectly going through the engineering project object and hitting an invalid target behind it. However it's also quite difficult to imagine how it could have happened at all, so if you can no longer reproduce it I think it's a good idea to forget about this one unless we get further reports of it occurring. Any further attempts at fixing it would need to rewrite the way the UI handles the dragging and dropping and we'd prefer to avoid that if it's not necessary.

Hmmm. This was a crash we encountered ourselves when we were testing 5.33.0, but we fixed it before releasing the update. I've tried reproducing it myself the the Steam version but I can't get it to crash. The versions should be the same, but are you playing on Steam or GOG? Can you give us more detailed instructions on how to reproduce it? Which specific area of the screen are you dragging it into? I suppose it's possible the crash is somehow tied to performance.

Fair enough, we'll consider splitting ambient out into environmental too. If it's simple we'll probably do it quickly, if not then it'll be something we'll do if we have time for it at the end of development.

Thanks. Yeah, this is a known issue with the shroud system. We're planning to take a look at it for Milestone 6, although we've not got round to it yet.

Brilliant - that's incredibly helpful!

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 could occur starting the Endgame mission (only on Experimental branch). Fixed an AI hang that could occur during the alien turn. Fixed an issue where re-ordering engineering projects would sometimes not save correctly when you exited the engineering screen.