Chris
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Posts posted by Chris
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8 hours ago, ih8california said:
Will the weight of cannons/lances/missiles/torpedos still matter or is it solely hardpoints now?
Yeah, the weight still matters.
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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!
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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.
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5 hours ago, Skitso said:
I'm pretty sure that was the first time I encountered symbiotes.
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.
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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.
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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.
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On 5/29/2025 at 12:56 PM, Dragorxt said:
Thanks, this will be fixed in Milestone 6.
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On 5/29/2025 at 12:25 PM, Skitso said:
Title
If you get a reproducible case for the issue, please attach it. We've not found one yet.
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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.
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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.
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On 5/25/2025 at 3:59 PM, tja said:
Hi folks!
I didn't play this beta for almost a year. One thing that unfortunately still hasn't been addressed is the long and slow loading time.
Is there some way to officially raise some awareness for this?
Thanks!
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?
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On 5/23/2025 at 5:38 PM, Melee said:
This may have been due to impending monitor failure on my end. The capacitors in it need to be replaced. The monitor I was using when crashing yesterday wouldn't start this morning. Using GOG version, I was dragging engineering projects to bottom of engineering queue window and releasing (the "screenshot_on_unhandledexception.jpg" in the bug report shows where the project was dropped). I cannot duplicate crash now with a newer Viewsonic VX2457 connected via direct HDMI. The original monitor yesterday was connected HDMI/DVI-D.
Ignore, as everything on my end is different now and I can't duplicate original hardware until I repair original monitor.
The other Harvester LoS bug still happens with new monitor.
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.
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8 hours ago, Melee said:
Description: CtD dragging last engineering project.
What Happened: Dragging last engineering project lower with mouse and letting go resulted in game crashing. Project stays where let go and doesn't snap back. Crash is repeatable.
Update: Dragging any project well below last project and letting go crashes game.
bug_report_2025-05-22-22h48_st_5.33.0_unhandled_exception_0.zip
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.
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9 hours ago, gG-Unknown said:
I tested it again and you are right, it is about 20 tiles. I think that cut it to 15 will do the job. When range is too far it gives too strong guideline, 15 tiles thou gives nice clue - it is just about corner in the shroud. Ability to hear thru the shroud is nice gameplay, keep it please.
Thank you for revealing your sorting sfx vs ambient. Well here is player perspective : I use games for relaxation so listen 20 minutes still the same wind noise or alien base humming is getting on my nerves, (not relaxing at all ) so I switch off Music AND Ambient in all games.
Expectation is, keep play sounds only related to my actions. If you could change your category or add another slider for "environment sounds" = cars, tubes. The "continuous sounds" which can be switched off-on by player interaction (by destroing a car, or come in range of aoe)
Then ambient slider would be reserved for sounds connected to map only, like wind in arctic, birds in jungle etc. It means - Non player changeable continuous sound. That would really improve my experience. (or any sound sensitive person)
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.
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9 hours ago, gG-Unknown said:
leaking tube, out of abductor
it is possible that it was reported before by someone else, I keep track only "my own bugs". I just noticed that :
and first level, perhaps it could help you find a variant :
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.
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2 hours ago, Melee said:
Ok, I can reproduce LoS bug.
1. Load "user_day_316_harvester_reveal_test_2-609.json".
2. Move Duval to position indicated in screenshot and click inside building to rotate to look into building.
3. Rotate camera via 'e' to match screenshot.
4. Move Evans to position indicated in screenshot and throw fusion grenade targeting tile Sebillian leader is on.
5. Shoot Sebillian leader with Wright.
6. Try to move Knudsen to building corner to shoot Sebillian leader with a right mouse click, who sees another Sebillian and opposite end of map and Harvester is revealed.
![[m5.32.0] Harvester LoS 1.png](https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/uploads/monthly_2025_05/m5_32.0HarvesterLoS1.thumb.png.35215eca52b89ee2eb1f8bd9e7017300.png)
Brilliant - that's incredibly helpful!
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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.
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4 hours ago, gG-Unknown said:
1.
I had my Ambient volume low, well zero. For some reason, you have set the Tube SFX to Ambient slider. I dont think it is correct. Ambient is like independent set of sound for the map. As you say in tooltip : " birdsong in the jungle map".
Tube humming should be SFX I belive. Sound connected to object or action, like door opening. Doors opening SFX are correctly connected to SFX
slider
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2. your statement that "unit you control has to be within a certain aoe of said tube for the sfx to play" is not correct. Tube is more than 15 tiles hidden in a shroud but I can hear it. Do we know what exactly "certain aoe" means in number ?
3. humming after deactivation was fixed. Thanks
I'm pretty sure Kouki is correct actually. I can't be bothered to switch over to Milestone 5 to test it, but it works exactly like he says in Milestone 6 and we haven't changed the way the sound system works in at least six months, probably more. The AOE range seems to be about 20 tiles.
Ambient is the correct designation for a continuous sound like the humming sound for abduction tubes or the engines on parked vehicles. The sound effects are the non-continuous sounds.
As Kouki already said, we'll have a think about whether to remove the proximity requirement for these particular sounds in M6. It exists to prevent people scanning the entire map and hearing where all the tubes are in the shroud, but there's probably a better way to handle that.
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4 hours ago, gG-Unknown said:
2 months ago, I have reported a bug which was partially fixed a month ago. Then I reported it again.
Since then, You probably tried to fix it again, but current behaviour is still not correct.
Now, The crouch bonus changes the position in the list of bonuses, when you crouch or stand.
FIX : Aim chance AND list of bonuses have to be updated on each change AND remove those which are not valid.
Please bear in mind that quite a lot of the fixes we make go into Milestone 6 rather than Milestone 5, because for various reasons we're now only putting important bugfixes in the M5 hotfixes.
I think it would be best if you don't re-report any bugs you've already reported in Milestone 5 until Milestone 6 arrives (unless it's a bug that has been listed as fixed in the M5 changelogs and the fix hasn't worked, in which case please do tell us).
I've just checked and both of these issues are fixed in Milestone 6.
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22 hours ago, Volverston said:
Thanks!
Then what else was missed in my case so I got only 24 days delay? does none of generators were counted since they are not listed in mission goals and only in briefing?
19 computers, one generator destroyed by solders (one by alien) and win supposed to give 29 days
Oh, yeah, I know the problem now. The generators were granting +1 day instead of +5 days, which I've fixed already, but actually I now realise the way I'm tracking them being destroyed doesn't carry through to strategy anyway (I'm using a hidden item to do it, but it's not being recovered because it's a mission where you have to retreat to the dropship).
So you got 19 for the computers and +5 for the standard mission victory bonus, and +0 for the generators.
I'll have a think about how to fix it properly.
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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!
Gameplay Changes:
- Alien Base missions will no longer re-randomise the map and aliens present if you abort a mission and return to that same particular base.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed an AI turn crash that could occur if an evacuating civilian was mind controlled before they evacuated.
- Fixed a crash that could occur during the AI turn in tactical missions.
- Fixed pressing Space on the Geoscape not correctly centring the camera on the map like it used to.
- Attempted a fix for areas of the map and UFOs sometimes not revealing from the shroud when you move soldiers.
- Fixed a minor issue where partially visible multi-tile objects could sometimes be incorrectly hidden after loading a save.
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On 5/19/2025 at 10:04 AM, Skitso said:
Sorry, no save for this.
Ufo is 1 leveled (scout) so it's not that. It seemed the hull reveals itself with day rules and I've seen this issue quite a lot in night missions so I can send you a save next time I see it.
It's fine - we've now found the bug for night missions. Please report it again if you see it for day missions, but the night missions should be fixed in Milestone 6.
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On 5/16/2025 at 10:58 PM, Volverston said:After finishing this mission, I had spotted 2 bugs.
1. Mission briefing mention that I can get -35 days for next bombardment. 5 for each generator, 1 for each data disk. BUT there are 20 computers and only 2 generators, that gives 30 days only.
2. During my mission one of the generators was destroyed by Alien. At the mission results I got only -24 days (one computer was destroyed). Looks like generator destroyed by Alien was not counted.save on the last mission turn
Thanks. I've fixed the issue in #2 now, but there's no bug with issue #1 - there's also a 5 day bonus for winning the mission.
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22 hours ago, Melee said:
Using the attached save I moved the pistols behind the geminis (by dragging with mouse) and then changed to a different screen and then back to engineering. This was done several times.
bug_report_2025-05-19-08h48_st_5.32.0_user_f11_0.zip user_day_302_manual_save_3-575.json
Thanks. I've had a look at it and it seems like if you drag it a bit too far and the item has to "snap back" into position at the bottom of the list, the change isn't saved. If you move it carefully and don't go beyond the list area then the change is saved correctly. We'll get it fixed.
![[m5.32.0] Harvester LoS 1.png](https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/uploads/monthly_2025_05/m5_32.0HarvesterLoS1.png.d29cd5aeb0d48e1e22b352a78dff1054.png)
Milestone 5.36.0 Released! (Experimental)
in Xenonauts-2 Releases & Patch Notes
Posted
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: