Chris
-
Posts
11,329 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
568
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Downloads
Posts posted by Chris
-
-
Thanks for the thoughts, everyone. I'm working on another balance pass at the moment so I'm reading through the last 2-3 pages at the moment, hence why I'm going to be quoting a lot of people in this post.
On 7/24/2024 at 2:17 PM, Xeferah said:Maybe it's not the aim that annoys me, but the damage range? I have seen the same shot from aliens (with reloads) do damage ranging from 8 to 64. I have no idea how exactly armour works, but I do think the range in damage might be my issue? I also think that armour before the second upgrade 'feels' kinda useless, most likely due to the big damage range. Only after getting pretty high armour my soldiers will reliably survive an alien shot.
On 7/24/2024 at 3:22 PM, Skitso said:Damage can be anything between 50% to 200% of the base damage. You can think of it as some kind of a damage location model. (Leg vs. Head for example)
@Chris, I think it would be a good idea to communicate these "critical hits" with unique hit sfx and particles (more blood etc) and maybe larger damage numbers to really drive home the fact that this shot really hit where it hurt.
Yes, one of the changes I'm thinking about making for Milestone 5 is reducing the damage variation from 50%-200% to 50%-150%, which is what it was in the original Xenonauts - and I think it's also what OpenXcom eventually settled on as the default settings. It just felt "fair" that damage should range from half damage to double damage, but I think it does result in damage being too spiky overall.
On 7/30/2024 at 1:02 PM, Skitso said:I agree, but as far as I know, only wraiths are currently able to throw grenades. I hope GH will add grenades later to other enemy types as well. Imagine cyberdrone spreading burst fire of grenades around it once a turn, sebillian burning it's surroundings with incendiary grenades etc.
Alien grenades are also currently a bit dull and too similar to human grenades. The game desperately needs something to push player to change tactics. So maybe slowly moving homing grenades, spreading poison gas etc.
Yes, poison grenades for certain aliens (likely Sebillians) are planned for Milestone 5.
-
I'm going to try reducing the possible miss arc from 80 degrees total (40 on each side) down to 50 degrees. I'm very reluctant to reduce it further than that because there needs to be enough scatter that miss shots actually miss most of the time, otherwise the HEVY is going to be hugely overpowered.
There are still some bugs with the HEVY we need to fix, but they're not particularly simple and they'll be done in Milestone 5 hopefully. Those include the grenade sometimes scattering behind the shooter at short range, and the bug where if you're corner-peeking with the HEVY that miss shots can sometimes hit the corner (which is why most of those "soldier blowing themselves up" situations occur).
-
3 hours ago, jackbou said:
Will the production team delay the progress of milestone 5 because of playing Black Myth: Wukong?
Nope. I don't think any of us have bought it.
-
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 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.
-
13 hours ago, zardoz2206 said:
is this as intended ? it never worked like this in other xcom type game. (usually the control would last 1/2 turns, or be cancelled when the alien who launched the mental attack dies.
The intention is that you get control of your soldier back if the mind controlling unit is killed. We'll look into it.
What unit mind controlled your soldier?
-
On 8/15/2024 at 8:00 PM, Skitso said:
Now that I look at that image again, it seems it's the yellow part of the line of fire that is black if it's behind something.
Yeah, the obscured yellow tiles are drawing black for some reason. I can't reproduce it though. Can you?
-
On 8/16/2024 at 12:07 AM, Captain Cranium said:
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the reply. To your questions:
1. You mean in the Xenonauts 2 folder in the Documents/My Games folder I assume? Mostly there are only folders - BugReports, Mods, Saves, and Settings - and all are empty save for settings, which contains a number of .json files. If you meant the folder within the GOG/games/Xenonauts 2 folder then yes of course, the executable and all the appropriate looking libraries and such are there.
2. This answer is slightly more complicated - Windows Defender, as I am running Windows 11, but I have tried turning it off briefly, and also have added Xenonauts 2 as an exclusion to its exclusion list (both its folders and its processes), and controlled folder access is off. The only complication is that I am running Windows 11 inside of Parallels - so technically there is also Bitdefender running on the parent OS for Parallels (MacOS in this case) - but this has never prevented a Windows installed program from being able to form save files in the past. Before you ask, I have shut off Bitdefender's active protection - it's easy to temporarily turn it off for a time, but even when I do, the saves do not form.
EDIT: Also, I just looked into Windows Defender more deeply, and it shows no recent activity in terms of having identified and/or removed and/or quarantined threats. It's all green arrows stating that everything is under control and there are no threats.
Thanks for the reply. That's interesting to hear. So this is a strange situation because the game is clearly capable of writing to that directory given it created the settings files.
It's possible to change the install directory by adding
-gameSaveFolder=<X>to the startup path in Steam / GOG / whatever. I'm not 100% sure how Parallels works but perhaps moving it might fix things?If not, we'll have another think about what could be causing it. However it sounds like you've already checked most of the things we'd suggest - it's Windows Defender and controlled folder access in Windows that have caused problems for other users historically. I'm not a Mac user but it sounds like you've already tried disabling the equivalents.
EDIT - actually, one thing that would be useful is to make a bug report using F11 after trying to make a save. Hopefully that'll create a zip file in the /bugreports/ folder that will have some data we might be able to use to debug the issue.
-
If we've made a bad change, we'll get feedback about it and it'll be adjusted accordingly in the next batch of fixes. Bernie's feedback has been noted just the same as everyone else's, and there being a potential issue with the Automed Unit (likely due to it being too heavy now it has reduced function) is on our radar.
However we've only got one data point so far, and I don't generally make balance changes based on such little information. If anyone has feedback about how the new Automed Unit feels then feel free to chip in, otherwise let's end this here.
I'm always grateful to anyone who posts feedback on any topic on our forums, this one included.
-
1
-
-
On 8/16/2024 at 2:57 AM, Bernie22405 said:
You're putting a spin on this that is not at all what I said, Chris. But that's okay, your game, your forums, your rules and I didn't expect it would be otherwise.
My complaint was never anything but that you reduced the effectiveness by too huge an amount all at once. 80%, Chris, you reduced it by 80% and my complaint was that this was too much, that maybe 40% would be better and that fine-tuning could happen from there. That would give players an easier choice between having to carry both or having to give up the effects of one in favor of the other. Since the player is already very limited in what space they have and how much weight they can carry (a system that really needs some going over if you want something else to fiddle around with since it's pointless to hire any soldier with under 50-55 strength) carrying both is generally out of the question. IMHO, this 80% reduction borked the whole healing system and it's pointless to continue playing.
Anyway, I only stopped in to see how distorted my comments would be portrayed here. Not too badly to be honest, but not great either.
Have a great one and, no, I have no intention of ever playing the game again, nor any others from this company that you've had a hand in. I think you're too quick to see something that you think is having a negative effect on gameplay and then go in not with a scalpel to make the fine adjustments needed, but with a machete in a jungle clearing operation. You're probably a fine person though, someone I'd share a coffee and an afternoon with discussing software projects we've each worked on and part company with a handshake.
There isn't any middle ground between carrying one item or carrying two items, though, as it's not possible to carry 1.5 items. You either carry one or two items. That's pretty much the crux of my point - you're asking me to pull the wrong design lever here by increasing the regeneration amount.
The reason why I'm trying to drill down into why you want the Automed Unit to have the functionality of two items is because I suspect the actual fix for this issue (if this actually does end up being an issue) is to reduce the weight of the Automed Unit now it has reduced functionality, making it easier to carry the two items if you do want both bits of functionality. Not going back to having one item that fills two roles really well and one item that is totally irrelevant, as that setup doesn't actually give the player a choice to make.
However, you seem very much against the idea of having to carry two items, and I was trying to understand whether it was an issue with not having the capacity to carry two items or whether it's because you just genuinely found the concept of there being two items ridiculous on a fundamental level. From your previous posts, it largely seemed like the latter.
Best of luck in future anyway.
-
3 hours ago, intuition said:
Thanks for that advice, it seems to have fixed it!!
I started a new campaign in english language and already played three ground missions without any crash! Until now no crashes at all!
It seems that my first playthrough was somehow corrupted. It was initialized in german language. When language is set to english, this old campaign still keeps crashing. But the new campaign initially created in english language doesn't. Maybe the bug in my first playthrough overlapped with the bug regarding crashes when creating new campaigns in different languages, because it was created before the fix and got corrupted somehow.
Also I noticed something when I switched to english and loaded my old playthrough.
Even if the language is set to english, there are still german texts occurring. See attached screenshot of my first (corrupted) campaign.
So texts are messed up between languages. I hope that helps to identify the bug.
But for now my problem is fixed and finally I can play and enjoy the game
Thank you.
Ah, great - I'm glad you've got it fixed. Out of interest, if you start a new campaign in German and start playing it, does the game still crash?
It'd be great to know if there's bugs we need to fix in the German game!
-
21 hours ago, Captain Cranium said:
As the topic says - no matter where I am in the game, on the Geoscape or the Tactical mode, saving games appears to work, but whenever I go to load anything I always get nothing but a blank page. Checking my '...\Documents\My Games\Xenonauts 2\saves folder also always shows an empty folder. I have edited permissions to the folder as much as I possibly can, and I always start the game as administrator. Autosaves are not forming either, despite messages displaying that they are.
My questions are twofold -
(1) the obviously implied one (why is this happening/how do I fix it/etc), and
(2) is there some way to change the save game location entirely? Perhaps if I'm able to choose a different folder it will work.
Hi there - so this is quite an interesting issue. My suspicion is that this is something to do with your antivirus software, but this bug does affect people occasionally so it'd be great for us to try and figure out what's going on.
First question: if your \saves\ folder is empty, are there files in the rest of the \Xenonauts 2\ directory? I'm guessing there are, otherwise the game would have crashed on startup.
Second question: what antivirus software are you running? Is it quarantining or automatically deleting the save files? Although our save games are just text files, they do contain some elements that resemble a .zip file so they might be getting wiped out while the other files are considered fine.
It is possible to change the save game directory file but I doubt that'll help much in this situation. I'll let you know how if this antivirus stuff doesn't fix the problem
-
On 8/13/2024 at 9:53 PM, intuition said:
Here is another one on the same enemy.
bug_report_2024-08-13-22h51_gc_4.22.0_unhandled_exception.zip
Thanks for providing the crash dumps. This is a really strange issue - it looks like a crash in the AI pathfinding, but it's not in an area we'd normally expect to see a crash. I also can't reproduce it at this end at all - I've loaded up version 4.22.0 on the Experimental branches and loaded the saves from both the .zip files you've provided, and I just don't get any crashes even if I do four or five End Turns while playing in German.
The programmer who would normally look into this is away on his honeymoon at the moment. We do have someone else who could potentially look into it, but before I get them involved I want to be totally sure this isn't a result of corruption on your machine.
Sorry for the hassle, but can you please try following the instructions in this thread, and then start a new campaign? If you get any crashes at all, then please try switching the language to English (US) and see if that fixes the crash. Maybe there's a translation bug in the game somewhere.
-
23 minutes ago, mark321 said:
Now I understand. It seems there is another translation of this grenade into Polish.
As for the difficulty level, I think the lowest level would be good for players who want to learn the storyline of the game and not have too many challenges in the tactical layer.
Thanks for your help. I'll try to get back into the game.
No problem. I'll flag your issue with the flashbang grenade to the Polish translators then, and see if they can improve that.
You're right that the easiest difficulty level shouldn't be too difficult, so I will be looking into that in Milestone 5 too. I've got some ideas about what might be causing the problem already.
-
30 minutes ago, mark321 said:
I uninstalled the game and I don't have any save games. My soldiers had the first armor I could produce. I also marked heavy armor. The damage they took from the aliens was 70. They weren't recruits.
I tried stunning in another mission with flashbang grenades. In a ship with a teleporter. There was only one alien left at the top. I teleported up and threw a grenade. It said he was stunned. I went down and ended my turn. The next turn I teleported with another soldier and the alien was standing without stun. I threw a grenade again, stunned him and went down. The next turn I went up and shot him. Then the mission ended.
Thanks. OK, I'll bear in mind your feedback about the Terror mission.
As for the units not being stunned - it sounds like the issue is that you're using the Flashbang, which suppresses enemies (removing all their TU and giving them reduced TU next turn), rather than a weapon that stuns them. Suppressing them is good and makes them easier to stun, but you do need to use a Stun Baton or Stun Gun on the enemy unit to actually knock them unconscious afterwards.
-
39 minutes ago, mark321 said:
I have a few days off and I thought I'd play Xenonauts for fun. I played a lot of X-Com 2 a long time ago and this type of gameplay is very familiar to me. I chose the lowest difficulty level and it was quite enjoyable until around day 150 of the game when I got the Terror in the City mission. My soldiers die after one alien shot. Armor and hiding behind covers do nothing. I can't throw a grenade because it's too far away. These covers are a mistake. A soldier kneels behind them and dies after one alien shot, while the cover stands still. Something is wrong here. I also have reservations about the movement of soldiers. There is no possibility of reserving movement points for kneeling and shooting. Also, stunning all the aliens should end the mission, but it doesn't.
Stunning all the aliens should end the mission. If it doesn't, please attach a save game so we can check if there's a bug.
You can reserve TU for firing / crouching by right-clicking on the buttons for the fire mode / crouch. We'll eventually add this to the tutorial.
Do you have a save game from the Terror Mission you had trouble with? Ideally a save from the very start of the mission. I'd like to test it and see if we've made the mission too difficult, but as part of the test I need to know the type of weapons and armour you're using, and how experienced your soldiers are etc - so a save game would be great.
-
We've now released a small patch onto the public branches for Xenonauts 2 that contains a few more important stability fixes.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a translation bug that could cause frequent crashes for people playing the game in non-English languages.
- Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when the player opens an abduction tube.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if a berserking unit kills another unit that was about to go berserk.
-
On 8/6/2024 at 11:12 PM, Bernie22405 said:
"Reducing a gun's damage by 80% wouldn't be like it doesn't still have a role."
Does that sound right to you? It doesn't to me, not any more than reducing the automed by 80% does. Look, I'm willing to concede that I may be misremembering how it used to be, confusing the advanced medkit with the automed (I'm gonna have to dig out the old games and fire up one of my workstations that's old enough to replay them), but I'm not arguing that the automed should be fully restored to what it was either. I just think an 80% reduction is too much. That's not tweaking the game, that's taking a chainsaw to the item. Reduce it by 40% instead, see how it goes and what it does to the balance. Right now, I've stopped playing because I don't want to have to carry both the automed and the medkit. In effect, this change is a "deal breaker" for me. That may not mean anything to you, I'm one player, one customer out of potentially thousands, but will I be the only one?
Anyway, best of luck to you with the game, I'm out and it's getting uninstalled because it's not something I enjoy anymore.
I'm sorry to hear that's a dealbreaker for you. But if the assault rifle was so deadly at both long range and midrange that it made the sniper rifle completely redundant, I'd have to nerf the assault rifle so it was mostly a midrange weapon as was intended - even if it led to some players being annoyed that they would now need use a mix of assault rifles and sniper rifles in their team, and made them hate the game (and some would, because people rarely like having overpowered things taken away).
The same applies here. I hope you come back and enjoy the final version of the game, but I can't leave the game balance broken simply because you want an item that provides complete protection from bleeding wounds AND heals so well it makes the Medikit completely redundant. Surely the gameplay can't be that atrocious without having regenerating soldiers, else you'd never have played far enough into the game to get the Automed Unit in the first place?
-
On 8/9/2024 at 12:46 PM, Xeferah said:
I tried it several times, it should work for you too.
Thanks, yeah, I can reproduce this. We'll take a look.
-
15 hours ago, intuition said:
Now I also have a crash report for the case when enemy turn is processing and the game crashes.
It happens most of the time, when enemy turn is starting and the movement or attack of an invisible enemy is processed. The crash on start of enemy turn or during it happens on a regular basis (1-3 per mission). Until now I had just one mission where it didn't happen. Also to note saving at end of turn is enabled but I also had it when saving at start of turn was enabled.
Named log file is attached.
I saw similar cases in that forum where those crashes happened. Maybe this is related ?
bug_report_2024-08-11-18h37_gc_4.21.0_unhandled_exception.zip
Thanks, sorry to hear you're experiencing issues. Can you try switching to our Experimental branch to see if it's any more stable?
We'll take a look at the bug reports today to try and figure out the issue in the meantime.
-
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 on trying to begin a new campaign once you had switched to a non-English language.
- Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when the player opens an abduction tube.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if a berserking unit kills another unit that was about to go berserk.
-
We've now released another stability fix for Milestone 4 that fixes several more bugs and balance issues (mostly related to enemy accuracy being too high). We'll continue to collect player feedback and bug reports and tweak / fix things as necessary while we work on Milestone 5.
Balance / Gameplay Changes:
- Units now only rotate when suffering damage during the enemy turn. This avoids situations where soldiers lack the TU needed to complete their planned move after taking damage from enemy overwatch fire, as they need to turn back to face the direction they want to travel.
- Accuracy values for all aliens has been reduced by roughly 10% overall, and enemy Accuracy modifiers have been reduced to 0.8x on Recruit difficulty (from 0.85x), and increased to 1.3x on Commander (from 1.2x). Overall, this means enemies have roughly the same Accuracy on Commander difficulty, roughly 10% less Accuracy on Soldier and Veteran, and 15%-20% less Accuracy on Recruit difficulty.
- Wraith Accuracy has been reduced by a little more than the other aliens, as their base Accuracy was so high.
- Secton Psionic Triangulation ability now grants +30 Accuracy when active (previously +50).
- Automed Module now heals +5HP a turn (previously +25HP). It is therefore still excellent for healing Bleeding Wounds without spending TU, but a few Medikits are now required if you want to heal badly wounded soldiers quickly.
- Cleaner Accelerated Rifle is no longer slightly more accurate than the human equivalent.
- One Cyberdrone has been removed from the early Psyon terror sites / retaliation missions (so you now face 1 Cyberdrone on Recruit / Soldier, 2 on Veteran, and 3 on Commander.
- Transfer item quantities are now preserved when you switch the destination base on the Transfer Items screen.
Bugfixes:
- If the game cannot write to the save directory, it should now display an error screen instructing you how to set a new save path rather than just crashing.
- Fixed a bug where soldiers could lose a few TU after having their movement interrupted when spotting an enemy (they were being charged for the full planned rotation, but only rotate as far as was necessary to spot the alien).
- Fixed a bug where soldiers and equipment were incorrectly being recovered after losing a mission (which could cause soldiers to survive the battle despite their corpses being outside the dropship / recovery area).
- Fixed an issue where soldiers on roofs / higher levels could often not find a valid move path if they were being ordered to move more than 10 tiles.
- Fixed a bug where the Combat Shield would sometimes not disappear visually when destroyed.
- Fixed the Servitor playing a human injury sound.
- Fixed the Servitor's body not disappearing when destroyed.
- Fixed an issue where tooltips would spawn more quickly than they should in some situations (which could be quite annoying).
- Fixed interceptor evasive roll travelling further than intended if time was set to pass at 2x speed.
- Fixed a UI issue where it was possible to unintentionally transfer soldiers back to their own base.
- Fixed a bug where you could sometimes be unable to rotate the camera after loading a save.
- Fixed an issue on one of the Dockyard maps where there were some missing concrete walls on the water edge tiles.
- Fixed a purple error texture on the damaged state of some of the sandbags in the ATLAS Base map.
- Made the abduction tubes slightly shorter, so they fit within the shroud of a single tile.
-
2
-
On 8/3/2024 at 4:01 PM, Bernie22405 said:
This is how it has always worked in the game, at least in how I play. Reducing the automed by 80% makes about as much sense as taking any of the top weapons and reducing them by 80%
I don't really agree. The Advanced Medikit is the improved version of the Medikit, and it's better for full healing. The Automed Unit didn't exist in the first game and is designed to stop units bleeding out - very frequently a unit takes a hit and just doesn't have enough TU to get to a medikit before they die from bleeding wounds. That won't happen if you have an Automed Unit, and if your soldier is only lightly wounded you can just let the regeneration heal them.
In its previous incarnation the Advanced Medikit was pointless, because the Automed Unit was much better in basically every way. Reducing it to 15HP of regeneration still means nobody would ever use the Medikit, because it'll still heal pretty much any wound in 3-4 turns. Is the fundamental issue here is you don't want to have to carry both items, but you want the benefits of both?
Reducing a gun's damage by 80% would make it totally pointless, but it's not like the Automed unit doesn't still have a role.
-
6 hours ago, ThatDanishFellow said:
So, I simply want to say thanks for making this game.
I've sought after the experience I had as a child when I was playing UFO Enemy Unknown and I've never been able to satisfy that same feeling I had, playing that game... that is, until Xenonauts 2 came unto my radar.
I hope you keep up this amazing work and continue adding to extend the campaign.
Thanks again.Thanks, nice to hear it's brought back those memories
-
1
-
-
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:
- Units now only rotate when suffering damage during the enemy turn. This avoids situations where soldiers lack the TU needed to complete their planned move after taking damage from enemy overwatch fire, as they need to turn back to face the direction they want to travel.
- Transfer item quantities are now preserved when you switch the destination base on the Transfer Items screen.
Bugfixes:
- If the game cannot write to the save directory, it should now display an error screen instructing you how to set a new save path rather than just crashing.
- Fixed a crash on the Geoscape when certain types of missions spawned.
- Fixed a bug where soldiers could lose a few TU after having their movement interrupted when spotting an enemy (they were being charged for the full planned rotation, but only rotate as far as was necessary to spot the alien).
- Fixed an issue where soldiers on roofs / higher levels could often not find a valid move path if they were being ordered to move more than 10 tiles.
- Another attempt at fixing the bug where the combat shield was not being correctly hidden when destroyed.
- Made the abduction tubes slightly shorter, so they fit within the shroud of a single tile.
Milestone 4 Balance & Feedback thead!
in Xenonauts-2 General Discussion
Posted
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.