Hello. In december 2019 I started working on a WW2 modification for Xenonauts. I didn't aim high, it was mainly for fun, just trying whether I am capable of getting anywhere. I didn't have experience with Xenonauts modding, although I have been fiddling with games for almost 20 years. Whenever it was possible and not too hard to begin with, I tried something.
So I read a few topics here on the forum, downloaded some weapon mod for reference and started with my mod. I am no artist so I was downloading images from the internet. You can look at the result of a few days of work here:
Another picture - soldier equipment screen.
Video of two Spitfires trashing lone UFO. The music isn't ingame, I added it after recording the video (taken from here). Another fitting soundtrack for the game would be Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.
Another video, a Mosquito training rocket aiming on an UFO, while a Spitfire plays the bait. This one is a bit slow so the rockets are clearly visible. I set the aircraft movement speed to somehow realistic numbers, but the game isn't ready for that slow pace.
The player controls the newborn SAS, game starts in july 1941. I added some British weapons and few American as well. I wanted to replace the ballistic - laser - plasma - mag tree with all-ballistic tree, divided by nationality instead. The next two tiers would be German and Russian. Player would never have access to energy weapons or other similarly advanced technology and the game would have to be easier in late game to accomodate for that. I planned only two armour types: jackal (being just an iron plate or something, inspired by WW1 trench armour) and wolf (some advanced armour capable of absorbing energy). Soldiers would be dying more than in vanilla. Player would have to rely more on good positioning and reaction fire (which I enabled on machineguns). And swarming.
For aircrafts, base plane would be the Spitfire, with Typhoon being available for construction no later than in september to deal with armoured UFOs. Mosquitos would be the peak British aircraft, coming in three types - fighter (MGs + rockets), night fighter (MGs + extra radar radius) and naval bomber (torpedoes). With Germany joining the fray, player would be able to get Schwalbe and other aircrafts - especially their exotic prototypes would fit here. For troop transport, I chose C-46 Commando. Soldiers would be dropping into the zone on parachutes, so I modified Valkyrie for that.
Since the air combat of that time was mostly about machineguns/cannons, I was thinking about moving around the weapon slots. In vanilla, cannon can have only cannons, normal can have only rockets, heavy can have both rockets and torpedoes. Now how about moving rockets and torpedoes to the cannon slot (you chose either more, faster but weaker rockets, or one slow but hard hitting torpedo), then the normal slot could be for machineguns and heavy slot for cannons. That way, you can have both MGs and cannons on a plane without having to roleplay the reason.
As the aircraft speed would be three or more times slower, the game speed would have to be faster (so the player doesn't fall asleep), with more monthly paychecks coming in. On the other hand, player would need more bases (probably all slots), because the planes are slower and have lower range.
Why am I posting though... I was working on it for just a couple of days. I got it to an OK level, I could keep adding more weapons and stuff. But I realized that it's pretty much worthless unless I do a complete rework, with xenopedia entries, research etc. And I didn't want to do that. So I abandoned the project. Now it's more than a year and I am quite sure I am not going to work on it ever again - not alone anyway. I think it's a solid start and someone could use it as a modding resource to create something of value so here you go:
Basic download - all the xml files, gui, weapons, aircraft, ...
Colorized basic armour sprites - I used BIMP, a plugin for GIMP, to colorize all 3700 sprites for basic armour in a few clicks. I included some info in the archive about how to set it to get the same results. It's not perfect though, some spots on the helmet are red so it resembles a red cross.
