Solver

You're not doing anything wrong, the issue was with uploading the Linux version to Steam. I'm not sure how 0.34.1 got on there, if anything. But perhaps I should try again, the Steam tools have also changed...

I already play X2 on Linux, and it works fine despite the lack of official support. Unity games really tend to work quite well on Linux as long as they do not use any graphical features that are too fancy. DXVK takes care of getting the graphics working on Linux, while the core game code can be expected to work because it's .NET. Unity has for a long time targeted the Mono redistributable for .NET support, so that should work as well on Linux as it does on Windows (and of course MS .NET is also cross-platform these days). I would have released Linux versions of X:CE if I could. That was never possible unfortunately. I have the source code to the game itself, written by Goldhawk, but I don't have the engine's source code. It's only available as a bunch of libraries for Windows (I think Mac versions exist), not Linux, and only in binary form. Goldhawk never had that source either. As a result, building native Linux versions wasn't possible, not easily at least. The game is finnicky enough as it is, and only compiles "as is" with a particular version of the MSVC compiler, too. In fact X:CE was also the reason to keep a separate box for me - I released a small X:CE patch earlier this year, which required me to boot that box for the first time in over a year. This inconvenience is a major reason why there will probably be no more X:CE updates.

Start the game, look in the top right corner of the launcher, that's where the game version is.

If you're feeling brave, you can try editing the UI screen, it's assets/scripts/workshopview.lua. But the game is pretty borked if you try to play in 4K...

Some ideas for aliens that are, behaviour wise, a bit more interesting than "soldier with a gun" (of which you still need to have several types). Shield Drone. Something like the light alien drones, but stays close to friendlies, and can project a shield around a friendly alien in range. So you either fight the tougher, shielded alien, or try to first take out the agile drone. Heatlamp alien. No gun, but has a damage aura some 3 tiles around it, so it just damages all enemies within range, doing more damage if it's closer. Somewhat low damage overall, so it's not an instakill, but you want to get rid of these before they get too close. Dangerous due to their area of effect ability, their weakness can be low TUs or HP. Fire-using alien. Fire was very underused in X1. You can have an alien that, by itself or with a gun, causes fires, which would be fun due to the unpredictable spread of fires in some biomes, and generally being a completely different type of hazard. The second-form alien. Upon being killed, it produces a weaker form of itself, or splits into two smaller aliens, or something else along those lines, the idea being that it creates a new, smaller threat. Mobile shield robot. The alien version of your shield soldiers essentially. Doesn't buff anyone else, instead it's just a big shield that aims to stay between your soldiers and other aliens (probably said to be remote-controlled in-game). Unarmed, but with very high HP, requiring you to shoot around it or to take it down with concentrated mass fire.

I've also been doing just that in UFOs, trying to focus fire a single Andron to create a big boom. That said, it might be good to move the ability to another alien and decrease the explosion's power. You should prefer to kill exploding aliens from a distance, and you should be able to use that explosion against enemies, but it probably shouldn't be like setting a mininuke off.

I really like the idea of introducing more complexity and substance into the economy. It feels like all x-com games have a strategic economic management game somewhere, trying to get out but buried under other issues. In the original game, the economy is entirely meaningless because you can set up manufacturing for profit, and also because missions give way too much loot after the first few. In X1, the economy is not broken, but it's simple and self-reinforcing. If you're doing well, you get more money so that you continue to do well. If you're doing poorly, you have a limited time window to turn things around or else everything comes crashing down. Having alloys and alenium for production was good but ultimately irrelevant. If you were doing well enough to have access to the advanced items, you had enough materials. Manufacture components could add a lot, as long as they're scarce enough, and there's variability in how you get them. You could make it worthwhile to assault landed UFOs (which carry a higher risk) by making sure they carry some valuable components that are fragile and usually get destroyed in a crash. You could reward air combat success by having rare, difficult spawns of UFO fighter wings that carry valuables. And so on. At the same time it needs not to be too random, it absolutely ruins the feeling if you're just there waiting for some rare component to drop from a UFO. This is a good idea, but I think the main thing is to make sure resources, whether it's the usual alloys or components, actually introduce some choices into the game - which means different ways of getting the resources with varied risk/reward ratio, and having the numbers such that you usually don't have the resources for everything.

Try the http links again now (after clearing browser cache or in an incognito window).

I'm afraid you're misunderstanding, it's not about several dropships on a single mission, it's about the game having multiple types of dropships in the first place, X1 style.

I suppose this post is for Paul primarily (welcome!) - great to see a Discord server go up, but it should be mentioned that a community Xenonauts server has been around for a couple of years. It's not a big server but does have some recognizable people from the X1 community, so it would perhaps make sense to merge the two, or reach out on the old server and let them know that an official one now exists?

I pushed a small update on Steam (launcher version 0.35.1) that fixes the unfortunate bug with Reapers one-shotting vehicles.

Congratulations on your daughter, Chris! I imagine you're barely getting any sleep now and of course working from home is quite the challenge with a newborn. Also good to know that development is proceeding apace. Looking forward to V13 with what looks to be a fairly feature complete Geoscape.

Shooting at aliens should contribute for accuracy increases regardless of whether it's reaction fire or normal fire. Correct, X:CE allows suppression to contribute to bravery increases. Without that change, bravery would very rarely increase - the only other way is to experience morale events, and those are rare. In the course of a normal game even getting +1 bravery for a soldier wouldn't be guaranteed. This goes hand in hand with another X:CE change, a bug fix for the psionic combat. Soldiers with higher bravery are supposed to be better at resisting psionic attacks but, due to a vanilla bug, the effect was marginal. X:CE fixes the calculation to work as intended, so higher bravery soldiers should now actually be braver in the face of psionic assaults, and combat vets should become braver with time. Yes, you can probably abuse it into bravery gains for everyone on every mission. I never bothered fixing that kind of issue in X:CE. You can trivially guarantee maximum TU and STR increases on every mission, and significantly boost your chance of ACC increases. That is not how the game was intended to be played, but if you want to do that, go ahead. I don't even want to pretend to know the whole system. You're correct in general, both the Xenonaut soldier and the alien get their initiative score, calculated from the factors you list. Soldiers will, I believe, use the best attack that they have TU for, but I'm not sure. They calculate a probability of hitting allies and don't take the shot if it's above some threshold, so it depends on particulars like the weapon accuracy and more.

You can only replace existing sound files, there's no way to control any logic or do anything more sophisticated there.

Great news

Sounds like something went wrong in the installation. If you have the game on Steam, just use the community branch there - don't install the manual download from the forums. With a manual installation, things could go wrong, the Steam install just works. Delete the script cache under %HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\Goldhawk Interactive\Xenonauts\internal , then reinstall X:CE from Steam (use the Verify Files option) and see if it fixes things.

Option 3 is the most intuitive to me. When a soldier isn't in a dropship, it makes sense that the assigned loadout is the desired template and not something that actually depletes your stores now. It's the most user-friendly solution, preventing "losing" items and preventing the need to repeatedly reassign equipment. The big issue here is to make sure that's not confusing, but I imagine a graphical cue could address that. if a soldier is unassigned, draw their equipment with some transparency mask applied. It should convey the idea that the equipment isn't really "there" yet.

The most important part! Congratulations Chris, and get some sleep while you still can!

Sad

Maybe hold off on that and just drop the price? Combat shields have been limited items for a long time. At least going back to v7. Never crossed my mind that it might be a bug, and I actually consider it among the best minor changes in X2. Shields were very good in X1, and still are, giving them a cost feels fair.

I think the biggest issue is going to be objects in the grenade's path and blocking chance. It's hard to handle. The idea of checking for a path on the level above is good, but it's only an approximation. If you only use that, you'll end up with impossible paths, so at most such a check can be used for part of the implementation. Consider throwing a grenade over a wide, one level tall barn while standing next to it. The soldier is at X, the rectangle is a barn. +----------------------------+ | | | | | | Target X+----------------------------+ That means there's a path through the level above: +----------------------------------------------------+ | | | ^--------------------------------+ | | | | | +----------------------------------------------------+ | |-----------------------------+ | | | || | | | | || | v | | ++ | Target | | X+----------------------------+ | +----------------------------------------------------+ But the path is impossible for a grenade throw - a grenade can't make two turns at a straight or nearly-straight angle. The soldier would need to stand some distance away from the barn in order to have the possibility of making that throw. Instead, I think the blocking chance of items on the ground level should be (nearly) unchanged near the thrower and the target, and be (nearly) zero in the middle of the path. This is a way of accounting for the grenade's parabolic trajectory, where it would in reality be at its highest point when halfway to the target. Alternatively, you could try and calculate proper parabolic trajectories, but that's easier said than done.

Merry Christmas and happy holiday season to everyone at Goldhawk - your effort in working on Xenonauts 2 is greatly appreciated. Looking forward to seeing how it develops in the next few months

The issue there is mainly with the UI. It wouldn't be too difficult to increase the amount of soldiers that can technically be on a mission, but there wouldn't be any UI to support that. So as things are, 16 soldiers is a hard limit.

Ah right, that recoil is a penalty that should get applied to heavy weapons like LMGs. If the soldier isn't wearing a strength-enhancing armour suit, then the soldier's effective accuracy stat will be further modified by Max(0, (recoil / 100) - strength). Since recoil / 100 < strength for all vanilla weapons anyway, that's yet another bugged formula and wouldn't actually modify anything. New X:CE variables are documented, as for the old stuff, it's of course known, or can be looked up in any case, but it's not documented. There are probably a few hundred variables just in gameconfig/weapons/weapons_gc/aiprops files, and documenting them all accurately would be a lot of work.

Do you mean something else perhaps? There's no hpLimit (or hp_limit or anything similar) in that file. What do you mean by recoil? Accuracy? Scatter? There's no variable that the game calls recoil. Not even close, unfortunately. What you see on this subforum is all there is, as far as I'm aware. Frankly it's not always easy to figure out how something is calculated, many things in the game can have a ton of different modifiers. The best bet, if you want anything specific, is to just ask here.