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Xenonauts 2 - Version 0.0.6 (Public Combat Test) Released!


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We have just released an update to the public build of Xenonauts 2. This build is available free of charge because it is a very early build of the game and we don't think the project is of the quality where we can reasonably expect everyone to pay for it; full details on where to get the build can be found in this thread.

We've spent the last couple of weeks working on the various fixes and improvements to the game that would not require a major rewrite of the game systems. After this build we plan to take two or three weeks to rewrite some large systems in order to fix the remaining issues (more on that below) and after that build we'll be pushing forwards with adding new content.

CHANGELOG:

  • We've added the suppression system back into the game (mechanics explained below), although it's probably still a bit buggy right now and needs testing!
  • The game now has a replay / log mode that we can use for bugfixing, and maybe also for actual replays in the future. See below for details. 
  • There is now a graphics option panel, which is accessible via the in-game menu (top left of screen). Again this needs some testing and probably won't be 100% functional quite yet.
  • We've simplified the "manual overwatch" system so it now simply displays the intended shot you soldier wants to take, and you can either approve the shot or order the soldier to ignore that alien for the rest of the turn.
  • Corpses should no longer block movement, and dead aliens should no longer trigger the fire cursor
  • The "opt-in" message that appears when you start up the game has been made clearer, and the checkbox enabled / disabled states are clearer than before
  • We've made some updates to the accuracy calculation:
    • The game now correctly charges TU when a unit needs to rotate in order to fire their weapons; previously this was happening for free
    • We've removed some old "flanking" code which was incorrectly flagging adjacent cover as being in the line of fire when it clearly was not.
    • Adjacent cover is correctly ignored now when both the Xenonaut and aliens share the same cover; i.e. you can negate alien cover by running up to the other side of it.
    • Miss shots now only have a 25% chance (previously 100%) of hitting a unit when they pass through its tile, making friendly fire less common
  • Various small fixes to the control / interface system:
    • If you double click on a destination beyond a unit's move range, the unit will now move as far as it can down that path until it runs out of TU
    • You can now press spacebar to interrupt a unit's movement
    • Clicking on an "enemy spotted" icon now makes the alien briefly flash red
    • Edge scrolling sensitivity has been turned down
    • Camera rotation has been sped up
    • Fixed a small bug with the camera position after the enemy move
    • Fixed the Psyon Officer having a misaligned Plasma Rifle in his hands
  • Various small visual fixes:
    • Units now have a jump / climb animation for the small changes in height; however these are kinda jumpy so we'll give them another pass for the next build
    • We've cleaned up the game cursor by removing the "grid" effect around it, and shrinking down the cover indicator radius around the mouse to just the current tile
    • There was a weird issues with the lightmaps in the previous builds that is now fixed; hopefully the graphics are slightly improved for everyone
    • The Psyon Drone now has a black jumpsuit instead of being nekkid
    • The aliens were previously using "human" animations, now the Officer has his own animations (the Drone will get some for the next build)
    • We've trimmed and flattened some of the cliffs so they fit better within their designated areas
    • Burst fire shot delays are now working correctly, so fast machines should no longer see all the shots fired almost simultaneously
    • We've stripped some of the detail rocks out of the map to make it look less cluttered

 

Replay / Log Mode: This logs all the game commands and random number generation in your mission, and if you do a manual bug report (via F12) then it will be sent to our servers. We can then plug that file into our systems and it will play your mission through to recreate the bug. This should be MUCH easier than asking forum users to post reproduction steps for the bugs they encounter, particularly as you can now do this after the bug has occurred since it starts logging game commands as soon as the mission starts. Nothing except game data is logged, and the game logs are only sent to us if you send a bug report.

Suppression Mechanics: The suppression system works like in Xenonauts 1 - firing weapons at a target (even if they do not hit it) can build up suppression, eventually forcing them to lose all remaining TU and reduce them to half their starting TU at the beginning of the next turn. It is generally used to cancel enemy overwatch and to pin enemy units in place.

The mechanic is relatively simple: each weapon has a value for suppression damage, and if a unit accumulates more suppression damage in a turn than it has Morale then it will become suppressed. Suppression damage inflicted is modified by by close the bullet passes to the target; full suppression damage is inflicted if the bullet hits the target and this falls off to zero if the bullet misses by more than three tiles. It is also modified by unit armour - essentially by the percentage of the shot damage that would get past the target's armour (i.e. armoured units are harder to suppress). Weapons do not inflict suppression on targets out of range.

The only change to the Xenonauts 1 calculation is that the game now models how close bullets pass to the target and then calculates suppression based off that, whereas in the original game the suppression damage was applied to the intended target tile irrespective of where the bullets actually went.

 

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Following on from the changelog, some details on feedback and our next build. In terms of gameplay and performance feedback, feel free to post in this thread as I'm now going to close the existing thread we've been using for feedback up to this point (I think it will be confusing to have the feedback for so many different builds in a single thread if we carry on using it).

NEXT BUILD PRIORITIES:

As mentioned in the previous thread, our next build is going to be our final update that concentrates on polishing up our basic gameplay systems in that specific map against those specific aliens. We're going to take two or three weeks to rewrite a bunch of complex systems which will allow us to fix up many of the remaining major issues in the game. These are the key systems slated for a rewrite:

  • Input system - the thing that picks up your mouse clicks. It's responsible for the weird cursor behavior occurring at the moment, with the crosshair not properly focusing on the target aliens and multi-tile ground objects not being treated as individual tiles and so forth.
  • Line of Sight - the alien turn is hidden under the blue fog of war because it's not correctly being exposed during the enemy turn, so we need to fix that up.
  • Camera System - the Hidden Movement screen is hiding a lot of things it should not be hiding, so you frequently don't even see your units getting shot. We're planning to fix that up too.
  • Elevation - the height system causes various issues with regards to line of sight and line of fire, and indeed we've just disabled higher levels in the current builds (which is why you can't see the tops of hills etc). This should also fix up the problem where the tops of trees are blocking your vision as a player.

There's also a bunch of optimisation and other stuff we'll be working on, but the main point of this post is just to assure people that we're not ignoring the feedback from the community on some of the most annoying parts of the game (tree visibility / cursor behavior / etc) even though we've not fixed them yet. They've just been grouped together in a big bundle of tasks that require a more fundamental rework of the code that we'll be starting tomorrow.

After that is done, I think we'll have a pretty solid foundation for the game. The feedback you guys have given us so far has been extremely useful and I think you can already see the progress we've been able to make on the game as a result of it, so please do let us know if you encounter any further issues in this build or the next one. The next build is going to be the one which we publicise more widely, so the more stable we can have the game for that moment the better!

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Testing version 6.  HIDDEN Alien Movement and firing is worst than before.  I lose men and never see where the shots are coming from.  And so far in this build I have not had a single opportunity fire although the aliens have obviously moved from a previous location to new location and I was not given the opportunity to fire although I had a least two men who covered that area and had plenty of TU's left.  The combat screen shows I see enemy but I cannot see them no matter what I do moving the screens to new views.

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14 hours ago, Larry Burstyn said:

Testing version 6.  HIDDEN Alien Movement and firing is worst than before.  I lose men and never see where the shots are coming from.  And so far in this build I have not had a single opportunity fire although the aliens have obviously moved from a previous location to new location and I was not given the opportunity to fire although I had a least two men who covered that area and had plenty of TU's left.  The combat screen shows I see enemy but I cannot see them no matter what I do moving the screens to new views.

Yup, we've not yet started to address the issues with hidden movement or the camera (as my post above mentions). That'll be fixed up in the next build.

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Hello, feedback on v0.0.6:
- The graphic option panel works fine, the menu's contrast check/uncheck is better.
- Camera : speed is fine. Can't we have free rotation (with middle mouse button) ? Zoom in/out (with the scroll wheel) ? I usually move with the mouse to explore the map. When I use the keys, it's for smooth moves or because i need to let my mouse pointer on a tile and move the map a little to see something better. Actually, when i move with the keys, the map moves but the mouse pointer move too... I don't like that.
- You let us the option to choose the cover indicator radius: nice
- The game ran fine on my machine (i7 3770K, RAM 16Go, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 2 Go)

I don't understand why the sides of the two bridges don't provide half-cover... Or is it a cover indicator issue ? See on the attached picture.

Thank you for this early build and I'm excited to see the next one.

 

 

X2_Cover.png

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just gave it a go, not looking too bad for an early build, now straight to the issues.

Getting big freezes when i click end turn, after 20 seconds or so the cursor turns into its hourglass and a few seconds after that hidden movement screen appears, enemy turns occur and everything runs smoothly again.  This is on laptop running i7 4270HQ @ 2.6Ghz, geforce GTX 960 M.

tried to interrupt a running soldier by clicking elsewhere on screen but they continued on their original path, you could divert soldiers on the run in x1 would be useful to keep this in x2 for monkeys that cant find the spacebar.

Lots of other little issues but the OP seems to address most of them, cheers for the preview & gl with the continued development of the game.

 

Edited by Dead Dread
im a fool who forgot something
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Pretty smooth play now. Cover and accuracy calcs seem to work much better, I had no cases of insane cover gained by things not even in the line of fire. I kept losing soldiers to the "Hidden Movement" screen. Lost four soldiers last game without ever even seeing the shot being taken, only hearing it. But I hear you're working on that.

Still missing zoom. Rotation is much smoother. 

There's a bit of a delay for getting the turn to turn over. I click "End turn" and it freezes for 4-5 seconds before the enemy turn takes place. Not a huge issue, but it's enough time to make you wonder if you missed the button or something.

Win 7

Core i7-3820 @3.6 GHz

ASUS GeForce 970 STRiX

16 GB RAM.

Game running off of an SSD.

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Performance and bugs are on par with my feedback on last version.
Really love the height difference and rich cover.  They brings the map to life!

Main issues:

  • Sometimes cannot fire. Once my sniper cannot fire no matter how I switch soldier or rotate. (He recovered next turn and faithfully snipped the drone. Yay!)
  • Sometimes cannot move one square.
  • Right click when in target cursor should not turn the soldier; I just want to toggle the firing mode to see accuracy.
  • I am seeing the bullets and plasma bolts better in this version. Are they slower now? Still often goes out of screen (even at 2560x1440).
  • Both my soldiers and the aliens keep destroying the cover right before them.
    I am so happy when a single shotgun blast can destroy the covering rock.  My soldiers must have the most powerful guns on Earth.
  • Cannot see direction of incoming fire despite having 360 view formation. Lost five soldiers and only once did I see a shot apparently coming from black grid.
  • Four of them, including the visible one, is the last officer sniping me from beyond sight range. Or it may be a new bug - I can't see half the aliens in my turn.  They are invisible!

First new drone is already invisible. Very, very, very hard to target; only a few pixels work (and not the little red bits).

invisible drone B.q60.jpginvisible drone A.q60.jpg

Soon after, a sergeant decides to play the invisible game too, lasting one full turn:

invisible soldier.q60.jpg

And the first officer of course won't leave us disappointed.

invisible officer A.q60.jpginvisible officer B.q60.jpg

I got screenshots for three aliens, then I don't border to count.  They all remains fully invisible in our turn until they die, when they leave a corpse.  They are visible in their turns.
I toggled graphic quality in the ground combat with the new graphic option slider, before I move any soldiers. Not sure whether it matters.

Core i5 2500K @ 3.3GHz, 8GB RAM, GTX 660, 2560x1440, around 25 FPS at good quality.
Temporary drops to 1 FPS when I press the end turn button.

Edited by Sheepy
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Thanks for the various bits of feedback everyone, we'll look into them. Invisible aliens is a weird one we've not seen before, but the "End Turn" slowdown is something we're looking into and potentially may also have fixed for the next build on the 28th Nov (i.e. a week on Monday).

 

14 hours ago, agris said:

Can we get a command line toggle to disable the hidden movement screen until this is resolved? Or suggest a file modification/deletion?

Afraid not. I know it's a pain in the ass, but it'll only be fixed when the code is fixed - the reason it's showing the Hidden Movement screen is because the camera isn't properly tracking the alien actions, so hiding the HM screen wouldn't help in this situation.

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On 18/11/2016 at 4:30 AM, Gijs-Jan said:

@Moonshine Fox @Dead Dread The End Turn delay is fixed in the next build; as well as a general AI speed increase.

@Sheepy The visibility issues of models popping in and out should be fixed as well.

 

Thanks. That's fast!  Is it possible to add a motion blur when the screen scrolls (and perhaps rotate) to make it smoother?

P.S. I like the elastic scroll, just think that the scroll process can improve.

Edited by Sheepy
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