Xenonauts-2 Version 0.13.0 (Public Combat Test) Released!

[Chris]

This new version of Xenonauts 2 is a free public test build, released free because it is still an early build and we don't yet think we can justify charging for it; full details on where to get the build can be found in this thread. The next update is due on Tuesday 18th July, although if necessary we will also release hotfixes for any game-breaking bugs encountered in this build.

This build cycle has seen limited progress because about half the team has been off on their holidays over the past two weeks, and the remaining team have largely been working on the strategy side of things. However the holidays are now over and the strategy progress will shortly start to show in the ground combat, so expect a nice big update in the next build! Anyway, more on that after the changelog. 

CHANGELOG:

• Fixed an issue that was causing significantly slower performance in the last build compared to previous builds - although the builds are still Unity dev builds, so even now will run a fair bit slower than the final game will.
• Shots should no longer be able to hit corpses (apparently in the last build units didn't lose their ability to block shots when killed).
• Miss shots should no longer hit adjacent crouching Xenonauts.
• Fixed an issue where the move path was not correctly showing the cost of uncrouching / crouching.
• Stopped the game showing silhouettes of enemies outside LOS.
• Fixed an issue where the IK wildly contorted the shooting soldier if you were shooting at a target less than one tile away.

As mentioned above, having several key team members away over the past two weeks really slowed our progress and the remaining team were largely working on the strategy layer logic or the merge of the strategy layer and ground combat. The merge is obviously one of the biggest tasks in the entire game but it's coming along well - we've now got saving / loading working on the geoscape, we've got units being passed correctly to the ground combat, and we're now working on passing the results of combat back to the strategy layer (soldier injury / progression, recovered items, etc).

I've also spent most of the week on getting the randomised soldier portraits working - some of you will remember the "portrait customisation tool" we showed off on the forums a few months back. We've now got art for all the different ethnicities in both male and female, and added extra professions so we can have custom scientist portraits and the like too. It's been a huge amount of work to do this (I've had to extract something like 5,000 image layers in all and we have had to write the appropriate logic to combine them correctly), but if all goes well we should be able to have literally thousands of high-quality unique faces in the game. Hopefully the results of this will appear in the ground combat next build, along with soldier models having the correct gender and ethnicity (again this is made possible by the strategy merge).

There's also a number of major new additions to the ground combat that are semi-complete that *might* make it into the next build too - local forces and civilians, multi-level LOS and climbing up onto higher terrain, starting the mission in the helicopter dropship, etc. No promises on any of them but we've got a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline that will be appearing sooner rather than later; I expect the next few builds to have a lot more in them than the last few did!

Please let us know if you encounter any issues with these builds, your bug reports are always extremely helpful to the development process!

[Sheepy]

For reference, the portrait generator preview is in the release note of ver 0.6.  Some players posted images of the test tool and portraits there.

[stepout]

I've had a couple of times where a soldier will fail a grenade throw and drop it right by his own feet, however, when it exploded the soldier took no damage.

 

 

[Chris]

Weird. I have noted it as a bug we need to fix that "miss" grenades are hitting adjacent cover though, we'll get that fixed up for the next build.

[thixotrop]

Two games so far:

- Grenades are still as weird as before: If an alien will be hit, the damage sound comes like a bullet hits it and it screams, then a click-sound as a bullet hits rock, then throw-animation of soldier, then explosion animation, then damage numbers on alien and scenery. If soldier fails and the grenade lands between his feet, explosion (mostly no sound then) and no damage in 50% of the cases but TU is spent anyway.
- The grenade-launcher seems to get the hang of it though, the cover could be shot over anytime. Maybe I was extremely lucky. Hitting the target or the its vicinity on the other hand seems to be a complete new concept for the Launcher-Solider ...dunno where he learned to shoot this thing, maybe shooting in the general direction of away was good enough up to now. *sigh*
- Reaper seem to love the UFO floor or hate outdoors. Or they aren't allowed to get out of their house-shoes as they didn't bring their outddoor shoes? However, they stay inside even when UFO-door and walls are destroyed by my precise Launcher guy. Does the "stay in UFO" logic for these aliens is too strict here?
- Dead aliens get damage number by explosions or strayed bullets.
 

And pictured issues:

- The tree-rotation problem:
This tree was visible/invisible with rotating the map as mentioned before. However, I also experienced that the rotation angle of when it is visible/invisible changes when ALT-Tabing out of and back into the game. Also, when the level height visibilty is changed with + and - the whole map changes the height now (this wasn't so before or?) and the visible/invisible angle changes too, so that the tree is visible/invisible at complete other rotation angles.

- Some tiles cannot be reached.

- Healing problem still exists too.

- Alien shot damaged street.

- I guess I still don't understand when an alien is visible and allowed to shoot at or not.
Afaik, red means visible by the selcted soldier, and orange that it is visible by another solider. But I have seen multiple times now that the orange aliens could be shot at with good percentages. Otherwise aliens shouldn't be visible at all as they were behind an UFO wall then. Is this related to the Alien-can-shoot-through-UFO-walls-thingy?
Here some examples (sorry cropped away the Alien Head Icons):

Red arrow alien was orange, green arrow alien was red. Who sees the orange alien when not this soldier, there is no one further to the left? Red alien is OK I guess:

Both aliens were Orange Headed for this guy. In general OK, although the one shouldn't be visible at all (see above), but shooting was possible with percentage values. The bullets were stopped by the walls then.

Only the left-most Reaper had a Red Head, strange but OK. The left-most Caesan should not be seen by anyone as mentioned above. The two on the right are OK, as the top soldier could see them.

- After reloading the LMG the ammo numbers stayed red:

And my log: recording_8.rec

 

Edit: Now this gets REALLY annoying. Again as I have finished this post here, I was logged out, although this page didn't say so, but I couldn't save the post.
Opened "home" in a new tab and could see that I was logged out. Had to log in again, copy my whole post with pictures and paste it in again.
I have talked with Solver about this in the past and he said this shouldn't happen, but it does for me. And it was now the sixth time or so.

 

Edited July 5, 2017 by thixotrop

[Chris]

Thanks Thixotrop, we'll have a look through this towards the end of next week and see what we can fix up in time for the next build!

[stepout]

Soldiers turn into white silhouettes when they are hidden behind cover and are either selected or dead.  I think it would be nice for that silhouette to be active at all times (when the soldiers are hidden behind cover), as I sometimes lose track of some of them.