Xenonauts-2 Version 0.18.0 Delayed!

[Chris]

Just a quick post to say that we're not putting a build out this cycle and we expect the next release to be on Tuesday 13th March. We've been doing some re-organisation of our map tilesets and textures which has broken the map we've been using in the public builds, but our new generation of maps are not yet ready to play. Rather than waste the time fixing up a map that we'll be tossing in the bin in the next week or two, it seemed more sensible just to push back our release for a couple of weeks.

EDIT - we're now pushing it back a bit further; perhaps Friday 16th March?

For posterity, here are the features that have been implemented since the last build:

• Game Options now correctly affect the ground combat, so the sound sliders etc work properly
• Soldiers now aim at a target's upper body rather than their feet
• Soldier portrait now displays their equipped armour
• Shotguns and other pellet-based weapons now display "20% x 3" etc in the same way that burst weapons do
• Empty weapons now display their ammo capacity in red at all times
• Corpses should no longer display damage numbers from explosions
• Fixed a bug where units would take a hit and be suppressed, causing them to go into a crouched state - but would not crouch visually due to the injury animation interrupting the crouch animation
• Fixed an issue with the move path end tile not being displayed if you were only moving to an adjacent tile

These fixes will all be rolled into the next update along with the new map.

[Chris]

Unfortunately it looks like we need to push this release back a second time, although hopefully only by a few days this time. We made a change to the way maps were loaded about a week and a half ago and it very much blew up in our face; we've just been fixing issues ever since and we're still not quite back to where we were before we started changing the maps.

Ultimately this is work that needed to be done at some point so we've not actually lost any time overall.... but it has been so all-consuming that we've made pretty much zero progress on our short term plans recently. There is a build that we could release, but it contains a number of issues I'd rather fix before we push it out.

[thixotrop]

Take your time.

Better to have a valid version the community can test and report, than having test reports you can't really use because you have to change things that render those reports obsolete.