Chris Posted December 24, 2019 Share Posted December 24, 2019 Hello everyone - hope you all have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year in whatever form you may celebrate it! Although progress on the project has been a little slower than we would have liked over the past month or so, things are still moving forward. The biggest roadblock for recent releases has been this bug on the Experimental branches where the game sometimes freezes up on the loading screen when you try to start a new game. This is obviously quite a serious bug but it has proved rather difficult to track down - and it's now looking like it may be an issue with Unity rather than Xenonauts 2 (it's an issue that occurs when we try to quickly load multiple Asset Bundles at the same time). We're still considering our next move; it's not an easy problem to solve. I've spent most of my time working on writing the research projects in the game, including the plot-related research that drive the game forward. Unfortunately this is something that requires a lot of focus; I can't write effectively if I'm being distracted every ten minutes (this is why I've not spent much time on the forums recently). I've come up with acceptable explanations for fundamental things like Alien Alloys and Alenium, and some of the key alien technologies - if all goes well the next build the early stages of the game will have the first draft of their research text in place rather than just blank space or bullet points! At the same time I've been doing basic testing of the tech tree with regards to the strategy layer. This involves playing the game but using the developer cheats to just auto-win every ground combat without playing it, so it primarily ensures that all the UFOs are spawning correctly and dropping the correct items that unlock the appropriate research which itself unlocks all the correct items and aircraft at the appropriate time. However as I am playing the strategy layer "properly" it has exposed quite a few issues on the Geoscape and in the Air Combat that I've now fixed, e.g. it was previously almost impossible to get beyond the point where Destroyers began appearing (they were just instakilling all your planes at great range), and there were still some missions floating about where powerful aliens were appearing far earlier than they should, etc. The rest of the team have been working on several features that are mostly complete but not yet functional, the biggest two being the Modular Armour system and the support for vehicles (the MARS / ARES one-tile vehicles). The coders responsible for these features are now off on their holidays but both features have already been fully implemented in terms of game logic, and we're now just at the stage where we're fixing bugs and usability problems with them. It's impossible to know how long this process will take with any given feature, so both systems might be in the game and ready to play with a couple of days after we return to work ... or we might still be battling through the bugs a couple of weeks later. Let's hope it's the former! The other thing we've mostly completed is setting up all the Kickstarter backer soldiers and portraits. This is a big task that involves a lot of data processing and quite a lot of code work to hook the properties of the custom soldiers up to the rest of the soldier systems that control "normal" soldiers, but it's mostly done - again we're just working through the bugs (like none of the custom soldiers having faces). I expect this feature will only take a few more hours of work to be completed. To conclude, I expect the early parts of January will mostly involve finishing off all these systems and hooking them up to the research tree while I try to fill in as much of the text as possible. That will form the basis of the next public build, at which point I will start working on testing the game as a whole ... which I suspect is going to involve a lot of map design work! 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solver Posted December 24, 2019 Share Posted December 24, 2019 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ruggerman Posted December 24, 2019 Share Posted December 24, 2019 Merry Chrostmas, and Happy New Year to all on these pages. Hoping that there are fewer Bugs next year, and great gaming to ALL. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coffee Potato Posted December 24, 2019 Share Posted December 24, 2019 Merry Christmas, and an invasion filled new year ya awesome folks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ruggerman Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 I hope that a new up-date will not be to far away?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alienkiller Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 (edited) Chris, I hope you and your Team had a nice Christmas and New Year Time with the Family. And I hope the bad Thing from the British Premier don´t hurt your Company to hard. @ Ruggerman: All we know is, that they are working hard on the new Version. Chris said already, that they wanna bring in many things which are still missing, esp. in R&D, Plots and such Things incl. Bugfixes / Reworks (keyword: Training Center). Sadly the Game have many Job-Sites left before it can go in Early Access State. So we have to be patient, drink tea and waiting. Edited January 21, 2020 by Alienkiller Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coffee Potato Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 1 hour ago, Alienkiller said: Chris, I hope you and your Team had a nice Christmas and New Year Time with the Family. And I hope the bad Thing from the British Premier don´t hurt your Company to hard. @ Ruggerman: All we know is, that they are working hard on the new Version. Chris said already, that they wanna bring in many things which are still missing, esp. in R&D, Plots and such Things incl. Bugfixes / Reworks (keyword: Training Center). Sadly the Game have many Job-Sites left before it can go in Early Access State. So we have to be patient, drink tea and waiting. What happened? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alienkiller Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 Only the Premier Boris Johnson and the new Parliament in the UK over Christmas and New Year. And that means hard times for all people there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Svinedrengen Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 56 minutes ago, Coffee Potato said: What happened? The best thing in a long time, BREXIT finally happened. Let us hope this is the beginning of the end of the EU Dictatorship. 47 minutes ago, Alienkiller said: And that means hard times for all people there. Wrong, it means good times filled with prosperity for people there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alienkiller Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 (edited) 51 minutes ago, Svinedrengen said: The best thing in a long time, BREXIT finally happened. Let us hope this is the beginning of the end of the EU Dictatorship. Wrong, it means good times filled with prosperity for people there. Yep BREXIT happend. The Worst Case UK could happen, because Scottland (the Moneymaker from UK) and the young Generation will go with or without Boris Johnsons OK like in the DDR. But back to topic. Edited January 21, 2020 by Alienkiller Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CaptainSPrice Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 (edited) On 12/24/2019 at 12:04 PM, Chris said: Hello everyone - hope you all have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year in whatever form you may celebrate it! Although progress on the project has been a little slower than we would have liked over the past month or so, things are still moving forward. The biggest roadblock for recent releases has been this bug on the Experimental branches where the game sometimes freezes up on the loading screen when you try to start a new game. This is obviously quite a serious bug but it has proved rather difficult to track down - and it's now looking like it may be an issue with Unity rather than Xenonauts 2 (it's an issue that occurs when we try to quickly load multiple Asset Bundles at the same time). We're still considering our next move; it's not an easy problem to solve. I've spent most of my time working on writing the research projects in the game, including the plot-related research that drive the game forward. Unfortunately this is something that requires a lot of focus; I can't write effectively if I'm being distracted every ten minutes (this is why I've not spent much time on the forums recently). I've come up with acceptable explanations for fundamental things like Alien Alloys and Alenium, and some of the key alien technologies - if all goes well the next build the early stages of the game will have the first draft of their research text in place rather than just blank space or bullet points! At the same time I've been doing basic testing of the tech tree with regards to the strategy layer. This involves playing the game but using the developer cheats to just auto-win every ground combat without playing it, so it primarily ensures that all the UFOs are spawning correctly and dropping the correct items that unlock the appropriate research which itself unlocks all the correct items and aircraft at the appropriate time. However as I am playing the strategy layer "properly" it has exposed quite a few issues on the Geoscape and in the Air Combat that I've now fixed, e.g. it was previously almost impossible to get beyond the point where Destroyers began appearing (they were just instakilling all your planes at great range), and there were still some missions floating about where powerful aliens were appearing far earlier than they should, etc. The rest of the team have been working on several features that are mostly complete but not yet functional, the biggest two being the Modular Armour system and the support for vehicles (the MARS / ARES one-tile vehicles). The coders responsible for these features are now off on their holidays but both features have already been fully implemented in terms of game logic, and we're now just at the stage where we're fixing bugs and usability problems with them. It's impossible to know how long this process will take with any given feature, so both systems might be in the game and ready to play with a couple of days after we return to work ... or we might still be battling through the bugs a couple of weeks later. Let's hope it's the former! The other thing we've mostly completed is setting up all the Kickstarter backer soldiers and portraits. This is a big task that involves a lot of data processing and quite a lot of code work to hook the properties of the custom soldiers up to the rest of the soldier systems that control "normal" soldiers, but it's mostly done - again we're just working through the bugs (like none of the custom soldiers having faces). I expect this feature will only take a few more hours of work to be completed. To conclude, I expect the early parts of January will mostly involve finishing off all these systems and hooking them up to the research tree while I try to fill in as much of the text as possible. That will form the basis of the next public build, at which point I will start working on testing the game as a whole ... which I suspect is going to involve a lot of map design work! Give me CD-Key and i gonna finish the game in less than 24h on highest difficulty Edited January 22, 2020 by CaptainSPrice Edit word Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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