Xenonauts-2 Closed Beta Build V15.4 Stable Released!

[Chris]

V15.4 Release has now been pushed out onto the default (Stable) branches on Steam / GOG. This is the same version of the game as is available on the Experimental branches, but it's a "Release" build which means it has all the debug logging stripped out and therefore has better performance (the downside is that it's harder for us to identify bugs reported in that version of the game).

As you can see from the changelogs below, there were a lot of visual / usability / stability fixes in the V15 builds along with several cool new features. The game still starts to fall apart once you reach the mid-game but this build is certainly a big improvement over the V14 builds!

We are currently working on the V16 series of builds and will be releasing them onto the Experimental branches either in late December or early January, depending on how much work we can get done before the Christmas holidays roll in.

V15 Key Highlights:

• Undersuits: we've added a new type of soldier armour to the game in the form of an "undersuit". This is a vest worn under the normal armour that provides a small bonus to the soldier, which can be anything from a small increase in Armour to improved strength and mobility to a small amount of automatic healing each turn.
• Training System: the soldier training system has been reimplemented. This is now a passive system where each soldier at a base gains a certain amount of progress in all of their skills each day provided there is enough training space available for them to use. The rate of training is relatively slow at the start of the game but as you learn more about your enemies through autopsies and interrogation of captured aliens, your training becomes more effective. Provided you are taking advantage of this system, new recruits will level up much faster at the end of the game than they did at the start - which means it's not completely crippling when you lose a veteran soldier on a mission.
• Base Building Disabled states: it is now possible to deactivate base buildings that require Power. Deactivated buildings provide no benefits but also consume no Power, which means you don't necessarily need enough power to operate all your buildings simulateneously - if you want to run your Alloy Forge for a bit, you could temporarily deactivate your Defence Batteries, etc.
  • This system means you no longer require Power to start constructing a building. If you have insufficient Power to activate a building when it finishes construction, it simply goes into its deactivated state. This means you can now freely place down as many structures as you like when constructing a base, rather than having to wait for a Generator to come online before you can start building anything that requires Power.
• Alloy Forge / Alenium Centrifuge: we've added two new buildings to the game that require rather lot of Power to operate and are used in conjuction with the Workshop. Completing tactical missions now results in recovering Unrefined Alloys and Depleted Alenium alongside the standard Alloys / Alenium. These two items are bulky and useless, but with an active Forge or Centrifuge the player can run an engineering project that converts them into standard Alloys / Alenium. The buildings also unlock the ability to produce Alloys and Alenium on the engineering screen using only money, but that project is expensive and time consuming and should only be used if absolutely necessary!
• Updated Research Tree: I spent quite a bit of time reworking the Research tree so it has more choices and is better organised. I'm working on the principle that every research project unlocks something useful (unless it's an autocompleted project), and to give the player the option to either go deep on a particular research topic (like weapons) and unlock advanced equipment in that area fairly early in the game, or to spread their efforts more widely and ensure they are making steady progress in all major areas of the game.
• New Ground Tiles: we've now put the updated ground tiles in place for all six crashsite / raid biomes. Although there's still some way to go on the visuals the maps now feel much cleaner and crisper (to me at least).
• Ground Destruction: the ground destruction overlay system from X1 is now functional. Ground tiles should display a damaged or destroyed decal when they take damage, and 3D objects (like cabbages) that are part of the tile should also be destroyed appropriately.
• Engineering / Xenopedia Categories: both the Engineering screen and the Xenopedia screen previously became totally unmanagable once you reached the mid-game, so we've added collapsible categories to both screens to make them easier to use.
• New Art: a few improvements here:
  • We've added a couple of new painted backgrounds to the game on the Research and Stores screens, and we've also added a little parallax animation and ambient sound as you enter the screen to make it feel a bit less static.
  • There's new side-on art for the Accelerated Ballistics weapon family.
  • The Abductor, the fourth type of UFO, has migrated from being a grey box to a proper textured model.

V15 Gameplay Updates:

• It now costs 3 / 5 TU for a straight / diagonal move in the tactical combat, instead of 4 / 6 TU. This effectively means every unit can move 33% further than in the last build, which should make the combat feel a bit more fluid.
• Shotguns now fire three pellets instead of four.
• Fixed an AI issue that meant that the aliens weren't using their waypoints correctly and were running around way too much inside UFOs.
• Soldier stats are no longer capped to +30 above starting value, but attributes do now suffer from diminishing returns. 
• Soldiers that are injured now display a health bar over their heads, and their names are coloured pink in the soldier list.
• Pressing up and down arrows (or WASD equivalents) on the Soldier Equip screen now scrolls through the soldiers in that category.
• Additional info is now displayed on the Base screen to do with Defence Strength (for turrets), healing rate and training. I've set up tooltips to explain what each one means.
• There's some new tiles diagonal floor edges and cosmetic wall "ends" for use within UFOs. The playable space inside each UFO remains the same but they just look a little bit nicer.
• Pistol animations for both humans and aliens had some very strange behaviour that has now been ironed out.
• Reduced the volume of various sounds in the game, and reduced the default volume of the music.
• Androns have now been shrunk down to fit inside the new tile height. Their animations are a bit messed up as a result, but we'll get that fixed over the coming months.
• Teleporters now make a teleport noise rather than a metal door noise.
• Buildings on the Base screen are now sorted in a logical order rather than alphabetically.
• Added additional tooltips to the Base screen, topbar and Soldier Equip screen.

V15 Bugfixes:

• The ARES should now display correctly on the Soldier Equip screen when constructed.
• The desert roads that units could not move onto in the previous build should now work properly.
• 45 degree / 30 degree camera rotation should work work correctly.
• After loading a save, dead units should no longer display the red hostile target selection square.
• Alien doors should once again play a noise when opened.
• Sebillian regeneration now correctly heals bleeding wounds.

V15.1 Bugfixes / Other Updates:

• Fixed a crash on the strategy layer linked to soldier HP regeneration when you had a second base on the Geoscape.
• Fixed the AI refusing to move in tactical combat.
• Fixed a hang that could occur during the AI turn.
• Fixed newly constructed interceptors being unable to form a squadron with existing interceptors.
• Fixed a large number of the pink error textures that would appear on objects (usually damaged ones) in the tactical combat. Please screenshot any more pink textures you see in the missions and report them as bugs!
• Wounded soldiers now display their Health statbar and their current HP bar correctly.
• Personnel / Soldier screen now has a navigation bar that allows you to switch between the soldier management panel and the soldier recruitment panel, and will soon also include the casualty list panel.
  • Soldier management screen now allows selection of multiple soldiers and has buttons for mass firing, and soon will allow the mass transfer of soldiers to other bases.
  • Living Capacity and Training Capacity bars are now present on both the soldier management and soldier recruitment panel.
  • Sorting by Role and Status column headers now works correctly.
  • By default troops are now sorted by Status on this screen, with the soldiers assigned to dropships sorted to the top.
• Added a warning pop-up when the player tries to launch a dropship that has empty soldier slots.
• Stores screen "size" value now displays the collective size value for that entire stack of objects, not just the size of a single object of that type.
• New research art for the Accelerated Ballistics research project.
• Added new research text for Alien Invasion, Alien Alloys and the UFO Design Analysis projects.
• The Research screen has slightly updated background art.
• A little more ambient audio has been added to the strategy layer.
• Blood should no longer be white in some instances.
• All aliens now have purple blood again.

V15.2 Bugfixes / Other Updates:

• Fixed a crash that occurs when a Xenonaut is mind controlled.
• Fixed an AI hang that could occur during the alien turn.
• Fixed the Armour dropdown on the Soldier Equip screen.
• Fixed base structures deducting their construction cost again once building finishes.
• Fixed the game crashing at the start of a Base Defence mission.
• Fixed the game crashing if you loaded a save game where a UFO on a Base Defence mission was present.
• Fixed an AI hang that could occur when an AI unit moved through stun gas and was stunned.
• Aircraft now regain the ability to perform an Evasive Roll when you remove heavy armour from it. 
• Base Stores screen item list can now be scrolled.
• You can now demolish the Living Quarters building without getting a pop-up that prevents you interacting with the game.
• Fixed the Training values on the Base screen being hooked up incorrectly.
• Fixed several of the upgradeable buildings having the wrong image in their active / deactivated states.
• Light drone explosion should no longer appear pink (hopefully).
• Removed a pink error texture from the destroyed MARS.
• Fixed various placement issues with the Geoscape topbar on 21:9 and 16:10 resolutions.
• All maps now have a border of impassable black tiles, which means you no longer see things that are "under" the map at the edges of the playable space.
• Androns now have a better walk animation and a proper death animation, so don't just T-pose in the ground on death any more.
• There's now a better animation for the stun baton attack swing.
• Humans and certain aliens (Psyons / Sebillians / Wraiths) now hold pistols out in front of them, which makes it much easier to tell the difference between an unarmed unit and a pistol-armed unit.
• Added some extra / updated research text.
• Added new research art for Laser Weapons and Alien Magnetic Weapons.
• Scout UFO research has been merged with UFO Design Analysis, which is required for the future UFO projects to unlock.
• Alien Facility is now unlocked via constructing the Quantum Decoder (itself unlocked via Alien Biology), and the Alien Dreadnought has been temporarily disabled. The Alien Facility now has AI waypoints in it, so the aliens will not all immediately rush you at the start of the game (although most of them seem to do it anyway).
• Alien Facility mission now has more doors in it.
• Added placeholder art for the Alloy Forge and Alenium Centrifuge.
• Sebillian Brute textures are a bit less bright than they were before.
• Temporarily disabled the grass billboards on the Farm biome, because they look terrible in the built game for some reason.
• Fixed some z-fighting on the portacabin tiles on the Dock raid biome.
• Updated the double doors on the various Farm biome barns.
• Arid field ground tiles are now destructible.
• Various visual issues in the outer borders of UFO interiors have been fixed.
• Updated the text on the Region panic critical / region lost pop-ups to be more informative.

V15.3 Bugfixes / Other Updates:

• Fixed an issue where red error text flashes up in the bottom left corner every time the player moved a soldier in the tactical combat.
• Fixed an issue where teleporters wouldn't work in the tactical combat.
• Fixed the bug where certain role loadouts would become empty if a soldier with that role died in battle.
• MARS / ARES is no longer invisible.
• More heavily armoured versions of the ARES no longer use the placeholder Hyperion asset from X1.
• Attribute numbers on the Soldier Equip screen now correctly increase as soldiers improve their stats.
• Strength is now correctly increased by training.
• The engineering projects that require an Alloy Forge now function correctly when you build one.
• Shipping containers now correctly block shots entirely (previously they only had a 50% block chance, allowing you to shoot through them).
• Alenium Reactor now displays the correct image when constructed.
• Fixed some mis-set text in one of the UFO bombing run geoscape log anomalies.
• Sebillian Brutes should hopefully now fire their weapons much more often, as they barely fired them at all before.
• Base Defence missions have been disabled because there's a bunch of issues associated with them we haven't had time to fix, the most notable one being that you'll lose any workshop-constructed weapons or armour that you use on that mission. We'll bring them back in V16 once we have them working better.
• Soldier stats are now capped at 100.
• Updated the text on the Region Panic Critical and Region Lost notification pop-ups on the Geoscape.
• Unit dropshadows should now show inside UFOs.
• Gun Drones now cast shadows onto the tile they are actually in, rather than an adjacent tile.
• Fixed a couple of small issues with the floor tiles for the Scout and Destroyer UFOs.
• Engineering screen now defaults to the first valid project category rather than displaying all of them.
• The base defence turret upgrade engineering projects now have a clearer name.
• Desert, UFO interior and alien base ground tiles now correctly display the damage overlays when they take damage.
• Added a few more aliens to each standard Alien Base mission.
• Andron plasma cannon projectile now has a plasma explosion graphic rather than a standard explosion.
• Training experience is now gained much more slowly, and all attributes are increased via training at an equal rate. Your soldiers won't all be Colonels six weeks into the game any more.
• The relationship between weapon penetration and armour hardness has been simplified a little, at least for now. This should make aliens like Androns and the Sebillian Brute a bit less resistant to basic Ballistic weapons.
• The range of grenades has been increased by 3 tiles.
• The Accelerated Cannon (Aircraft) now consumes Alien Magnets to build like other Accelerated weapons, rather than Alien Alloys.
• Platesuit (Undersuit) now weighs 4 instead of 10.

V15.4 + V15.4b Bugfixes / Other Updates:

• Implemented a general fix for an animation issue that could cause a variety of different crashes during the alien turn, particularly when either the Xenonaut or the alien was using burst fire weapon or a weapon that fires multiple pellets (like the shotgun). We're hoping this will cut down on the number of unexplained crashes that get reported for this build and save us time in the long run!
• Probably (?) fixed the bug where shroud would sometimes stop clearing during a mission.
• Fixed a crash that could occur during the alien turn as a result of Xenonaut reaction fire.
• Fixed a crash that would occur when you tried to build an aircraft in the workshop when you had multiple bases in existence and no hangar space at the first base.
• Fixed aircraft sometimes flying the wrong way on the Geoscape instead of towards their intended UFO target.
• Fixed UFO hulls sometimes not hiding correctly after loading a save game.
• Fixed line of sight not immediately updating after walls etc have been demolished.
• Duration time of aircraft being constructed in base with no engineers now shows "no engineers" rather than 250 million hours.
• Fixed some soldiers having blank Armour / Undersuit values when returning from a mission.
• UFO outer hulls are no longer destructible, which should fix instances where you are able to path through them after they have taken damage.
• Reaper zombies no longer appear as pink error models.
• Fixed the closed abode windows so that units cannot move or shoot through them.
• Fixed some concrete paving tiles that would disapear from the map if destroyed.
• Pressing "V" no longer permanently removes the fog of war from a map.
• Added a little more description to the pop-ups you get when you click on a Geoscape Command Center to make it a bit more obvious what that system does.
• Added extra tooltips to various parts of the game, including the air combat UI, the new campaign screen, and the pop-ups when a squadron intercepts a UFO.
• Reaper zomies are no longer suppressable.
• Pegasus can now only carry 12 soldiers.
• Arid grass ground tiles now display the destruction overlays.
• Fixed some z-fighting on the outer wall of one of the Farm barns.