Xenonauts-2 Closed Beta V21 Released! (Experimental Branch)

[Chris]

Closed Beta Build V21 has now been released on Steam and GOG. Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here).

This is our first update in a couple of months so there's a fair amount of new stuff in here, but frustratingly a lot of the work we've done in the past few weeks isn't quite ready to be included. You'll be seeing that in V22, and I'll cover what those things are in the August Development Update.

Apologies for the delays getting this build out, as we had some issues regarding load times. This only affected development builds (as opposed to "release" builds which the final game will be) but it basically made the game unplayable, which is why we had to push this release back into this week. 

Key Highlights:

• New UI (Main Menu & Settings): we've spent a long time this month implementing the new UI for the Main Menu / Settings Menu screen, and all their sub-panels (Settings, Save Game, Load Game, New Campaign, etc). What you see now is essentially the final implemention of those panels - it has our new UI style, much improved usability, and we've updated the various UI sounds as well. Overall I think it looks far more polished than before, and I'm looking forward to rolling out that UI style to the rest of the game!
• Early Game Structure (Cleaner Base): we've changed the structure of the early game a bit. The idea is that you're fighting the mysterious Cleaners at the start of the game, and you have to do a bit of research (or wait a couple of months) to begin the war against the aliens.
  • Various Cleaner missions are now spawned on the Geoscape in the early parts of the game and the player must gain intelligence from them to discover the location of the Cleaner base - and once destroyed, the Cleaner missions stop. You get 15% intelligence for each mission you complete, plus 25% from the Cleaner Autopsy and 50% from the Cleaner Interrogation. Right now all the Cleaner missions are just standard deathmatch missions but we'll be adding more variants in the next build (unlike when you're fighting the aliens, the Cleaners have numerical superiority and can call in reinforcements etc, allowing some different mission objectives).
    • This means you'll be doing between 3 and 8 extra Cleaner-related mission per campaign, including the Cleaner Base assault itself.
  • Your starting funding is significantly reduced. It is increased back to "normal" levels after you destroy the Cleaner Base.
  • The start of the alien invasion has been delayed a couple of months, and the starting interceptor must be researched. There's UFOs flying around on the map in the first couple of months that can be shot down after the interceptor is researched, but they're not causing relations damage.
• Advanced Dropship Art: the artwork for the two advanced dropships is now in the game. The dropship tiles are in the tactical combat mission, and the art is on the Aircraft screen and the background of the Soldier Equip screen on the strategy layer. One piece of research art is complete, but we're still waiting on the research art for the most advanced dropship.
• AI Improvements: I'm not sure how obvious this will be in the missions yet, but the AI is now much better at understanding the battlefield and how to use its own equipment. Hopefully at the very least it'll do less idiotic stuff, and as we tweak the gameplay settings / balance the game in the future you'll see more and more benefits from this work.
• Landed UFOs: Landed UFO missions have supposedly been in the game for ages, but weren't actually active. We fixed that up and cleaned up a number of bugs with the missions too.
• Soldier medals finished: The soldier medals are set up and should now all be functional.
• Combat Ambient Sound: each of the tactical combat biomes now has some ambient sound to accompany it, which adds a bit more atmosphere. There's a new ambient sound slider in the settings menu that allows you to turn this off if you find it irritating.
• Difficulty settings: we've implemented various options for the difficulty settings, but we've not yet activated them (all difficulty settings are identical at the moment). We've got to balance the game before we start balancing difficulty settings!
• Directional sound: most sound in the game is now run through the Unity directional sound system. This means we'll be able to play sounds based on what is currently on screen (e.g. fire), and that we can set a "hearing range" for various sounds based both on the camera position and whether your soldiers are nearby. These new sounds will be added in the next build, but in the meantime any unusual sound behaviour will almost certainly be caused by these changes - so please report any sound that isn't working properly any more!

Minor Changes:

• There's some extra research text for a couple of the early research projects, and I've added the correct art to various armour-related research projects.
• There's new artwork for the Gauss weapons. The new weapons should be much more easily distinguished from one another.
• Strategy - we've significantly improved the performance of the Geoscape. The game should now be pretty smooth except when things (i.e. UFOs) are spawning in, as this is a different optimisation issue we need to look at. Once that is also fixed, the Geoscape shouldn't have any performance problems at all.
• Combat - you can now cancel the camera panning to a newly spotted alien by pressing spacebar.
• Combat - we've improved the smoothness of changing camera visual level.
• Combat - we've added subtle dropshadows to the dropshadows and UFOs. This should make them look less "floaty".
• Combat - I've zeroed out the Initiative modifiers on weapons.
• Combat - Idle animations for combatants now have randomised times, so units don't all play their idle animations in sync with one another.

Bugfixes:

• Units under mind control were not being returned to the player.
• Fixed an issue where the tactical selection box UI could get hidden if you switched between levels.
• Fixed an issue where you couldn't transfer items from your third (or beyond) base to other bases.

As always, please let us know if you encounter any bugs by posting them up on the Bug Reporting subforums, as we'll release a hotfix if necessary.

[Alienkiller]

Thanks Chris.

From what I can read with the Major- and Minor-Changes / Upgrades it is a medium Upgrade for Testing.

Hope that in V22 and V23 we get more cool Stuff back which get already testet (Outposts, Alien-Space-Station etc.) and is atm under Upgrade / Rework / Refit.

 

[odizzido]

Lots of neat stuff in there