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Xenonauts 2 July 2022 Update!


Chris

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July is now done so it's time for our monthly update. I usually get to proclaim that progress has been good but unfortunately this month has been heavily disrupted, so while the project has continued to move forward we have not covered as much ground as I'd have hoped.

Why? Sadly covid has been everywhere in the UK recently and all of the team based in the UK managed to get it last month, and on top of that I also had to deal with food poisoning last week too. Seperately our Tech Director had a house-related disaster that meant he needed to take an extended holiday, and as we're a small team that resulted in a lot less working hours than we'd expected.

Although this meant we were not able to release Build V24 last month as planned, we are hard at work on it right now. There's been a lot of crashes to fix that have been introduced by all the new systems we've added since V23 but I think we've found and fixed most of them now, so we're now at the stage of adding and polishing the new content.

The biggest thing I've been working on this month is adding many of the terrain tiles we've been working on over the past six months or so into the game and putting them into maps. I've mentioned many of these tiles in previous updates but in V24 you should now see new (or revamped) buildings in various biomes such as the Jungle biome now having ancient ruins, the Desert maps now having trailer park-style mobile homes, a new type of barn and storage shed in the Farm maps, and a whole lot of new tiles in the Xenonaut Base Defence missions.

jungle_ruins.JPG

We're hoping to have the terrain tiles pretty much done in the next month or two, barring ongoing visual polish during Early Access. There's still a few base buildings that need tiles done for the base defence missions, and the Soviet Town biome is still incomplete (we're working on the buildings for it right now), and then it's just a case of checking through everything we have to ensure all the assets have the correct metadata set up etc. We've got a wide selection of tiles across a lot of different biomes now so we should have everything we need to ensure the game has far more maps than Xenonauts 1 did.

We've also been adding other types of art to the game too - a few new autopsy paintings have been added to the Xenopedia, plus the Stealthsuit now has its final painted art. The UI update continues to progress with the Funding Report and the Xenopedia getting visual updates this month. We're currently working on the designs for the Base and the Base Stores strategy screen, and hopefully we can start to implement them later this month too.

stealthsuit.png

 

There's not many new features that have been added this month because the coders have mostly been supporting other work. The map editor had become painfully slow due to all the data we've added to maps associated with the alien movement system (all the AI waypoints etc) so quite a bit of time was spent on improving performance there, and there was also work to be done related to the UI styling and functionality. Some of this is purely visual but other things benefit the player (e.g. the Xenopedia is now accessible in ground combat).

One thing we did add is the "tutorial notification" system, which you'll have encountered in other games - the little pop-up notifications that appear at certain points in the game to explain information. For example, the first time you get a bleeding wound on a soldier it pops up a notification explaining how to heal them. Spotting a door pops up a notification telling you that you can right-click on the door to open it without walking through it, etc. The first batch of these will be V24 once I've had time to write out the text for them.

So that's been the progress over the past month. Not great but not exactly terrible either. Hopefully next update things will have gone more smoothly and we can talk more about our future plans in more detail!

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Chris, thanks for the new Diray.

It´s good that the exisiting Parts get Bugfixed, Reworked or Refited and Stabilised as well as the Gaps get filled to make the first 3/4 of the Game fully playable / testable as well as the first Parts of the Endgame.

If you need more time for V24 then it´s fully OK and give me time too to finish some other important Projects, which get done between the Xenonauts 2 Beta-Testing.

Edited by Alienkiller
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  • 2 weeks later...

Yes that´s looking so. If my Researches are correct, we can make an fully Playthrough as Beta-Testers in September or Oktober with many cool new Stuff and the missing Parts implementet.

For an Playthrough in Early Access with last fine Tunings it will be next Year (like I thought) first in February or March at latest.

 

Edited by Alienkiller
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  • 2 weeks later...

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