Xenonauts 2 August 2024 Update!

[Chris]

Hello everyone - hope you all had a good August. Here's our monthly update on what the team here at Goldhawk have been working on.

Programming:
This month our technical director spent much of his month on honeymoon, and the rest of it fixing the trickier bugs discovered in Milestone 4 by the community. Our other senior programmer split his time between bugfixes and working on our updated internal game editor (mentioned in last month's update), which meant we only had one programmer available to work on feature implementation.

Aside from the weekly stability fixes we've released for Milestone 4 and various small usability changes / AI improvements, we added a few useful gameplay features to our upcoming Milestone 5 update. One was a much-requested update to the item sale price system, allowing sale prices to slowly regain lost value as time passes, and another was expanded options for "difficult terrain" which makes it more costly for soldiers (but not vehicles) to walk through and crush plants like hay. This may allow things such as shallow water that can be waded through on the Jungle maps, making the different biomes a bit more distinct from one another.

Invasion Phases:
I've spent a lot of time this month on the new "Invasion Phase" system. This divides the alien invasion into five escalating phases, with a narrative event and some artwork and a short conversation with the Operations Director and Chief Scientist at the start of each one.

The goal here is to tie the lore together and explain how the invasion is escalating, what the aliens are doing differently and how the world is reacting to it. It also allows us to more clearly explain the shifting role of the Xenonauts thoughout the conflict, starting as an clandestine organisation fighting a secret war against an unknown enemy and ending as an elite military organisation leading the fight against a full-scale alien invasion.

This coming month I'll be experimenting with several mechanical changes that we're hoping to tie to the Phase System, making the Geoscape mechanics a bit less static throughout the campaign. I'm quite excited about these, but I also don't want to talk about them yet in case I disappoint someone - they're still at the prototype phase, and could be changed or abandoned entirely based on playtesting. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this next month!

Other:
Other areas of the game continued to progress over the past month. We partnered up with a couple of new illustrators, one of whom painted the new "Funding Report" artwork at the top of the post, and the other is working on environment concepts for the tactical combat. We've also added lots of small things like some new 3D weapon models, some updated textures for certain alien combatants, and new tactical biome ambient sounds.

That's everything for this month - thanks for reading!

[gG-Unknown]

"Invasion Phase" system:

- great. I have described "Chapter system" months ago, which works exactly as You desribed "Invasion Phase" include added art and communication towards player, perhaps the seed get planted. :-)

- another art hands definately positive news. You could use AI art as base, then fix it by hand, efficient production.

"Funding Report" artwork - it keeps style of mystery. Nice balance of familiar silhouettes and unknown silhouettes. AI can do drawing, but the artist comes with idea.

 

Milestone 5 release date ?

[skaianDestiny]

10 hours ago, gG-Unknown said:

- another art hands definately positive news. You could use AI art as base, then fix it by hand, efficient production.

Please no LLM-generated ""artwork"".

[odizzido]

That's nice artwork there. And having possible changes to the geoscape sounds pretty good. If your ideas work out that would be pretty cool.

There is another of these types of games that was always pretty buggy and iffy, but had some fun concepts and that's the UFO:Aftermath/aftershock series. In aftermath there was the alien biomass growing across the planet mid way through you had to push back which was pretty nice....and in aftershock there was the whole resource linking game on the geoscape which could be optimised and provided reasons to go on missions beyond them just being there.

 

I know this is kinda outside your design, but I just wanted to mention the idea of changing how the accuracy works in this game again. I don't recall reading anything saying it has changed since 2021 when I play tested a little so I wish to illustrate my ideal system and I will hope you consider trying it out. I think it would significantly increase my enjoyment of the game. Now enjoy my MS paint skills:

 

 

edit----------

I just wanted to say I understand why you did things that way you did in the first game....but I was very much hoping that since you're on a 3D engine now you could give it a little bit more of a realistic solution

Edited September 5 by odizzido

[Chris]

On 9/5/2024 at 4:03 AM, odizzido said:

That's nice artwork there. And having possible changes to the geoscape sounds pretty good. If your ideas work out that would be pretty cool.

There is another of these types of games that was always pretty buggy and iffy, but had some fun concepts and that's the UFO:Aftermath/aftershock series. In aftermath there was the alien biomass growing across the planet mid way through you had to push back which was pretty nice....and in aftershock there was the whole resource linking game on the geoscape which could be optimised and provided reasons to go on missions beyond them just being there.

 

I know this is kinda outside your design, but I just wanted to mention the idea of changing how the accuracy works in this game again. I don't recall reading anything saying it has changed since 2021 when I play tested a little so I wish to illustrate my ideal system and I will hope you consider trying it out. I think it would significantly increase my enjoyment of the game. Now enjoy my MS paint skills:

 

 

edit----------

I just wanted to say I understand why you did things that way you did in the first game....but I was very much hoping that since you're on a 3D engine now you could give it a little bit more of a realistic solution

Yeah. That's the Valkyria Chronicles / Phoenix Point accuracy system, right? We tested it way back in the olden days of early X2 and we didn't like it. Any time you're basing hit chances on the actual 3d collision meshes of 3d objects rather than an abstracted "cover value", cover values because unpredictable.

Everything works fine if you're shooting in a straight line - shots are more accurate if you're closer, less accurate if you're further away. But unless you're in a world made of cubes, taking one step to the left or right can dramatically affect the shot hit chance because an irregular part of one of the intervening objects (like a branch on a tree) may be added or removed to the fire path. Same is true for crouching, it can have a dramatic and unpredictable effect on hit chance.

The problem is that this means that every soldier move involves using the preview mode to search half a dozen nearby tiles for the best hit chance on a particular enemy. Whereas in an abstracted system you know getting closer increases hit chance, and "flanking" to negate cover increases hit chance, and you can very easily deduce the pros and cons of moving to any given tile. The current system isn't perfect by any means but it is much snappier than a 3d system.

Also, the final image you linked isn't quite right - the game only uses only the highest cover value from all intervening cover to prevent that problem occurring.

[gG-Unknown]

2 hours ago, Chris said:

Also, the final image you linked isn't quite right - the game only uses only the highest cover value from all intervening cover to prevent that problem occurring.

This fact need to bee better translated  to  game UI.

 

[Skitso]

2 hours ago, Chris said:

Whereas in an abstracted system you know getting closer increases hit chance, and "flanking" to negate cover increases hit chance, and you can very easily deduce the pros and cons of moving to any given tile. The current system isn't perfect by any means but it is much snappier than a 3d system.

I started a thread about the issues I have with the cover system few weeks ago where I wrote this: 

"While I think the cover system Xenonauts 2 currently has is elegant and works fine, there's one critical issue that really brings the tactical game down.

The issue is that you don't need to use a cover to be in cover. It's completely irrelevant if you are hunkering behind a waist high concrete wall or if the said concrete wall just happens to be in between you and the shooter. It just doesn't make sense and makes tactical choises too easy. It just doesn't matter that much where you move your units, as there's almost always some cover in the line of fire (which means you are as good as in cover anyways)

Proposition: kneeling next to a cover provides double kneeling buff, kneeling without a cover might also need to be debuffed so players really feel the need to find a cover."

Any comment regarding this?

 

 

[Chris]

On 9/28/2024 at 12:30 PM, Skitso said:

I started a thread about the issues I have with the cover system few weeks ago where I wrote this: 

"While I think the cover system Xenonauts 2 currently has is elegant and works fine, there's one critical issue that really brings the tactical game down.

The issue is that you don't need to use a cover to be in cover. It's completely irrelevant if you are hunkering behind a waist high concrete wall or if the said concrete wall just happens to be in between you and the shooter. It just doesn't make sense and makes tactical choises too easy. It just doesn't matter that much where you move your units, as there's almost always some cover in the line of fire (which means you are as good as in cover anyways)

Proposition: kneeling next to a cover provides double kneeling buff, kneeling without a cover might also need to be debuffed so players really feel the need to find a cover."

Any comment regarding this?

 

I don't really want to get into a long discussion about it in this thread, but I'm not sure I see the problem? I think the XCOM system is pretty dumb where an object only offers protection if you're within a meter of it.

If the shooter and target are in a straight line, it doesn't actually matter where the cover is along that line in terms of how much of the target is obscured. Broadly, the reason you'd want to get closer to it (both in the game and in real life) is because then the object offers protection from incoming shots in a much wider angle than if you were several meters away from it (when it's only good from attacks from directly in front of you). But that's already modelled in the game, I know the current system isn't perfect but I think it works pretty well within the limitations of an abstracted / non-3d system.

[Skitso]

6 hours ago, Chris said:

I don't really want to get into a long discussion about it in this thread, but I'm not sure I see the problem? I think the XCOM system is pretty dumb where an object only offers protection if you're within a meter of it.

If the shooter and target are in a straight line, it doesn't actually matter where the cover is along that line in terms of how much of the target is obscured. Broadly, the reason you'd want to get closer to it (both in the game and in real life) is because then the object offers protection from incoming shots in a much wider angle than if you were several meters away from it (when it's only good from attacks from directly in front of you). But that's already modelled in the game,

I replied in discord to not clutter this thread with off-topic

Edited September 30 by Skitso