Jump to content

Build V18 (Beta Candidate) released!

Chris
 Share

Recommended Posts

Chris

Chris

Posted
Posted

Build V18 is our beta candidate. This means that it will be our first beta once all the major issues with it are fixed; so game-stopping bugs or major features that aren't working as intended. Our focus here at Goldhawk in the immediate future will be fixing these issues, and releasing updates to V18 until it is complete enough to be called "beta".

Just to clarify, even when V18 reaches beta status, it does not mean that the game is finished. It will be possible to play the game from start to finish, but likely will not be particularly well balanced and it will still contain placeholder art. It just means that that focus of the development team has moved from adding required features to improving the user experience and making the game as fun as possible.

Build V18 is at this status:

  • The standalones are available on Desura here (sidebar on the right).
  • Once V18 is confirmed not to have any game-breaking bugs in it, we'll roll it out to the Desura auto-updater too.
  • At the same time, we'll send it off to be ported to Mac / Linux by our porter.

In short, we're going to try V18 as a standalone first to see if it works, while leaving V17.91 available for download.

So, onto the changes / additions.

NEW FEATURES / IMPROVEMENTS:

  • More Maps: We've added about 20 more maps. There will be more added, but there should no longer be any crashes due to missing maps any more and the early game should be nice and varied.
  • Shot Path: When you shoot at a target in the ground combat, the projectile path is now shown along with the stopping chance of intervening obstacles. This should make the factors affecting a shot more obvious.
  • UFO Art: We've now done all the final Landed art for the UFOs, and the Crashed art for all UFOs up to the Landing Ship. One of the later UFOs still needs a painted floor and interior added, which will come in the next update.
  • Crash Site Auto-Generation: To make the early game less reliant on blind luck, there are now two crash sites auto-generated in the first two weeks, a Caesan and a Sebillian Light Scout.
  • Bullet Deviation: Lots of complaints about "unrealistic" bullet deviation over the past few months. We've improved this a bit (let me know if it works better for you), but the main purpose of this fix was actually to stop "miss" shots from having insufficient deviation to actually miss the target and ending up hitting them anyway. "Miss" shots are now unable to hit the target.
  • AI Improvements: There's been some more general AI improvements, but the biggest improvement is to Reapers. They don't mill around uselessly any more, they now properly try and eat civilians / Xenonauts.
  • Final Mission: This has been added in its blocked-out state. You can play it if you want, but personally I'd wait - it's not been balanced and the briefing screen explaining what you're meant to do hasn't yet been added :)
  • More Research Art: We've added a few more pieces of art to the Xenopedia. There's still plenty of missing images, but it's filling up.
  • Updated fonts: One from the forums: a333 has dived into the horrors of our engines and managed to fix up our fonts so they now display unicode characters, which will allow the game to be translated into other languages. We'll be thinking about what to regarding translation shortly, but it wouldn't be possible at all if he hadn't done that, so that's good news for everyone.

BUGFIXES:

  • Light Scout UFOs should no longer spawn without crews.
  • Large props no longer appear black on night missions.
  • Soldier equipment no longer vanishes when the soldier is wounded.
  • Soldier hiring pool being empty bug is now fixed.
  • Geoscape notifications no longer vanish if a crash site times out.
  • Projectile impact sprites are now correctly visible on props and units, rather than just on the ground.
  • Hay bales and crates should no longer appear inside the Chinook.
  • Corvettes should no longer give you millions of dollars (this should actually be fixed now).
  • You can no longer see through the doors of UFOs.
  • Pressing Esc on the Soldier hiring pool window no longer causes a crash.
  • Alien corpses should display correctly in most cases, rather than displaying a Xenonaut corpse.
  • Reaper Autopsy research project has been connected up properly.
  • Sebillian Guards no longer suffer from dwarfism.
  • When you load a save game, the game no longer notifies you about every workshop project you've unlocked.

BALANCE CHANGES:

This is mostly about the research tree / progression being simplified:

  • Autopsies no longer take up research time (they pop-up automatically after a mission) but no longer give a damage bonus.
  • There is now a single "explosives" research for each tier that unlocks the aircraft heavy missile, the aircraft light missile, the infantry rocket and the infantry grenade.
  • When researched, missiles (aircraft and infantry) and grenades are now available in unlimited quantities.
  • Advanced ammunition no longer costs Alenium, just money.
  • We've removed one of the interceptors from the game, as we had more researchable interceptors than we did weapon tiers and 8 researchable aircraft in all.
  • We've scrapped the Dreadnought UFO - the Battleship is already enormous and we don't realistically think we can make larger in-game maps.
  • If you want to discuss these changes, this is the thread to do it in.
  • Hunter Rocket turret is researchable as soon as you've built the Hunter.
  • Jackal armour now costs $30,000.
  • Corsair requires far less Alien Alloys than before.
  • Advanced aircraft weapons now only improve damage; like-for-like replacements are otherwise identical as you go up through the tiers. This is just to stop air combat getting overcomplex.
  • Laser weapons have had a damage buff because previously they were worse than ballistics.
  • Amount of Alien Alloys per crash site increased somewhat.

It is also worth noting what we are still working on for this build and still needs to be added before it can be considered beta:

  • Once the shape of the tech tree is more settled, I'll add the Xenopedia text for projects that do not have it. I'm chopping and changing quite a bit at the moment so it's a bit out of date in places too.
  • We need a "replace" function for the research tree, as when new unlimited weapons are unlocked you still have to manually rearm all your troops / aircraft. If an item is a like-for-like swop with increased damage and unlimited quantity, it should be done automatically.
  • I've been seeing invisible civilians on some terror sites again. I'll try and find that bug and kill it, though repro seems hard.
  • There's a bug where manufactured weapons are duplicated if you drag them to an invalid location in the Solder Equip screen.
  • There's a lot of very aggressive UFOs in the game at the moment. We'll make it so only the Air Superiority alien missions will actively engage your aircraft, as it's happening too much at the moment.
  • Seems some are still getting the launcher startup crash. We'll try to fix this, but there's now a LauncherFix.bat file in the game directory that will run the launcher without a video. If people complain about the launcher crash issue in the meantime, please direct them to that.

For comments about our beta plans in general, see this thread.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Chris

Chris

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Assonasitis - have you not been here for a release before? It can be anything up to 36 hours, and we're currently at 4 hours since the uploads finished. I wouldn't be checking this thread compulsively if I were you!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
thothkins

thothkins

Posted
Posted

I'm concerned that I lose soldiers to Reapers and they're not even trying :) Lots of items covered in the fixes to really improve thing.

Huge well done to a333! and it's nice to know that the second the release is there assoonasitis will be here to let us know.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Moonie

Moonie

Posted
Posted (edited)

Holy ****; a 4.5 gig download. This has to be Skyrim II. I hope you patch it via dropbox, or I'm going to have to upgrade my bandwidth. :)

Can't wait to test this baby *prays for a stable version*

What! version 18.1 already? Quick work Chris.

Edited by Moonie
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...