Xenonauts 2 April 2025 Update!

[Chris]

Hello everyone - it's time for our monthly development update on the progress we made in April.

Gameplay Fixes:
Over the past month our top priority was to release hotfixes for Milestone 5 when players encountered and reported bugs. This ended up being rather time consuming, because it turned out there were quite a lot of crashes related to rare occurrences in some of the new systems - but thankfully, the vast majority of these issues are now fixed (although we'll continue to hotfix any further bugs reported by the community!)

As we're heading towards the end of our Early Access journey, we also took the opportunity to fix some long-standing visual bugs. The most obvious of these was the bug where the interior walls of restaurant buildings on Terror maps would always appear pure black, but there were more minor issues too - for example, dropships / UFOs having ugly solid shadows rather than a soft gradient like on other objects. These should all be fixed in Milestone 6.

New Content:
We've also added new assets to the project. Progress continues on the final cutscene, with the rough sketch for each illustration now complete and sent over to the animation team that will be putting the cinematic together. We've completed another couple of pieces of research art (there's now only a handful remaining), and we've also added brand new models for the Cyberdrone and Heavy Cyberdrone that look better, have proper animations, and make the two variants much easier to tell apart.

Lots of new tiles have been added to the tactical combat, too. We've added the final environmental tiles for the ATLAS Base mission command room, and the Cleaner Base command room (including some updated tiles for the "Cleaner Device"). We've also added a lot of new tiles to the Soviet Town biome and we are in the process of creating our first proper test maps for that new environment, which we're hoping to include in Milestone 6 as an alternative tileset for Terror Site missions.

We've also added a lot of new tiles to the Jungle biome so we can create dedicated Jungle abduction maps - previously this biome lacked the tiles required to make the urban / industrial setting of an abduction map (whereas a jungle wilderness environment worked perfectly well for Crash Sites). The first Jungle abduction map is now complete and we should have all four in place when Milestone 6 launches.

Defender UFO:
A new UFO will be arriving in Milestone 6 - the Defender, a dedicated escort fighter that appears some time after basic Fighter UFOs. While less agile than Fighter UFOs, it is tougher and is equipped with a medium-range weapon that can target both Xenonaut interceptors and incoming missiles. As it's an escort craft it doesn't produce crash sites and won't appear in the tactical combat, but it should add a bit more variety to interceptions on the strategic layer.

Graphics Settings:
Finally, we've been working on proper graphics settings for the game. There's now sliders that allow players to control brightness / contrast / gamma, and we've evaluated the various quality settings to ensure that only things that actually affect performance are changed - previously the lower graphics settings would disable a lot of things that didn't actually affect performance, but still made the game look worse. We're largely done with this task; all we have remaining is to finish updating the UI with the new options.

That's everything we worked on last month. Thanks for reading, and I'll write another update at the end of this month!

[Skitso]

Hopefully you'll use the new soviet town biome to add some additional variety to cleaner intel mission too, which is currently western town only. Now that you have 2 urban tilesets, it might be wise go utilize them in more mission types in general?

Edited May 5 by Skitso

[skaianDestiny]

I like the idea of the Defender UFO. Hope we get more UFO escort types besides it too, including one that's contemporary with the Battleship as an ultra tough end-game enemy.

[pwd]

I imagined the fighters not leaving wreckage because they were small enough to be obliterated, not because of their classification as escorts. I think the Defender should be small on the radar so it fits in with this idea.