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V20 Experimental Build 1 Available!


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Firstly, if you do not know how to access the experimental branch on Steam, please read the instructions (and warnings!) in this thread. All saved games from earlier versions (including experimental versions) are incompatible, attempting to load them will cause problems.

You have all been waiting very patiently with v19 stable, and hopefully the changelist below will convince you the wait was worth it! From now on we will resume a more regular schedule of updates, probably all the way up to release.

Obviously the major new feature here is the new Geoscape UI - this was a massive project hanging over us for almost a year, so it's fantastic to finally have it in the game; as I note in the change list however, there will probably still be issues with it we need to sort out (so please report them if you can).

There is a host of other significant changes aside from that, a particularly big one being an overhaul of the accuracy system in the ground combat missions - I look forward to hearing your feedback on this in the Beta forum. There are too many more to summarise, so I will just get on with the change set and try to answer any questions people might have.

Also note we managed to decreased the size of the installed game by over 2GB by compressing PNGs! This does mean however that the new update will be about a 1.2GB download - nothing we can do about that I'm afraid, but future updates will return to being very small.

Fixes

- Fixed positions of Moscow and Warsaw

- Fixed various problems with soldier names

- Fixed hopefully the last oversized sprites (Sentinel and Wolf armour with various weapons)

- Fixed soldiers killed on base attacks not being removed from dropship

- Fixed crash when sending out a partially repaired aircraft with 0% fuel

- Fixed EMP damage not being applied to robotic units

- Fixed problems with various tiles in the Industrial tileset

- Fixed Reaper Analysis project name displaying incorrectly

- Fixed certain Xenopedia project not displaying stats

- Fixed combat shields being hidden when used with the alien plasma pistol or various types of grenade

- Fixed various incorrectly set tiles in the barn tileset

- Fixed the "Rapid Fire Lasers" Xenopedia info not displaying

- Fixed incorrect alenium transfer cost

- Fixed a variety of problems with the way the Cruiser UFO submap was put together

- Fixed inconsistent "crushable" property on various farm props

- Reduced footprint of Valkyrie drop pod area to prevent issues with spawning in buildings (and to fit it in certain maps!)

- A crouched target is now harder to hit both when shooting at it directly or hitting it via scatter (previously crouching only affected scattered shots)

- Fixed AI being unable to target vehicles

- Fixed a variety of minor bugs with tiles in the Arctic tileset

- Geoscape music randomisation should now be more random

- Can no longer create a saved game with no name

- UFOs attack a random target in air combat (instead of always the first aircraft in a squadron)

- Interceptors no longer burn their fuel extremely fast when loitering over a landed UFO

- Fixed injured soldiers recovering using their maximum HP, instead of their adjusted max HP

- "Killed" soldiers that were revived at mission end are no longer listed as KIA

- Terror mission UFOs no longer appear on the map once they reach their target city

- "UFO secured" no longer displayed at the end of a successful base defence mission

- Melee attacks can no longer be made through walls

- Final mission: Fixed mission repeating, fixed victory not registering correctly, added placeholder victory screen

Additions

- Implemented new Geoscape UI style!

-- This is a huge change and a work in progress, so expect lots of bugs and presentation problems!

-- Every screen in the Geoscape portion of the game replaced, with completely new art and revised layouts

-- Base screen updated with new art for all structures, and blueprint style art for buildings under construction

-- Background artwork for various screens wil automatically change as advanced technologies are researched

-- The soldier equipment screen is still using the old background for the moment, new one coming later

- Fairly major changes to accuracy and shooting system:

-- Accuracy percentage displayed on crosshair should now be unequivocally the real chance to hit the target

-- The game performs a single test on this percentage, if it comes out as a hit then the bullet will now always hit and never be intercepted by props etc...

-- If the game rolls a miss, then the bullet is completely prevented from hitting the original target

-- The missed shot then scatters at random around the original target (including hitting the ground tile the target is in, without hitting the target itself)

-- The scattered shot also has a chance to hit other units, however there is a negative penalty applied to hitting them meaning it is now less likely to hit units by accident

-- NOTE: A consequence of this is units can perform reaction fire "through" each other, and they will sometimes hit comrades doing so. This will be fixed.

- Improved the way accuracy information is communicated to the player

-- If a prop is in the line of fire it is highlighted in red and shows the percentage penalty it will apply to the shot

-- If there are multiple props in the line of fire then only the one with the highest blocking chance (the one used in the accuracy calculation) is highlighted

-- The stopping chances of other props are shown in grey for informational puposes

-- Multi-tile objects will now only display their accuracy penalty once

-- All tiles from a multi-tile props are now correctly ignored when shooting over them while standing adjacent to them

- All the maps for both the Industrial and Arctic tilesets have been overhauled, with multiple new maps added to each

-- There are now 3 maps each for small (light scout, scout and corvette) medium (corvette, landing ship and cruiser) and large (cruiser, carrier and battleship) map types for each tileset

-- Each map has more variety in randomised UFO and dropship placement

-- A large number of new building submaps have also been added for additional level variety

-- Please give feedback on how you find them!

- Jetpacks have received a major update in functionality

-- Jetpack units can now hover in the air, they do not always have to land as they did previously

-- Flying units cannot attack, react or perform any other combat action until they land again

-- If a flying unit is killed it is immediately destroyed along with any carried items

- Overhaul of UFO AI for the Geoscape

-- UFOs now pick a target nation at random, then spawn over that nation, which should help reduce the prevalence of attacks on poor old Australia

-- UFOs that pick a specific target (terror attacks, base supplies etc) should now fly a slightly more circuitous route so they are harder to pick out from normal UFOs

-- Scout UFOs should now explore a bit more randomly

-- Implemented a randomised variation of the interval between UFO waves, so they are much less predictable now

- Aerial terror attacks

-- Ground Attack missions now have a chance to spawn "aerial terror sites" (this will actually change to Bombing missions in future versions)

-- These must be dealt with quickly, or the aliens will lay waste to the area causing a heavy national relations penalty

- Added ability to hand off crashed UFOs to local forces for airstrike

-- This allows the player to essentially skip very repetitive missions (or ones they are not able to tackle)

-- The penalty for doing so being that the Xenonauts will not recover any alien technology

-- A cash bounty is provided by the nation the UFO crashed in equal to about half of the value of UFO + crew if it had been cleared in ground combat

- Implemented Radar stacking so that building additional radars at a base increased the range of radar coverage, instead of the detection chance (range increases offer diminishing returns for each new radar, and caps at 3)

- Used a PNG optimise tool to compress sprite size for unit animations; saved around 3GB of disk space (!!!)

- All grenades and explosive charges should now have correct animated images for when they are thrown and on the ground

- Painted over tiles for remaining alien base rooms (Red Andron, Green Sebillian rooms and vents)

- Many new painted over tiles for Xenonaut base

- Added new animated art for Buzzard jetpack (Sentinel and Harridan jetpack animations coming later)

- New animation for Reaper attack (still a bit buggy, couldn't figure out why in time for this build)

- A popup has been added to list the items retrieved from shot down UFOs that do not spawn crash sites (i.e. fighters and bombers)

- Implemented new soldier carrying capacity formula; BaseCarryingCapacity (20kg) + 10% of soldiers strength stat

- New Assault Shield image

- Added new tiles and submap for the Quantum Cryptology Center

- Heavy Plasma Rifle renamed to simple "Heavy Plasma"

- All research descriptions for the Xenopedia are now complete (please report any missing ones if you find them)

- New tiles and submaps for the Advanced Laboratory and Advanced Workshop, these replace the Lab/Workshop when you research the "Base Upgrade" tech

- Various visual improvements and tweaks to the style of popup windows on the Geoscape

- New tile art for Plasma and MAG base defence turrets

- Huge improvement to rendering speed on night maps (and alien bases), hopefully this should resolve any issues people on lower end machines have (please report them if not)

- Xenonaut interceptor cannon based weapons now automatically upgrade, as with missiles

- Implemented the Plasma Charge, which automatically replaces the C4 Charge when plasma explosives are researched

- Stun grenade/rocket blasts now have the correct colour of gas on detonation

- New Xenopedia images for Alien Electronics, Directional Thruster Array, Alien Alloy Hardening

- The combat shield now also has a chance to block shots coming in at 45 degree angles from the direction it is facing (but the chance to block is lower)

- Implemented different vision cones for different Xenonaut armours: Predator has a narrow 60 degree cone, Sentinel has a 360 vision cone (caused by science)

- Added "Berzerk" psionic power to Caesan Officers and Leaders (causes targeted unit to go bezerk)

- Assault Shields now automatically replace Combat Shields

Balance

- Tweaks to morale system to make it more likely individuals will panic, rather than the entire team at once (these changes are preliminary, bigger ones to come)

- Tweaked jetpack movement AP values to discourage over-use of level changing when pathfinding

- Tuned MG/Heavy weapon recoil to make them more worthwhile for lower stat soldiers

- Dropships have slightly extended range, and more advanced dropships are faster

- Increased civilian line of sight from 14 to 18 (in line with other units) to improve their behaviour

- Increased pistol magazines from 6 to 9

- Increased hitpoints of combat shields and advanced shields to 200 and 400 respectively

- Increased radius and coverage of stun smoke to 4 tiles

- Introduced rearm delay for aircraft, which is a flat delay they must wait before re-launching after any mission in which they use weapons

- Alien weapons now have a significant accuracy penalty when used by Xenonauts

- Incendiary damage multiplier increased (this causes props to take more damage from explosives) to 400% (not as crazy as it sounds [maybe])

- Increased damage of C4 and the new plasma charge

- Decreased armour mitigation of Heavy Plasma from 50 to 25

- Decreased armour of vehicles by about 30%

Please post your comments on the build here. If you encounter any bugs please post them in the experimental build sub-forum of the bugs forum. I will post new threads in the beta forum shortly for in-depth discussion of the current Geoscape and Ground Combat balance, but feel free to post brief opinions here too.

EDIT: I just did a small hotfix to this build because we were accidentally granting the player some early items at the start of the game which they should have had to recover from a UFO. This will only affect new games, and will not affect saved games.

Edited by Aaron
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On the home-base screen in the top left info-window (the one with rotate) . It always says Laboratory, it doesn't matter if I have a hangar selected or another room.

I clicked around in the Soldier equipment screen and the game froze all left-clicks in All of Windows 8.

I had to start task manager and navigate by arrow-keys to kill the Xenonauts process to get left-click back.

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Is there a thread for reporting bugs in v20 experimental build 1? I accidentally removed a scientist from a project and can't add anymore. I can remove all the scientist but it won't let me add any back in. I tried deleting the project and not it won't let me add any research projects.

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Wow, new UI looks great!

I agree, I've been following the game for 2 years? now, and though it was the old dark cold war art style that really sold me on the project originally (beyond the obvious appeal of a faithful X-Com successor), I think that the UI has been improving by leaps and bounds in every aspect for a long time. That's not to say that the original style has been lost completely, just look at those miserable looking soldiers!

As somebody who loves that art style, I think that rewarding progression via the visual transformation of the base is a nice reward, almost as nice as when you finally get that fancy new armor. And it happens to make the game easier on the eyes... I was never a fan of the black boxes, and even though I would have loved lights at night, I am somewhat contented by the way that cities pop-out on the new geoscape, making it feel far more alive than the old one did.

Big fan then.

Can start playing again now that we're on the home straight...

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Thanks, this is excellent apart from the fact that I have a lot of things to do over the weekend :)

Preliminarily, the one thing I am not sure about from the changelist is the negative modifier to hitting other units with scatter choice. I find it very Xcomish that firing a burst has the chance to hit everyone, not just the target. I hope that remains in place to some degree.

I also wonder what the intended use of jetpacks is. If soldiers can not fire while mid-air, it appears that they serve no function whatsoever?

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Really enjoying this new build so far, UI is looking a lot better. I've played a five light scout missions, trying to see some of the new maps, and noticed the aliens don't seem to want to shoot at me at all. The only way I've gotten them to shoot me (barring reaction shots) is to move 1 tile away from them and turn my back on them, they just run all the time.

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I am definitly not a fan of the new carrying capacity. It's just too low. I am hitting the limit easily, even without any armor. Combining that with the fact that i will only get one additional capacity for TEN strength levels and can't even go above the carrying capacity, although that may be a bug.

Just think about it. The absolute maximum of carrying capacity you can have is 30. 30!! Thats nothing. I know you don't want people running around with tons of ammo in their backpacks, but when you make all advanced weapons only have that pathetic amount of ammo, you don't really give us a choice. I mean aliens even have unlimited ammo.

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