Chris

Hello everyone - hope you all had a good Christmas! We've now reached the end of January, which means it's time for another development update. It's unusually long because it covers both December and January! Milestone 7 & Full Release: We're almost entirely focused on our upcoming Milestone 7 update these days. As many readers already know, this is the update that will become our full 1.0 release when Xenonauts 2 leaves Early Access. We're not yet ready to confirm our planned release date, but we've locked in an internal target and our publisher (Hooded Horse) will be making the full announcement once the trailer and marketing are ready to go! We'll hopefully be releasing the first version of Milestone 7 onto the Experimental branches for testing next week. I've just finished writing up the 5,000-word changelog for the initial Experimental release, and there's already a lot of good stuff in there - despite having a shorter development cycle than Milestone 5 or 6, it should still be a fairly chunky update. We're looking forward to sharing it with everyone. However, the Experimental release is subject to stability - we're currently working on fixing some critical bugs that make the game unplayable, so unfortunately we don't yet know if there are other game-breaking bugs lurking deeper into the campaign. If there are, we may need to push the release back while we address them. Fingers crossed for next week, though. Strategy UI Backgrounds & Interceptor Paperdoll: I'm pleased to say the updated interceptor art on the Aircraft screen is now fully implemented, which means you see the aircraft art update and change as you customise the loadouts of the planes. The updated strategy UI background art that upgrades and changes as you progress through the research tree should also be complete for the Experimental release next week, as we're now working on the last variant of the final UI screen. I think these updates will be the most noticeable part of the update for most people - they sound like small things when written out, but I think they do a lot to make the game feel more reactive and immersive. Performance Optimisation: A large chunk of programming time over the past couple of months has been spent on improving the performance of the game, and we've made substantial improvements in a lot of different areas - faster loading times on strategy and tactical combat, reduced slowdown on the strategy layer when UFOs spawn on the Geoscape, improved AI turn times during the tactical combat, and speed improvements that should stop explosions and autosaves locking up the tactical combat for 1-2 seconds (the autosave improvements will probably make Iron Man mode feel a lot better). There are a few other areas we wanted to optimise, but we're on a tight schedule so we'll be moving onto other tasks instead (unless community feedback suggests there are still serious performance problems in particular areas). Unfortunately, the downside of all these improvements is that optimisation work frequently introduces bugs to the game - indeed, it's part of the reason for the critical bugs we're currently working on fixing. Ironing out any of these newly introduced issues is going to be an important part of the Milestone 7 testing cycle. Praetorians & Alien Bio-Cannon: We've now finished adding a new rank of elite Psyons / Sebillians / Wraiths that appear on the hardest missions, acting as bodyguards for Eternals. The 3d models for these "Praetorians" have now been completed and set up in the game, and we've finished the big reshuffle of alien ranks required to make this happen (as "Praetorians" already existed in the game, we've had to demote the existing Praetorians to be Elites, and the existing Elites to be a newly-created "Warrior" rank). We've also finished setting up an improved version of the Mantid Alien Bio-Rifle, which is the weapon that spawns Symbiotes that previously disappeared halfway through the campaign because it posed little threat to heavy armour. The new Alien Bio-Cannon does increased damage and spawns two Symbiotes per shot, meaning Symbiotes will continue to appear throughout the campaign. This is especially fun because the Colossus can crush Symbiotes by walking over them in the same way that vehicles can! Farm Maps & Additional Scout UFO maps: We felt that the Farm biome maps were noticeably weaker than the others, in terms of both visuals and map layout. We've therefore reworked this biome as part of Milestone 7, revisiting and redesigning all of the Farm maps and incorporating a number of new terrain tiles that we were working on towards the end of last year. We're most of the way through this process, with just the Ambush and Extract VIP maps left to complete. We've also created an additional two maps for each biome for Scout UFOs, as previously each biome only had three maps shared between the three smallest UFOs (Scout, Destroyer, Observer). Although this was 21 possible maps across the seven biomes, players who restarted their campaign would inevitably start to see map repeats (especially if they did it more than once). The 14 new maps are currently at the draft stage, but we're expecting to get them fully completed in the next four to six weeks. Smaller Tasks: We've also worked on a lot of smaller tasks over the past two months. I won't go into detail on them, but I know there will be community members happy to read about things like the return of weapons having Reflex Modifiers, the addition of a new Interrogation project for Cleaner Leaders, the ability to manually activate teleporters when your soldiers are stood on them, and making being on a higher / lower level than your target give a more straightforward hit chance increase / decrease in the tactical combat. Mods & Steam Workshop Integration: Finally, we've spent a bit of time this month doing the last remaining technical tasks on modding support. Previously our solution did not support the loading of replaced assets (e.g. edited textures, etc), but Milestone 7 will have functioning support for this. Additionally, we've implemented Steam Workshop integration and created the UI required to generate new mod manifests and upload the files to Steam. This means that any modder familiar with Harmony code modding should theoretically have everything they need to create and distribute mods with the release of Milestone 7. Unfortunately, the average modder will probably need to wait for our Mod Editor tool to be completed - and that's likely to be pushed back to a post-release update, as right now it makes sense for us to focus all our attention on polishing the game content prior to launch. Now the technical foundations of mod support are complete, building the tools themselves will hopefully be fairly straightforward. And that's everything - as always, thanks for reading. We'll write another update at the end of the month, and hopefully we'll see some of you testing the Milestone 7 before then!

The players don't spend 40+ hours a week developing Xenonauts 2, so they don't understand why particular features are set up in particular ways. That means they don't properly understand the trade-offs involved in many of the things they're asking for - players are great at finding problems, but rarely very good at suggesting solutions. Sometimes I'll find a few minutes to explain why we made a particular decision, but the problem is you always want to debate my posts and suggest much more complex solutions to everything, and then tell me my ideas are bad if I disagree with you. Look, it's fine to make suggestions (smoke is already going to be less thick in Milestone 7 based on your suggestion), and it's fine to report things that you think are bugs (yes, smoke not spawning on water is a known bug that's on our to-fix list), but none of the points you've raised above are valid counter-arguments for why smoke should be stacked. If you want less transparent smoke, why would you want to allow it to be stacked? If smoke is transparent enough to be clearly visible against all terrain types, layering two of them on top of each other (let alone three) would make them largely opaque. Hiding them on upper levels like you previously suggested just makes things even worse, because then people wouldn't know they were there when trying to plan shots or pathing with jetpacks. You might not see a problem with a soldier on a roof shooting through four tiles of smoke and seeing the shot calculation applying the smoke penalty six times, but I can. There'd be plenty of other players coming on here telling us the game was broken if we did implement it. The fact a smoke tile exists on a higher tile doesn't mean there's necessarily a smoke tile below it to connect to. Smoke despawns randomly, and terrain objects like walls could affect smoke propagation and lead to "floating" smoke spawning in any situation. Fundamentally the problem is that without a drop shadow it's very hard to judge positions of any object that's not on level 0 when you have an isometric grid like this (the bug with "floating" units on top of hidden shipping containers was another good example of this), and you can't have drop shadows on a floating object. It only becomes obvious where the object is relative to the battlefield when you rotate the camera. Plus, the artist who did our particles did his work years ago and isn't available for freelancing any more, so we can't just make more smoke particles unless we go through an entire hiring and onboarding process that would be expensive in terms of both time and money. So there's a lot of reasons why we don't want smoke stacked. Hopefully that makes the decision make more sense to you. I read your suggestions and comments, and sometimes there's useful stuff in there which we incorporate into the game. Other times your ideas aren't useful. I don't have time to reply to many posts, and I don't really have time to argue with you. Ultimately you're just going to have to trust that the development team are the best people to make decisions about fixes and features, because we're the people who are most familiar with the game design and the project setup and what is possible within it (even if we don't explain all of it to you).

The game already prevents multiple stacks of smoke spawning on the same tile, but we want to avoid vertical stacking of smoke too. It's for several reasons - partially because stacked smoke would be extremely hard to see through and navigate in general, partially because when shooting up / down a level you'd get into situations where a bullet passing through a single ground-level tile might end up hitting both the ground floor smoke and the upper level smoke (which would be very confusing for a player), and partially because the smoke particles look a littlle strange hovering in mid-air. It can also be quite difficult to figure out where a smoke tile actually is if it's not on top of a ground tile due to the perspective of the camera.

If problems were as simple to fix as you seem to think they are, they wouldn't be problems.

Yeah, this probably isn't ideal - but I'm not sure it's worth too much time to try and fix it. What we don't want is multiple stacks of smoke stacked on top of each other, but as you say ideally the smoke should fall down to the ground if thrown on the level above. I'll check with the coders how much time it'll take to fix and we'll balance it against other issues in terms of priorities.

There shouldn't be any civilians on abduction missions except those in the tubes. It's a bug if there are. I thought the civilians did something on the Terror mission regarding Panic but I'm not completely sure. I'll check with the coders.

Yes, but what you're asking for there is quite a significant feature that requires changes to the game logic, UI, UX and potentially weapon design. It's an interesting idea, but it's multiple days of work to implement and test, and probably more given it'll probably interact with existing systems and cause bugs that need additional time to fix. My solution is a 30-minute contained fix that improves the current situation with no real disadvantages. I don't personally see people getting confused if the reload icon disappears when the reload action wouldn't cause them to end up with more bullets in their gun.

Thanks, yeah. This is a bug and we're looking into it. The game used to correctly include the abduction civillians in the calcution, I'm pretty sure. We must have changed something that broke it at some point.

Yeah, this is because you don't have a full clip in your inventory for the weapon - you must have previously unloaded that clip or something. At present the game only supports quick reloading if you have a full clip in your inventory. We'll update the logic so it will show the reload function as long as you're carrying a clip containing more shots than your weapon currently has.

So I think the poison grenade tooltip is correct. The explosion effect from the grenade suffers drop-off just like normal grenades do, so you're probably seeing reduced damage values because the grenade didn't land on the tile where your soldier is standing. Similarly, the issue with the shield taking damage from the initial explosion is because the initial explosion is chemical rather than gas damage (some acidic fragmention explosion from the grenade, rather than from the poison gas itself). So the shield is affected by that in the same way it is affected by normal explosion damage. If it were set to be gas damage, it would bypass the shield completely (but would be negated if the unit had a gas mask). I think having it as chemical damage is best. Yes, in an ideal world the gas mask would be an on/off item but we don't have time to add support for that right now. Giving it health is an interesting idea. I don't know how much work that is, but again I suspect we're probably not going to have time to implement it prior to release as we're working on quite tight timescales. But that might be something we add post-launch. I'm not sure if we want to add armour destruction to the poison gas. To me, that doesn't really make sense - that's the one thing you wouldn't expect poison to damage. I think for now I'm happy to leave it so that poison gas doesn't really affect rebreather soldiers, and in future I think giving rebreathers HP would give the effect you want. BTW alien grenades weren't ever meant to be usable equipment, and this is going to be fixed in Milestone 7.

Yeah, that's intentional. Why do you feel robbed? You get more rewards for a landed UFO than for a crashed UFO.

Koki has been trying to reproduce this for a while now and we can't do it at all. If you encounter issues like this again then please provide saves, because videos aren't that helpful when it comes to fixing them.

Thanks for the report. This is intentional though - they were moved further back in the tech tree in Milestone 6 and they now unlock from Advanced Alloys, which is one UFO later than before.

One potential reason why this can occur is if you accidentally started the engineering project at a secondary base, as the project won't complete and then won't be available to start in your primary base. So if you've got extra bases I'd just quickly check it's not sitting in their engineering queues.

As I've said, best to discuss this in the balance thread. Feel free to @ me so I see the continuation of the conversation. I'll ask the coders to look into it, but to me what the AI is doing there is breaking line of sight from all the Xenonauts that are looking at it before attacking, because that means it won't take loads of reaction fire after it attacks.