This is the second half of today's stability patch for Xenonauts 2, with a couple of minor gameplay improvements thrown in as a bonus. We're concerned these fixes may potentially introduce new bugs into the game, so we're releasing this build onto our Experimental branches before we push them out to everyone on the standard branches.
Milestone 1.24 can be accessed by switching onto our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here). However, please be aware that Experimental builds have slower load times and worse general performance than normal builds, as they contain a lot of extra logging to help us find and fix crashes when they occur!
Milestone 1.24 Changelog:
Item sell prices now increase / decrease correctly per item sold even if you sell in a stack, meaning there is no longer any benefit to hoarding items in your stores to sell all at once.
The items on escort UFOs are now also recovered if you win the crash site. This means you can now get the bonus Alloys and the Fighter Datacore items when you shoot down a UFO that has alien Fighter escorts.
Added a new settings option to disable Camera Edge Scrolling in the tactical combat (i.e. the camera moving if you put the mouse near the edge of the screen).
Fixed an issue where the game would fail to load up at all if the /My Documents/ directory was inaccessible for some reason.
Fixed a bug where the Cleaner Cell missions would not register when a unit carrying the VIP steps into a dropship for the first time, and did not automatically end the mission with victory like it should (although it did register if that soldier moved a second time within the dropship).
Fixed an issue where you could stack Extra Armour modules on the MARS if you were playing in a non-English version of the game.
Attempted to fix the lockups some people were experiencing in the strategy section of the tutorial.
Fixed an AI hang that could occur during the alien turn.
It would be greatly appreciated if some players were able to switch over to the Experimental branch and let us know if they encounter any problems with the new build!
Milestone 1.23 Released! (Stability Fix)
We've released another stability patch for the Early Access version of Xenonauts 2. We'll be releasing two patches today, and this is the "safe" update that everyone will recieve immediately.
The second update will come in a few hours and will arrive on our Experimental branches for some testing before general release - but we'll explain that in full when we release it!
Milestone 1.23 Changelog:
The random number generator seed is now randomised by default when you load a save, as the saved seed appeared to be confusing some players. Saved games will no longer play out exactly the same way every time when you load them, unless you manually deselect the "Reset Seed" checkbox in the bottom right of the Load Game screen (doing this is often important if you're testing to try and reproduce a bug).
Fixed a crash at the end of Terror Sites and Landed UFO missions that would occur if the mission timed out while the dropship was in flight towards it (you can now just continue playing those saves).
Fixed a crash that would occur if you were holding Shift while attempting to use a grenade or medikit.
EDIT - this build was temporarily reverted due an issue with loading older save games. It has now been fixed and the name has been updated to Milestone 1.23b
Milestone 1.22 Patch Notes (Small Balance Fix)
This is only a minor update to the game, but it may help players that are struggling with the early-game Cleaner missions. We're working hard on fixing the remaining crashes in the game and hopefully we'll be releasing another stability patch tomorrow!
Changelog:
Reinforcements in the Cleaner missions now spawn less frequently - the initial wave of reinforcements still spawn at the same time as before, but now you have 5 turns before another wave of reinforcements spawn (previously this was 2 turns). This means fighting through the reinforcements to finish the mission should now potentially be possible.
Fixed an error in the "Armour Destruction" tooltip that was making it unreadable.
Removed any reference to "Closed Beta" from the game version to prevent confusion.
Milestone 1.21 Released! (Stability Fix)
We're releasing another stability fix for various issues encountered by our players on launch day. A big thanks to all the people who took the time to report the various issues they've encountered today so we can fix them!
Changelog:
Esc now skips the starting cinematic.
The starting cinematic now correctly obeys the volume sliders.
The Settings menu is now available in the tutorial.
Fixed the game refusing to load at all if you had older saves from the demo or from old backer builds still in your save directories.
Fixed a crash that could occur when using explosive weapons (e.g. the HEVY / grenades) beyond their maximum range.
Fixed a crash that would occur if you added quotation marks (" ") to a soldier name and then tried to start a tactical combat mission.
Fixed a crash when hiring new soldiers if you'd deleted the default Rifleman loadout.
Fixed a crash that could occur if you built your first base in Greenland. As a temporary fix for various related issues which we can't address in a quick patch, you're no longer able to build a base on Greenland. These will be fixed properly in a future build, at which point you'll be able to build bases there again.
Fixed an issue where players would lose all their manufactured soldier items if they lose an Abduction mission due to not opening enough of the containment tubes before the timer runs out.
Milestone 1.20 Released!
Hello everyone. We've just a very small patch to fix a crash that could occur if players tried to rebind keys while playing in a non-English language!
Xenonauts 2 Early Access Release!
Greetings, Commanders!
It's finally time to defeat the alien invasion - Xenonauts 2 is AVAILABLE NOW in Steam Early Access!
Early Access Roadmap
Our plans are to spend roughly 9 months (subject to change) in Early Access, during which we'll be delivering regular updates with new content, improvements, balance changes, and fixes.
We've put together a roadmap that outlines our current plans for these updates:
Additional Tactical Maps
Soviet Town Biome
Air Combat Revamp
Alien / Civilian AI Revamp
Cruiser UFO
Harvester UFO
Battleship UFO
Operation ENDGAME
Ending Cinematic
Alien - Androns
Alien - Reaper Bull
Alien - Eternal
Alien Psionics
Ultimate Interceptor
Ultimate Dropship
Ultimate Armour
Fusion Weapons
Hovertank
Mod Tools
Fullscreen Borderless
Community Suggestions
Of course, we'll also be listening to community feedback during this process and we may change the roadmap or add new things based on what the players want. We're looking forward to working together on improving Xenonauts 2!
Xenonauts 2 will release into Early Access on July 18, 2023.
Xenonauts 2 May 2023 Update
Hello everyone - May is now over, so it's time for our monthly update to explain the progress we've made.
Early Access Launch Date & Plans
The first thing to mention is we now have a date for our Early Access launch. I don't know exactly when it will be revealed because our marketing partners Hooded Horse are handling the announcement, but we're focused on getting the game as good as possible for that date.
Anyone whose been spending time on our Discord will at least know that we’re not planning on launching in Q2. However, you won’t have much longer to wait - watch this space; the invasion will begin sooner than you might think!
Please be aware that the Early Access version of the game at launch is going to cut off after about 60-70% of the full campaign. This is still a big chunk of the game - depending on how quickly you play tactical missions, you could easily spend 10-15 hours playing a campaign before you hit that point. Ultimately we had to make a decision between spending our time working on polish and bugfixes that affect the whole game, or fixing various issues (and adding some missing content) that only relate to the final section of the game.
In the end, we thought people would prefer to play a 15+ hour chunk of Xenonauts 2 that would hopefully leave them impressed and keen to play the final game, rather than release the entire campaign in a less polished state that they might enjoy less. We will be adding back the removed content during Early Access, once we've had a chance to test it and polish it up to the standards of the rest of the game.
Current Goals
Our current goal is to make sure the playable parts of the game are as enjoyable as possible. One important aspect is to ensure all the research text and art in the playable sections are ready, so I've been working hard on that (along with a number of illustrators). We're also working on lots of bugfixes and usability improvements, and adding little quality-of-life features requested by the community - e.g., you can now rotate soldiers when arranging them inside the dropship on the strategy layer. If there's any time left over, we'll try and add some new maps too.
We're not going to be making any further large changes to the game until after the Early Access launch, as we want to avoid introducing new bugs. It's always important to have the game as stable as possible on launch!
Completed Work
Now I've discussed our future plans, I'll quickly summarise the work we did last month in the space I have left:
We released Closed Beta build V27 onto the Experimental branch for Kickstarter backers, along with four hotfixes that fixed a LOT of bugs. We'll be hotfixing a few more issues this week and then hopefully releasing it on the Steam / GOG main branch.
More work on the translation.
As mentioned above, quite a lot of work on the research text/research artwork.
We did some more work on the new Geoscape icons.
We fixed the memory leaks in the game, which were causing performance issues and eventual crashes if you played the game for an extended session. This involved upgrading a copy of our codebase into the most recent version of Unity (as the version we're using is so old it doesn't have the tools required to easily find memory leaks), which is good news - after the Early Access launch, we'll probably upgrade the main project to this new version of Unity too. This should improve performance and compatibility, as well as make the lives of the developers easier.
There are a few other small things we worked on that probably aren't worth talking about, as this post is already rather long. That's all I have for this month, so thanks for reading the post, and I'll make another post once our release date is announced!
Xenonauts 2 April 2023 update
Now that April is behind us, it's time for another monthly update. There's been good progress in some areas this month, but also some areas of frustration.
Cleaner Cells
The main new mission we've been working on this past month are the Cleaner Cells. These are VIP Elimination missions where you're tasked with attacking a hidden Cleaner command post and killing / capturing the leader in charge. If you're successful, all Cleaner activity in that region will stop and Panic will stop rising there.
The other part of the mission is capturing data from the various computers around the map (the same way as in the Intel Hub mission). This is an optional activity, but any data captured will increase the player's progress towards revealing the Cleaner Headquarters - and once that is revealed and destroyed, all Cleaner activity everywhere will stop. Capturing the VIP rather than killing them also provides a bonus to Cleaner HQ progress.
This means these missions are another example of a mission where you can choose how much you want to push your luck. Enemy reinforcements start spawning after seven turns, so most players will have enough time to fight their way in and kill the VIP without needing to fight off the reinforcements - but you can take a risk and try to grab more of the computer data either by staying and fighting the reinforcements for a few turns, or just by spreading your team out more in the early stages of the mission.
Although obviously this isn't that different from the Abduction missions or the Cleaner Intel Hub mission, I personally feel it still makes a nice change of pace from the standard crash site / elimination missions, so hopefully everyone else enjoys them too!
Translation part deux
The other big feature we've been working on is still the translation, which has sucked away a lot of our time and delayed pretty much everything else we've been working on. Frustratingly, it's still not done - although we're a lot closer than we were last month.
I wrote out several long paragraphs of explanation here in my previous draft of this post, but honestly I won't bore you with the details. There's just a lot of work to be done to set up support across a variety of different languages (including non-Latin languages like Russian or Chinese and Japanese), and this is a big and complex game with lots of text in it. Lots of text needs to be loaded or displayed differently in very specific circumstances, so there's been a lot of unpleasant surprises.
We're hoping we'll be done with our end of the translation work next week, but ultimately it's difficult to know what further problems we'll encounter.
Other Work
We have done a few other things though. I've spent a bit of time this past month adding more 'character conversations' to the game, which are a nice way to sprinkle a little more flavour into the game beyond the research text. I think they're a nice addition in terms of immersion.
We changed Combat Shields back to working like they did in X1 based on all the player feedback we got on the topic. There's also been quite a lot of bugfixes and small UI updates on the strategy layer too, which are collectively useful but there's nothing individually worth picking out.
That's everything for this update - see you next time!
Xenonauts 2 March 2023 update
March is nearly over and it's time for our monthly update. We've still not nailed down a definite date for our Early Access launch but barring any major disaster we're planning to stick to our Q2 target window, so we're an absolute maximum of three months away from launch at this point.
Campaign Options
One of the two big features we've worked on this month are campaign options, which take the form of a new panel alongside the New Campaign menu.
The values for these options update as you change difficulty settings, allowing players to better understand how each difficulty setting changes the game. However, you can also change the values manually and create your own custom difficulty setting - for example, if you found the strategy layer fairly easy but wanted to make the tactical combat harder.
We've also included new options (both on this panel and in the standard settings menu) that allow you to enable or disable several of the quality of life features or gameplay changes we've made in Xenonauts 2 - for example, some people like enemies displaying their heath values above their heads, whereas others do not. This also applies to things like the camera automatically focusing on newly detected enemies or whether soldier rotation when firing weapons should cost Time Units.
Translation
The other big feature we've worked on this month is the technical implementation of translation, which has involved finding literally every text string displayed in the game and exporting it into a massive spreadsheet so it can be translated.
There's many thousands of these (many of which are dynamic strings rather than static ones), so it's been a lot of work and has caused quite a few bugs. However we're now pretty close to being done with this, and we'll hopefully be doing a dry run of the tech next week with the localisation teams from our marketing partners. If that goes well then we'll be sending the text off to the professional translators afterwards.
This is the main reason why I've not been comfortable setting a date for Early Access quite yet - I really wouldn't be surprised if at least one unexpected problem arises from the translation testing that derails general development for a week or more, so I don't want to be working to a hard deadline until the dry run is complete and we've fixed any major problems that were identified as a result.
Other Work
Another improvement that happened this month is the Aircraft screen and all associated panels being reskinned. This was the last of the strategy management screens that required a visual revamp, so now the only parts of the game that still need a UI pass are the Geoscape map itself and the Air Combat. Quite a nice mini-milestone for us!
That's all I've got for now - see you all next month!
