We've now released a small patch onto the public branches for Xenonauts 2 that contains a few more important stability fixes.
Bugfixes:
Fixed a translation bug that could cause frequent crashes for people playing the game in non-English languages.
Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when the player opens an abduction tube.
Fixed a crash that could occur if a berserking unit kills another unit that was about to go berserk.
Milestone 4.22.0 Released! (Experimental)
This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
Bugfixes:
Fixed a crash that would occur on trying to begin a new campaign once you had switched to a non-English language.
Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when the player opens an abduction tube.
Fixed a crash that could occur if a berserking unit kills another unit that was about to go berserk.
Milestone 4.21 STABLE Released!
We've now released another stability fix for Milestone 4 that fixes several more bugs and balance issues (mostly related to enemy accuracy being too high). We'll continue to collect player feedback and bug reports and tweak / fix things as necessary while we work on Milestone 5.
Balance / Gameplay Changes:
Units now only rotate when suffering damage during the enemy turn. This avoids situations where soldiers lack the TU needed to complete their planned move after taking damage from enemy overwatch fire, as they need to turn back to face the direction they want to travel.
Accuracy values for all aliens has been reduced by roughly 10% overall, and enemy Accuracy modifiers have been reduced to 0.8x on Recruit difficulty (from 0.85x), and increased to 1.3x on Commander (from 1.2x). Overall, this means enemies have roughly the same Accuracy on Commander difficulty, roughly 10% less Accuracy on Soldier and Veteran, and 15%-20% less Accuracy on Recruit difficulty.
Wraith Accuracy has been reduced by a little more than the other aliens, as their base Accuracy was so high.
Secton Psionic Triangulation ability now grants +30 Accuracy when active (previously +50).
Automed Module now heals +5HP a turn (previously +25HP). It is therefore still excellent for healing Bleeding Wounds without spending TU, but a few Medikits are now required if you want to heal badly wounded soldiers quickly.
Cleaner Accelerated Rifle is no longer slightly more accurate than the human equivalent.
One Cyberdrone has been removed from the early Psyon terror sites / retaliation missions (so you now face 1 Cyberdrone on Recruit / Soldier, 2 on Veteran, and 3 on Commander.
Transfer item quantities are now preserved when you switch the destination base on the Transfer Items screen.
Bugfixes:
If the game cannot write to the save directory, it should now display an error screen instructing you how to set a new save path rather than just crashing.
Fixed a bug where soldiers could lose a few TU after having their movement interrupted when spotting an enemy (they were being charged for the full planned rotation, but only rotate as far as was necessary to spot the alien).
Fixed a bug where soldiers and equipment were incorrectly being recovered after losing a mission (which could cause soldiers to survive the battle despite their corpses being outside the dropship / recovery area).
Fixed an issue where soldiers on roofs / higher levels could often not find a valid move path if they were being ordered to move more than 10 tiles.
Fixed a bug where the Combat Shield would sometimes not disappear visually when destroyed.
Fixed the Servitor playing a human injury sound.
Fixed the Servitor's body not disappearing when destroyed.
Fixed an issue where tooltips would spawn more quickly than they should in some situations (which could be quite annoying).
Fixed interceptor evasive roll travelling further than intended if time was set to pass at 2x speed.
Fixed a UI issue where it was possible to unintentionally transfer soldiers back to their own base.
Fixed a bug where you could sometimes be unable to rotate the camera after loading a save.
Fixed an issue on one of the Dockyard maps where there were some missing concrete walls on the water edge tiles.
Fixed a purple error texture on the damaged state of some of the sandbags in the ATLAS Base map.
Made the abduction tubes slightly shorter, so they fit within the shroud of a single tile.
Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!
Hello everyone - with July finished, it's time for us to give our monthly developer update on what we've all been working on here at Goldhawk.
Milestone 4
Although we released Milestone 4 last month, we've continued to patch it with bugfixes and balance updates. As many players found the game too punishing, we've been making the lower difficulty settings a bit more forgiving. Thanks to everyone who has given us feedback, and we'll continue to monitor it while we work on Milestone 5.
Fixing bugs has also been relatively time-consuming this month. With many new players coming from both Tacticon and the recent Steam sale, we've received a lot more bug reports than normal and we've made fixing them our priority. Some of these were obscure stability bugs, but many were small gameplay issues - e.g. we've fixed a bug where soldiers could lose 1 or 2 TU when their rotation was interrupted by spotting an enemy. Continuing to iron out these sort of small annoyances should improve the experience for everyone.
Unfortunately, a large influx of new players combined with Milestone 4 being overly difficult and having some stability issues when first released means our Recent Reviews on Steam aren't as positive as they were previously. If you are enjoying the game and haven't left a review, please think about doing so - and if you've left a negative review, just know we're working hard on improving the game and we hope you'll give Xenonauts 2 another shot once it leaves Early Access!
Air Combat UI
One of the parts of the game we're working on for Milestone 5 is the air combat, with a particular focus on the visuals. This month we've done some initial work concepting the final UI style for the air combat, and even though we're still exploring the visuals we thought we'd share a concept with you -- please don't read too much into the information on the screen, it's all WIP!
The other area of the air combat that we'll be working on for Milestone 5 is the air combat section of the tutorial, as a lot of players bounce off the interception minigame because the game currently doesn't even explain the controls. Hopefully a better tutorial and improved visuals will allow more users to enjoy that section of the game.
It's probably also worth mentioning that the Geoscape UI is also not yet final (which is why it still looks so similar to the first Xenonauts), and we'll be tackling that once the Air Combat is done.
Rescue Civilians
Another system we implemented in Milestone 5 this month was the ability to order civilians off the battlefield, as many members of our community have been requesting this since our Early Access launch. The system is simple - soldiers can order adjacent civilians to evacuate with a right-click, which causes the civilian to run back towards the player's dropship where they can flee off the map edge.
By default civilians will skulk around the map and avoid enemies, but once they have been ordered to evacuate they will simply sprint as quickly as possible towards their evacuation zone. Make sure you have cleared a path for them if you want them to live!
Game Editor
The final major system we've been working on this month is our internal game editor. Our Unity 2022 update means we've now got access to much more powerful plugins, which means we can replace our creaky old game editor with something that has better performance and more functionality.
Why are we mentioning this? Not only will this allow us to work faster, but the game editor is also going to serve as the foundation for our future mod tools. Once the work on our internal tools is complete we'll hopefully have taken a significant step towards having a working community mod editor.
That's everything for this dev diary. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next month!
Milestone 4.21.0 Released! (Experimental)
This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
Changes:
Units now only rotate when suffering damage during the enemy turn. This avoids situations where soldiers lack the TU needed to complete their planned move after taking damage from enemy overwatch fire, as they need to turn back to face the direction they want to travel.
Transfer item quantities are now preserved when you switch the destination base on the Transfer Items screen.
Bugfixes:
If the game cannot write to the save directory, it should now display an error screen instructing you how to set a new save path rather than just crashing.
Fixed a crash on the Geoscape when certain types of missions spawned.
Fixed a bug where soldiers could lose a few TU after having their movement interrupted when spotting an enemy (they were being charged for the full planned rotation, but only rotate as far as was necessary to spot the alien).
Fixed an issue where soldiers on roofs / higher levels could often not find a valid move path if they were being ordered to move more than 10 tiles.
Another attempt at fixing the bug where the combat shield was not being correctly hidden when destroyed.
Made the abduction tubes slightly shorter, so they fit within the shroud of a single tile.
Milestone 4.20.0 Released! (Experimental)
This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
Balance Changes:
We've re-applied a couple of balance changes that were meant to be included in the 4.19.0 patch, but didn't actually made it in! (see below)
Secton Psionic Triangulation ability now grants +30 Accuracy when active (previously +50).
Automed Module now heals +5HP a turn (previously +25HP). It is therefore still excellent for healing Bleeding Wounds, but it does not make Medikits completely redundant.
Bugfixes:
Fixed a bug where soldiers and equipment were incorrectly being recovered after losing a mission (which could cause soldiers to survive the battle despite their corpses being outside the dropship / recovery area).
Fixed a purple error texture on the damaged state of some of the sandbags in the ATLAS Base map.
Milestone 4.19.0 Released! (Experimental)
This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
Balance Changes:
Accuracy values for all aliens has been reduced by roughly 10% overall, and enemy Accuracy modifiers have been reduced to 0.8x on Recruit difficulty (from 0.85x), and increased to 1.3x on Commander (from 1.2x). Overall, this means enemies have roughly the same Accuracy on Commander difficulty, roughly 10% less Accuracy on Soldier and Veteran, and 15%-20% less Accuracy on Recruit difficulty.
Wraith Accuracy has been reduced by a little more than the other aliens, as their base Accuracy was very high.
Secton Psionic Triangulation ability now grants +30 Accuracy when active (previously +50).
Automed Module now heals +5HP a turn (previously +10HP). It is therefore still excellent for healing Bleeding Wounds, but it does not make Medikits completely redundant.
Cleaner Accelerated Rifle is no longer slightly more accurate than the human equivalent.
One Cyberdrone has been removed from the early Psyon terror sites / retaliation missions (so you now face 1 Cyberdrone on Recruit / Soldier, 2 on Veteran, and 3 on Commander.
Bugfixes:
Fixed a bug where certain mechanical units would not disappear correctly when killed (most frequently enemy Sentry Guns in the Cleaner Base).
Fixed a bug where the Combat Shield would sometimes not disappear visually when destroyed.
Fixed the Servitor playing a human injury sound.
Fixed the Servitor's body not disappearing when destroyed.
Fixed an issue where tooltips would spawn more quickly than they should in some situations (which could be quite annoying).
Fixed interceptor evasive roll travelling further than intended if time was set to pass at 2x speed.
Fixed a UI issue where it was possible to unintentionally transfer soldiers back to their own base.
Fixed a bug where you could sometimes be unable to rotate the camera after loading a save.
Fixed an issue on one of the Dockyard maps where there were some missing concrete walls on the water edge tiles.
Help Us Improve The Game!
Thank you so much for your continued support of Xenonauts 2! We genuinely appreciate all the feedback you’ve provided. Your thoughts are incredibly valuable to us, so we invite you to share a Steam review to help us keep improving the game.
Milestone 4.18 STABLE Released!
We've now released another stability patch for Milestone 4 that fixes several crashes / hangs, with more fixes planned for next week. If you encounter further issues, please continue to report them and we'll do our best to get them fixed.
We've also been collecting player feedback since our balance patch last week, and it seems the general opinion is that the game is remains a little too hard - with the most common issues being that aliens feel too accurate, and a few specific missions (such as early Psyon / Wraith terror sites) being too difficult. We'll be releasing another balance patch to address this soon - but these changes will be felt more on the lower difficulty settings, as we believe Commander difficulty should remain a challenging experience.
Changes / Bugfixes:
Fixed the issue in the tutorial where the Cleaners were sometimes not reaching their intended positions, causing the tutorial to fail.
Fixed a crash that could occur due to enemy overwatch fire.
Fixed an AI hang that could occur during enemy overwatch fire.
Fixed an AI hang that could occur during the AI turn during enemy movement.
Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur on the Geoscape when transferring items / staff / aircraft between bases.
Another attempt to fix the reinforced shield engineering project not unlocking correctly (from Ultradense Alloys).
Fixed an instance where grenades would sometimes not explode when thrown, which would happen if the soldier rolled a miss and they scattered into an invalid location.
Fixed some flickering walls on one of the Cleaner Data Raid maps.
Fixed some issues with demolition grenades not showing their fire tiles correctly when targeting fences.
Added updated translation files for most non-English languages.
Milestone 4.18.0 Released! (Experimental)
This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
Changes / Bugfixes:
Fixed an AI hang that could occur during enemy reaction fire.
Fixed a crash that could occur when transferring aircraft between bases.
Fixed an instance where grenades would sometimes not explode when thrown, which would happen if the soldier rolled a miss and they scattered into an invalid location.
Another attempt to fix the reinforced shield engineering project not unlocking correctly (from Ultradense Alloys).
Updated the Spanish and Korean translations.
Milestone 4.17.0 Released! (Experimental)
This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
Changes / Bugfixes:
Added updated translation files for most non-English languages.
Fixed a crash that could occur due to enemy overwatch fire.
Fixed a hang that could occur during the AI turn.
Fixed the issue in the tutorial where the Cleaners were sometimes not reaching their intended positions, causing the tutorial to fail.
Fixed some flickering walls on one of the Cleaner Data Raid maps.
Fixed some issues with demolition grenades not showing their fire tiles correctly when targeting fences.
