The biggest news in 1.33 is a large number of bug fixes, and a lot of behind-the-scenes work to solidify the game’s architecture.
But we also added quite a few new events! Every time you rescue a faction crew there’s now a chance of something positive or negative happening.
In 1.33 we made some changes to game balance: the battleship’s water capacity was raised to 8 from 6. Repair amounts in repair caches were increased. And a common ore reward was adjusted down to 6 from 8 (to prevent wastage due to reaching ore capacity).
We added a frame rate limiter in options -> graphic settings, so if you have a decent graphics card it won't be to running XO at 450fps.
Narrative was added to help explain why ships in your fleet jump randomly and to gently suggest formations. Additional narrative was added to explain repair options (which only appears the first time any damaged ship is added to the fleet, if tips were selected at the start).
We added a dashed line to the formation editor that shows where mining ships need to be placed in order for them to be able to mine.
All pirate events were made repeatable. Yar.
We did a lot of internal work on the codebase to give us more maintainability and hopefully less bugs related to Unity prefabs deciding to break ‘just because.’ This actually required a lot of work, consuming about half of the dev time for this cycle, but we think the investment is worth it.
We added the ‘by:’ tag to the isDisabled condition, which allows us to set up different results depending on which ship did the disabling (say, Harvesters vs. the player).
I did an early mockup for improving the fleet list, adding current ship orders to it.
Aborting a waypoint order now clears the old waypoint.
In preparation for our upcoming quests, specifying a destination more than one jump away is now a fixed distance instead of a random distance.
If a formation leader is sent scouting, a new faction leader is now designated.
I added an emergency repair event for the procedural engine to fall back on.
The juryRigged condition now also triggers as true when a Fixer does a fix on the target.
Some minor adjustments were made to our wizard-mode to help us test.
I created a smaller 3D model to be used for hovering ships discovered by scouting.
The quest beacon logic was improved so that it no longer overwrites the rendezvous text.
For some reason, we didn’t have an icon for the Empire ammo dump, so I created that.
The Tracker event was improved, but we decided to put it on ice until a new piece of functionality is complete.
I finalized the technical spec and UI design for slot unification, which we’re working on now.
And we added additional information to our logging to help us diagnose issues.
Bugs Obliterated
A pretty nasty and rare lockup bug was found and dispatched.
Almost as nasty, a bug that prevented the player from jumping (ever) was cleared and we are pleased to restore full jump service to you.
Scouting with the Auxiliary while the battleship is seized no longer erases the battleship and it is no longer possible to scout with the Aux while the battleship is seized.
It used to be that a player would receive resources before a ship, which could cause resources to be lost if the player was at or near their resource cap. That’s been fixed.
An odd edge case was covered off that had to do with crewing and removing crew from ships in an event that included a jump.
Hovering ships in the scouting report now always shows the type of ship or station.
The maroon command no longer pops up in a couple of inappropriate places.
Mouse pointer ‘nope’ no longer displays when hovering the tactical arrow.
Nested group conditions now work as they should.
When adding a ship to an existing formation, the formation stays in place and the newly added ship goes to join it, rather than vice versa in some cases.
When a ship returns from scouting, formations no longer sometimes try to rejoin it. The scoutship always tries to rejoin the formation instead.
The opacity layer behind tooltips now displays properly when text is split due to being close to the screen edge.
Fleet ships no longer temporarily revert to their faction color when repaired.
Ships returning from scouting should no longer lose their health bar in the fleet info list.
Arrows no longer ant-march on the playfield when hovering scan in the context menu.
The tactical arrow now pulses every time the comms in progress warning is pulsing.
The juryRigged condition now works properly.
Weapon icons in trade were stretched weirdly, but now they display as intended.
Save games now properly restore ship ids from spawned events.
The shipOrderIs condition now works properly with both the [fleet] and [player] tag.
Setting an antispinward waypoint no longer creates a phantom arrow ant march.
The waypoint icon is no longer smunched.
The water quality arrow position was fixed.
A rewired error was wired back up.
The fuel/water/ore quality hover in the minimap briefly went horizontal, but it’s properly vertical now.
In some cases the lower fleet info scroll arrow was going invisible, that should work now.
Shield pips should now keep up with the shielded ship instead of deorbiting.
The following buggy events were unbugged: The Collaborator, The Prisoner Ransom, all Rover pirate events, the Elysian Hauler, The Gauntlet.
An OnShipCrewHover bug was taken care of, as was the dreaded transform.localPosition bug.
Known issues
For Windows and Mac, none that we know of.
Known issues, Linux edition
When submitting feedback in Linux the game says “no Internet connection” but we still receive your feedback.
When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.
Branching out
We can now branch events from within events. If you’ve read some of the discussions in our forums here, you know how excited we are about this! Branched events can even be made aware of things ships have done in the prior event, which opens up some really fun possibilities.
In 1.32 event branching is in place on all crew rescues. The more dynamic tier 2 branching is only in Rover crew rescue events right now. We’ll be adding more branched events over time.
Hotkeys have been expanded to include Jump, Hail, sCan, goto waypoint (X) and attack (Z). All of these keys are remappable in options. You can also now swap mouse axes in options. Hotkeys have been disabled in the feedback form, so you’ll be spared from accidentally jumping or attacking.
So now to set a waypoint, just select the ship, hover where you want the ship to go, and hit X. Scanning works with or without a ship selected, just hover the ship you want to scan and hit C. Of course you can still use the context menu.
The enter key also now acts as ‘continue’ for all dialogs. The escape key still skips all dialog (until the next choice).
The rendezvous can no longer be Harvested by between-jump expansion. It’ll make more sense when you get there.
Also, water riots no longer trigger once you reach the rendezvous, this includes after you achieve victory too.
I did UI design and technical specification work for our upcoming next major update which is... slot unification and cargo! Yes, ship slots are about to become multipurpose! When we finish implementing this feature it will allow civilian ships to carry weapons (but not use them, at least not without modifications), and cargo items will be introduced. We’ll talk more about this when it is ready!
Tooltips now appear when you hover trade and repair destinations in the starmap.
When you hover the attack action, and your ship is in the defend ROE, we now display a tooltip letting you know your ROE will be auto-switched to weapons free.
All Devastators have been adjusted to jump in much farther away from the fleet, should you be unlucky enough to jump into Harvester-controlled space. This should somewhat delay the devastation.
Trade and repair events no longer spawn when overrun by Harvesters, and their starmap icons are also removed. Similarly, once visited, trade/repair events no longer will spawn at a given destination and the starmap icon is removed.
Some of you may have noticed some shenanigans going on with a Harvester ship in an event called The Tracker. That event just became a little more… interesting.
Work was done to prepare the game for quests - we now have a quest beacon that we can deploy that works very much like the rendezvous beacon, showing direction when the beacon is off map and the actual beacon above the destination when you are nearby. There’s a bit more functionality there and of course content needed too before we will spring those on you. As far as timelines go, quest functionality will be completed after slot unification.
I adjusted the narrative in The Prisoner Exchange event to suggest using the defend ROE. That’s a stopgap for some upcoming improvements. On our Discord, player opinions are split almost perfectly 50/50 between automatically changing the ROE to defend when hailing vs. having some narrative pop up reminding the player that they’ll be opening fire when they arrive. We haven’t decided what the best course of action is, so have your say on our Discord!
Events can now be tagged as repeatable, an essential bit of functionality for certain types of event branching.
In an event we can now identify this specific ship that has done an action, for example, the ship that destroyed ship X, or the ship that tried to hail ship Y. This was more groundwork for branching and quests and gives us even more interesting outcomes for our events.
Also in preparation for quests, I expanded the number of jumps away an event can be.
I made minor tweaks to events like The Patch and The Prisoner Ransom.
And I’ve been gearing up to be adding more content, so I improved the scripts I use to help me generate events. I’ve also been doing a better job of documenting everything in case, you know, anyone ever wants to mod XO. :)
Bugs Munched
Controllers are now fully disabled by default, we hope that fixes some of the left mouse not working errors out there.
The Q/E hotkeys didn’t want to work during comms, but they were given lots of encouragement and do their job happily now.
Attack orders now clear properly after a shieldship is disabled, allowing it to be repaired and recrewed without annihilating other ships with its shield.
Some rendezvous platforms lost their names, they have been renamed.
We think we finally obliterated that minor but annoying jump ring bug. Bye bye rings!
A wacky bug in The Assist event was squashed by the big foot of doom.
Plans, ship and resource icons as well as the greyed out jump button temporarily quaffed invisibility potions. The effects have worn off.
The formations window wanted to close automatically whenever a ship was dropped on it, we fixed that.
I fixed The Outbid event, made a minor adjustment to the Fixer Flotilla (all the Fixers really means ALL the Fixers)
A fair amount of tuning was done to our new spawn event functionality, and also for quest beacons.
Trade events didn’t want to appear but we’ve coaxed them back out.
A few smallish bugs were briefly bringing on the pain, but they’re gone now.
We did a considerable amount of internal restructuring to make the game easier for us to maintain and expand. This is still in progress.
Known issues
Some events display 'unknown ship id' instead of the ship. If you see one of these, would you kindly let us know the name of the event (e.g. The Sleeping Monkey) or send us in-game feedback? That way we can get that fixed right up.
Known issues, Linux edition
When submitting feedback in Linux the game says “no Internet connection” but we still receive your feedback.
When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.
Our Keys Just Got A Bit Warmer
This build brings three new hotkeys: Q E and J. Q/E toggle between Tactical, Starmap and Galactic views. J will jump your fleet, assuming your fleet can jump. You can bind those keys to anything you like: Esc -> Options -> Configure Keys. All game actions are bindable actually. :)
We’re working on several more hotkeys that will appear in the next version, but we wanted to fix a few hot bugs first, thus we bring you 1.31 a little early.
Captains Be Advised
Starting in 1.31 ships with the Defend ROE are now automatically switched from Defend to Weapons Free when given an attack order. Since, you know, you told them to attack and all. This means your warships will auto fire on enemy warships until you tell them to stand down. If people are hating this, we’ll switch it back, but (DEFEND + ATTACK) just kind of didn’t make sense.
The rendezvous marker now shows up when any planet is hovered (after day 50 that is), and the marker itself is now visible in the starmap. We agree, it is too ginormous right now.
Rendezvous water and fuel quality are now pegged to 100%.
A new event was added, The Fair Swap.
Event fixes were made to The Unrefined, the Commandeered Farmship.
In our event system, the [fleet] tag now includes the battleship
Jump ready is now displayed in the planet info screen when appropriate
Lifeboat and refugee events now have a vastly lesser chance of spawning at the same time.
Shieldships can now be relied on to always counterattack, even against other shieldships, subject to all existing rules, conditions and local laws where applicable.
New games now cannot start on a trade/repair event.
The configure keys dialog was given a minor facelift.
I moved all devastators to start much, much further from your fleet when you jump into Harvester space. It should take slightly longer for them to destroy your fleet now.
Bugs eradicated
The ‘cannot attack’ bug and hopefully all of its frustrating variants have been squashed with vengeance.
Accidental verybigs in the events are no longer causing verybig problems, which should kill off that ‘I can’t jump’ problem.
Mining ore no longer mysteriously stops. This will not prevent labor strikes in the future.
Ships no longer fire on you as they are jumping away. For the record, that was a bug, not additional cruelty. The rendezvous marker no longer flashes onscreen if it isn’t supposed to. Confusing!
Waypoints stand a better chance of being cleared by ships once they are reached.
We think we fixed the [unknown ship id] bug, but it’s just a thought. Do please let us know if it returns.
Water riots are now adding and subtracting properly and zero now really means zero.
Faction leader lost events now properly trigger.
Gaining a faction leader events should work now as well.
Hailing a non-fleet frigate with a non-Pact ship now displays the appropriate ‘go away or I shall taunt you a second time’ message.
The weapon detail view should never again allow the minimap to peek through. No fair!
The mining laser and shield models have now been restored to their former glory. Those weapons are no longer masquerading as lasers.
Some edge cases were cleaned up in The Crushed event. The Fixed was similarly fixed.
Known issues
If you’re having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. We are still trying to whack this bug. We'll get it.
Hotkeys trigger in the background when you are writing feedback, which can cause an unexpected jump. This will be fixed in 1.32 if not sooner.
The three ring bug has been definitively identified but not yet squinched.
Known issues, Linux edition
When submitting feedback in Linux the game says “no Internet connection” but we still receive your feedback.
When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.
XO featured on SpaceGameJunkie podcast
We're excited to be featured on the legendary SpaceGameJunkie podcast this Tuesday January 7th, 2020 at 4PM PST! Join us here: https://www.spacegamejunkie.com/stream/
Major Trade and Repair Update
Trade and repair events are now clearly indicated in the starmap! These kinds of events also appear much more frequently. Next up for trade will be ship and fleet upgrades, and we’re very excited about that!
You can now buy ships in a limited number of late game events! We will be adding more ship purchase events over the next weeks. There’s a chance we’ll even add shipyard icon to complement the trade and repair icons. Let us know what you think in the forums here or our Discord.
There’s a new Harvester ship: the Investigator. It’s still somewhat rare, but this light warship will probe your fleet, offering up earlier combat-oriented challenges as you strive to save humanity.
New content was added with eight new events: The Smackdown, The Drydock, The Unceremonious, The Fusion Overload, The Prisoner Ransom, the Prisoner Exchange, The Investigator, and The Tracker.
All of the narrative was shifted away from suggesting to the player “run directly for the rendezvous” (since this is a very bad strategy). The rendezvous narrative and beacon now appears starting at day 50.
The rendezvous beacon shows up whenever you hover a destination, not just your current location.
The trade icon in the starmap was animated, and the repair icon was made to rotate.
As part of the trade overhaul, I removed the trade timers that were no longer needed. Also part of this overhaul required adding explicit end conditions to all trade and repair events. All this took a few passes to get right.
We did a little work on cache events too. Caches are not considered trade events. We removed them from the new trade and repair system; they are now purely ‘bonus’ events that don’t count as a full trade or repair event.
The jumpSound subtag now works as designed, allowing me to designate if a ship should be in the system or arrive via a sound and jump animation.
The rate at which Harvesters expand was slightly reduced to give players more agency when deciding where to jump.
We added a ‘backup’ trade event in case one isn’t available because of procedural reasons, and then expanded it out to have several varieties.
Two cache events can now never ever spawn at the same time, as nice as that would be.
Repair cost was adjusted down massively from 5 to 2.
Bugs fully smunched
A huge shout out to Josh aka NightKiller0011 for helping identify and test a starmap glitch we had with the first push out of 1.30! 1.30b fixes the issue which was due to Unity forgetting it’s quality settings. Our update checklist has been updated so this won’t happen again.
A rare lockup bug related to trade events was eradicated.
An event with a Pact crew and weapon now ends as it should.
The “Rover Can’t Jump” event now acts appropriately.
“The Bloody Decks” now excludes the cruiseliner for reasons we hope will become clear at a later date.
Several Harvester intro events were displaying an incorrect tag in the mission reminder area, but that was rectified.
Known issues
If you’re having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. We are zeroing in on this bug.
If your ship isn’t shooting, try changing its ROE (select the ship or formation and right click)
Mining ore with mining lasers stops after a certain amount of time and does not restart until you jump again.
Known issues, Linux edition
When submitting feedback in Linux the game says “no Internet connection” but we still receive your feedback.
When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.
The biggest feature this week is the new water riot grace period. This may have been our most requested feature, and it took a little tweaking to get right. It may still need a little tweaking, let us know how you feel about it.
You now have a two day grace period to correct any low water situation before riots force you to dismiss ships from your fleet. This makes water a lot more forgiving. I am going to try out some riot-specific events to spice things up, but those are not yet in the game, so enjoy your riot-free riots while you can.
It should be less likely for a Harvester carrier to spawn in the middle of your fleet. More tweaking may be necessary here, do let us know if it happens to you - the best way to do that is by sending in-game feedback. We also adjusted how and where Harvesters spawn and their spawn order.
When you receive a Plan, it should now always be something you can immediately use. Deferred gratification has been indefinitely postponed.
We added warnings to the plot course screen when a low or no resource condition is likely to occur. This should help players take the appropriate action, whatever that may be.
Three new events are now live: the Evac, the Fire Station and the Overwhelmed were added.
The faction tag was expanded to allow for multiple factions. This allows us to add farmship events believably to Empire worlds, where previously there were none. I’ll may add some pact-only farmship events later, but I’ll be focusing on adding Empire + Rover/Corp/Irenic events first.
Right clicking while in waypoint placing mode now cancels the waypoint. In this mode a tooltip is now shown.
Ships that move to a waypoint now have offsets so they don’t dogpile on each other.
Formations and formation movement are now locked to an orbital line. Formation speeds were normalized.
Marooning a crew now appropriately docks your relations with the maroonees. Always wanted to use that word in a sentence.
Tooltips have been added to the Transmogrify window to ease understanding.
setTooltip actions, such as tutorial text, are now always overridden by ordinary UI tooltips.
I improved the conditions in an event type to allow for more actions.
A completely empty tag is now used for clearing tooltips, and it looks much better now.
Farmship events now spawn a tad more frequently.
Mines now strike non-fleet Empire ships if the player drops a minefield.
Some events were restructured for consistency. All events had to be expanded to include the new factions array, which turned out to be quite the picnic. Thank goodness for VIM, that’s all I have to say.
Hovering the JUMP button when you don't have enough fuel now displays a tooltip and what we lovingly call MousePointerNope.
An abandoned ship in your fleet now tells you that it is abandoned via the magic of tooltippery.
The loading screen now says... wait for it... loading. When you send feedback you also get a sending popup to ensure folks the game is not broken.
Non-essential windows are auto-closed before going to starmap to better allow for course plotting.
Visually I finalized the look of the starmap course lines. That's the last bit of non-production art in the game!
List of Bugs Fully Squashed
We may have fixed the issue with rudder pedals, joysticks and controllers hijacking input.
Fixed a bug that prevented people from being able to type in the feedback field.
Fixed a bug that was causing Harvesters to appear right behind the fleet when they first jumped in. While we may have accidentally discovered ‘insane mode’ it is a little too cruel for ordinary play.
You can now select and deselect ships in your fleet list as you would expect.
Ships should now retain their fleet color when abandoned, damaged, repaired and the like.
The minefield somehow reverted to an older size, so I corrected that. Bad minefield!
Courses can now be plotted correctly again, and scouting now should work as expected.
An issue where the maroon command wouldn't show up has been fixed.
We think we fixed a formation controller bug that has been popping up.
And formations going to waypoints should always reach the waypoint now. We think.
And a dictionary-related bug was also hopefully wiped out.
Known issues
If you’re having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like.
Some Linux users are experiencing strange graphic effects. Please help us diagnose this by posting your experience on the discussion thread here or on our Discord.
Feedback is partially working from the native Linux version, but we still have no idea why it isn't fully working, probably something to do with networking. If you have an idea why, please hit us with a cluebat.
What is a waypoint, anyway?
Two builds in one update! Our normal cadence is one build a week, but kicking off Early Access was very special so we’re a little ahead of schedule.
Warship armor was doubled for all ships except the battleship. We will be making additional changes to improve the feeling of combat, including adding more combat events.
This week’s big feature is the ‘waypoint’ command, aka Suggestion #65 on our Discord. You can now tell ships and formations exactly where to go, and they will go there and orbit until you tell them to do something else. This took most of the week to get right, and there’s still a few enhancements we’ll be adding.
"Waypoint" narrowly won out over "go to" in voting on our Discord. Most gamers think of a waypoint as a type of waypoint called a fly-through waypoint - something that you pass through on your way to an endpoint. This was verified after at least five minutes of extensive research. Turns out that a waypoint can be any navigational point. Maybe we will add multiple waypoints if such things are necessary to, say, avoid a minefield. Ahem.
Per Suggestion #33, it is now possible to delay the Harvesters appearing for a short while by jumping before the Harvesters arrive. Let us know if this scratches that itch.
A new event was added that hopefully does a better job explaining how low quality fuel locations can lead to badness if you get into a laser battle and need to jump quickly. Thanks for the feedback on that one!
Hovered ships now display “counterattacking” instead of “attack directly” when counterattacking. Disambiguation. It’s a thing.
Abandoned ship events are now more responsive to things like being disabled and being crewed with the wrong crew. That ended up taking much longer than expected.
The return to comms message was relocated to where it made more sense - right above the button you need to click.
Right clicking on a plan in your inventory moves it back to the trade dialog, preventing the accidental deletion rage quit syndrome. We believe that over the long term this will save many keyboards.
Mouse tooltips now wordwrap when on the edges, and should always display an opacity layer.
The UI for displaying resources in the minimap was slightly improved for readability.
It should no longer be possible to jump into a location and have zero events happen. This took a fair bit of tweaking to get right. Combat, damaged and disabled events were adjusted to percentages to allow for easier ship armor level balancing should it be necessary.
List of Bugs Eradicated
An issue was fixed when trying to return a plan to a trade menu with zero items.
Ships should now properly display the fleet color (blue) when repaired, instead of reverting
Shieldships attacking a laser-equipped ship with a defend ROE now counterattack properly.
Losing a faction leader at the rendezvous no longer works the same way as when the fleet isn’t at the rendezvous.
The Elysian Hauler event now ends properly when you jump. Turns out spelling counts.
The formationAttack tag was acting in a cowardly and unbecoming manner and has since been disciplined.
An adjustment was made to our event spawning algorithm to ensure that missions, non-missions, timed events and fleet events all play nicely together. They should be doing that now.
Timers were appearing too soon on a few events, they should not do that any more.
I verified that all escort missions have decrew blocks.
An issue that led to [unknown ship] tags was fixed.
Known issues
If you’re having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like.
Some Linux users are experiencing strange graphic effects. Please help us diagnose this by posting your experience on the discussion thread here or on our Discord.
Feedback is not working from the native Linux version and we have no idea why. If you have an idea why, please hit us with a cluebat.
Victory, thy name is Pancakes
We’re going Early Access on Monday so we may be pushing one last update late Sunday night. We are psyched!
Congratulations to Drive By Pancakes for being the first human to achieve Victory in XO! An XO t-shirt will be winging its way over, and if you come across a certain Rover ship bearing Pancake's name, hopefully the Croft will bring your fleet luck.
A huge thank you to all the suggestions, feedback, bug reports, email, comments, tweets and other electronic missives from our awesome Kickstarter backers! It has been so, so great to hear from so many people loving XO!
Changelog
Ships now move in the closest direction if you just click the action (e.g. ‘attack’). You can change direction by highlighting the movement arrows. This should make movement even easier.
Save games are now resumed paused. Much better.
Faction leaders are now visible when doing crew transfers or scanning ships in your own fleet. They’re still hidden on non-fleet ships and will remain so.
Hovering a formation now displays ‘ships forming up’ making it clearer that a formation is waiting for all ships to arrive before executing an action.
What happens when you achieve victory was cleaned up, adding in all the goodness that happens when you lose - stopping the game and ensuring that it couldn’t be resumed after a save, and numerous things of that nature. End game is now 100% complete.
Credits now roll when you achieve victory, as well as the victory song. :)
Elapsed time was removed from the end game and victory screens; it wasn’t really working and may have been giving the wrong idea. Trying to speedrun XO will result in failure. You have been warned.
The game over dialog was made similar to the victory screen. Except, you know, for the victory bits.
Some end game bits were adjusted for fairness and sanity. No spoilers here.
Quite a few conditions were added to quite a lot of events to accommodate things like destroying pirates. This led to me doing a pretty big rework of the pirate-style events, and they work a lot better now.
Shields no longer have an effect on abandoned ships, making it substantially easier to repair hostile shieldships.
I found time to add some more events, but I spent more time cutting dialog and tightening up quite a few events. There’s a lot more to cut.
^isRendezvous and ^victory are now the default for events.
List of Bugs Eradicated
Ships and formations now defend themselves properly when they are given the defend ROE.
A different bug that prevented ships in formation from attacking when a formation ship was disabled was eradicated.
Weapons free now properly attacks anything hostile/enemy in range, closest first.
Mining lasers now take out nukes just like their big sisters do.
The formation forming up tag logic was cleaned up.
A seized, crewed ship (or a recrewed ship) that is given a jumpaway order (by an event for example) will properly break away and jump.
You can no longer get a fake victory by restoring a savegame from the rendezvous.
A bug preventing jumping was unbugged.
Our event victory and isRendezvous tags were tested and debugged and fully work now.
The left arrow had stopped pulsing when the comms in progress was pulsing. Fixed.
Melting a ship’s weapon no longer strips it of all actions.
The nuke was restored to its proper level of nukification.
If you tried to nuke a Harvester carrier just as it was jumping in, it would cause a problem. Now it just fails elegantly.
An unusual issue that was causing the battleship to rotate and change direction when other ships spawned was put down.
We unmapped a couple of controller buttons as they were doing a save/exit when pressed and it was looking like a crash. Controller support is pretty awful right now, don’t try it.
Scouting should work properly on Mac.
A couple of bugs related to resuming from victory conditions were cut off.
More than a big handful of autobugs were summarily fixed by Heru.
Known issues
If you’re having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like.
Feedback is not working from the native Linux version and we have no idea why. If you have an idea why, please hit us with a cluebat.
XO Early Access
What do we believe makes an excellent Early Access experience? A great playable game to start, regular updates, and the ability to have your voice heard!
A great playable game to start
XO is already a full experience, and a tough one at that. With 30+ ship types, over 500 events, and more than 10,000 words of narrative, it never plays the same way twice.
"XO is a fascinating twist on the scifi roguelike..." - Many A True Nerd "positively addictive" - Kickstarter backer "Fantastic game, 10/10." - Kickstarter backer
But we have much more planned, including plenty of adjustments to improve the experience.
Weekly updates since July 2019
In July 2019 we entered alpha testing with our Kickstarter backers. Since then we've released an update at least once a week right here on Steam - that's 25 updates and counting!
As two full time veteran game developers we're confident in our ability to continue at that pace and respond rapidly to issues that will inevitably arise.
Have your voice heard
Thanks to our Kickstarter we already have an awesome player community and have been responding to player requests for months now. As an Early Access supporter you will be able vote on the 70+ player suggestions already in the queue -- and add your own suggestions!
Since the project began in 2015 we've been all about listening to our players and improving the game while keeping to our overall vision. We've exhibited at huge events like PAX all the way down to one-on-one playtests. We know how valuable your input is.
Please join us on XO's journey!
Brian Jamison Creative Director Jumpdrive Studios
Beta 1.24 "The Rendezvous"
Included in this release is the end game! Try your best to make it to the rendezvous. All we can say is, you’d better have a good sized fleet when you get there… And the first person who posts a victory screenshot to our Discord is going to get something special.
Linux users, you can now play XO natively. For Linux only sending feedback is broken, so use Discord or email please.
Changelog:
Like previous versions this will erase your current save.
Tooltips were improved for all forms of unequippable weapons, for when a ship is full, and other trade-oriented cases.
Tooltips now word wrap and display if the mouse is too low (looking at you, formation button)
I narrowed the triggering conditions on some of the hardest events, and also made some changes to how abandoned ships appear, particularly early game.
We’re continuing to have actions visible but greyed out with a tooltip explaining why a particular action isn’t available. Fix and repair are the latest actions to get this treatment.
Tab now works on the feedback form.
The mouse icon now always has an opacity layer behind it.
Mission objectives should no longer overlap.
After the death jingle plays, we now switch to main menu music. Refreshing.
The tactical arrow now pulses when the return to comms text is visible in the starmap.
Many, many narrative tweaks were made to improve consistency and tighten up the text, and include new features like the rendezvous beacon.
The tutorial was given a clear ending.
Harvesters now do more than just give an empty box when they are hailed.
Save/restore was added to the native Linux version. A certain shield you may encounter was rotated to its proper orientation, and made so that it didn’t accidentally destroy certain things. You’ll know it when you see it.
Our first rev at score was added.
Event ships respond more appropriately to players arbitrarily taking pot-shots at unarmed vessels. You know who you are.
Reminders that it’s a really, really, really extremely good idea to hail all ships were added to all relevant events and their conditions were tightened so they only trigger in cases where they ought to be seen.
Bugs:
Fixed a last minute missing bit of something with the end game.
A case where a ship failed to attack when ordered to do so was corrected.
An event was spawning two gunboats but now it only spawns one as intended.
A quick refactor to the way the addEquipment tag interacted needed some additional love, so it got that.
our addEquipment tag needed a fix to stop it from duplicating items.
Formation logic was cleaned up. There’s still a couple of minor issues that we’ll address next week, but Heru swatted down several issues.
A sound effect bug was fixed before ya’ll even heard it.
A bug related to ships jumping away was fixed.
Certain conditions related to our procedural event picker needed fixing, so Heru fixed them.
Some tweaks were made to get tooltips working the way we wanted.
A number of events were tweaked and fixed in minor ways. Jeez-o-pete I hope I’ve found all the typos.
Known issues:
Joysticks, rudder pedals and some controllers may need to be unplugged before play.
There is a bug related to scouting and jumping that we will have fixed in an interim release soon.
