Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!

[p]Hello everyone - we're now into October, so here's our monthly development update covering everything we worked on over the past month.[/p][h3]Milestone 6[/h3][p]After releasing Milestone 6 onto the Experimental branches last month, we continued to release updates for it this month. Having completed all three of the remaining gameplay tasks on our Early Access roadmap, we're now focused on stability and bugfixes.[/p][p]We're still aiming to have the full release for Milestone 6 in the next two to three weeks - although estimating how many bugs our testers will find (and how long it'll take us to fix them) is tricky, so that date may move if we encounter a lot of problems![/p][h3]Ending Cinematic[/h3][p]The first completed item on our roadmap was the ending cinematic, which is a short epilogue cutscene in the same style as the opening cutscene. This has now been fully implemented in the game and plays after completion of the final mission. There's not really much more to say here, but I hope players feel it's a fitting way to close out a successful campaign.[/p][h3]Air Combat Tutorial & Gemini[/h3][p]Next was the "Air Combat Update" roadmap item, which contains all our previous work on the air combat interface refresh (plus the new side-on art for all the aircraft weapons) and now also contains the air combat tutorial. This has been integrated into the existing tutorial, and is aimed to be a brief explanation of the key interception combat mechanics, giving the player just enough information that they can figure out the rest by themselves.[/p][p]The Gemini interceptor has also had a bit of a refresh over the past couple of months, having morphed from a fighter that simply had better stats than its predecessors to a craft capable of performing some unique combat maneuvers. We recently added the "wingover" manevuer for that aircraft, which flips the plane through 180-degrees and can be rather helpful in a dogfight. This should help keep the tech progression interesting.[/p][p]We'll continue to tweak and refine the gameplay and balance of the air combat in Milestone 7, but we're now relatively happy with the overall state of the air combat.[/p][h3]Soviet Town Biome[/h3][p]The final completed item on our roadmap was the Soviet Town biome - an alternate biome for terror missions that is used in certain parts of the world. Adding a new "town" biome always takes a long time, but I'm pleased with the way it has come out. There's a nice contrast between the Western Town, which is mostly commercial buildings, and the Soviet Town being a mixture of residential, government and industrial buildings. That should help keep Terror missions feeling fresh.[/p][p]At present we've only added the five small Terror maps to the game, but the remaining three medium Terror maps are mostly complete and should be fully finished in the next week or so.[/p][h3]Miscellaneous[/h3][p]We've also added a few other smaller pieces of content this month. There's three extra strategy and three extra tactical music tracks (which almost doubles the amount of music in the game), plus updated models for the MARS and ARES vehicles, and some Xenopedia rewrites to reflect the new mechanics and gameplay changes added recently. And, as always, there's a long list of minor improvements that are too small to be worth mentioning.[/p][p]I think that's everything. Thanks for reading, and I'll be writing another post in a month's time![/p]