Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!
[p]Hello everyone - hope you all had a good Christmas and start tot he year! It's time for another development update. It's unusually long because it covers both December and January![/p]
[h3]Milestone 7 & Full (1.0) Release[/h3][p]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.
[h3]Strategy UI Backgrounds & Interceptor Paperdoll[/h3][p]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.
[h3]Performance Optimisation[/h3][p]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.
[h3]Praetorians & Alien Bio-Cannon[/h3]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!
[h3]Farm Maps & Additional Scout UFO maps[/h3]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.
[h3]Smaller Tasks[/h3]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.
[h3]Mods & Steam Workshop Integration[/h3]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 next month, and hopefully we'll see some of you testing the Milestone 7 before then!
[h3]Milestone 7 & Full (1.0) Release[/h3][p]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.
[h3]Strategy UI Backgrounds & Interceptor Paperdoll[/h3][p]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.
[h3]Performance Optimisation[/h3][p]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.
[h3]Praetorians & Alien Bio-Cannon[/h3]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!
[h3]Farm Maps & Additional Scout UFO maps[/h3]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.
[h3]Smaller Tasks[/h3]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.
[h3]Mods & Steam Workshop Integration[/h3]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 next month, and hopefully we'll see some of you testing the Milestone 7 before then!