Xenonauts 2 News

The launch of Xenonauts 2 has been a huge success so far, with over 30,000 people buying the game since Tuesday. It's been an amazing (and exhausting) experience for us here at Goldhawk and we want to offer a genuine thankyou to everyone that has supported us!

With so many people playing the game, we've also been provided with an enormous amount of feedback about the good and bad parts of the current Xenonauts 2 experience. Although we're still sorting through this, I wanted to quickly discuss a few issues that have come up repeatedly and explain how we're planning to address them. They are:

• Bugs & Stability
  
• Performance & Loading Times
  
• Timed Missions
  
• Similarities to Xenonauts 1
  
• Modding Tools
  

[h3]Bugs & Stability:[/h3]
Fixing any crashes, hangs and other game-breaking bugs is our highest priority issue. The sheer number of people playing the game means lots of bugs have been found, and we've set everything else aside and are working hard to fix them as quickly as possible.

I think we're making good headway on these stability issues given the small size of our team, but we're not quite there yet. We appreciate your patience while we work through these issues - we've only got two programmers and they need to sleep once in a while!

[h3]Performance & Loading Times:[/h3]
There's been a lot of complaints about the loading times in the game. This is something we were initially planning on optimizing further closer to final launch, but based on community feedback we'll be moving this work forwards,

In the meantime, it may be possible to reduce loading times by installing Xenonauts 2 on the fastest hard drive you have available (as load speeds in our game are governed largely by the hard drive speed).

Also, we suspect there is a memory leak in the game. If you've been playing for a couple of hours and loading times or general performance feels a lot worse than at the start of your play session, please reboot the game and it should return to normal (we will be looking into the memory leak once the crashes are dealt with).

[h3]Timed Missions:[/h3]
Although many people enjoy the new timed missions in Xenonauts 2, there's also a sizable group who very much dislike the concept. We are going to be adding campaign options that allow you to adjust these timers, allowing people who enjoy the missions to tweak the timings to their own preferences and those who dislike them to remove the time pressure entirely (e.g. by increasing them to 99 turns).

Again, this was originally planned for later in development but based on player feedback we have decided to bring it forwards. Of course, we'll also be continuing to balance and improve these missions throughout Early Access - so hopefully far fewer people will want to skip them in the final game anyway!

[h3]Similarities to Xenonauts 1:[/h3]
While many people do already feel like Xenonauts 2 is distinct enough to stand apart from its predecessor, not everyone agrees with this.

While I do understand this view, I think it is important to remember that Xenonauts 2 is not yet finished. There's a lot more improvements and content planned for Early Access, and the game will feel less and less like the original Xenonauts (and more and more superior to it) with every new update.

It's probably also worth pointing out that the original Xenonauts wasn't particularly well received when it first launched into Early Access back in 2013 (thankfully before the days of Steam reviews), but the community feedback and sales revenue allowed us improve the game dramatically - and I'm sure the same will be true for the sequel!

[h3]Modding Tools:[/h3]
Although the entire game isn't editable with a text editor like the first Xenonauts was, we've still designed Xenonauts 2 to support modding and have already done a fair bit of work under the hood to ensure that they will work properly with the game.

However, manually editing the compressed json files used by the game with a text editor is not the most straightforward process. As such, we've been chatting to members of the Xenonauts 1: Community Edition team about the possibility of taking an editing tool we developers created a few years back and building it into a community-led standalone modding tool.

It's therefore possible that modding tools might be arriving much sooner than expected - but we can't make any firm promises here, as we're still just exploring the possibility at this stage!
[hr][/hr][h3]Development Roadmap[/h3]
Finally, in addition to the points raised above, you can see what our longer-term plans for Xenonauts 2 are on the Development Roadmap outlined in our previous update!

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!

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

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.