Xenonauts 2 News

Your Xenonauts 2 update for May is finally here! Apologies for slight lateness on this one.

Chris is back on the case full-time now and has been focussed on getting the early game balanced and playable.

[h2]Rinse and Repeat[/h2]

This has mostly involved repeatedly playing the campaign over and over again, making a series of gameplay changes and bugfixes each time. This isn't really something that can be done until relatively late in development, when all the key gameplay systems are in place. Chris is working on this earlier for the sequel because we've got new mechanics to implement / test, and we need a playable version of the campaign to do that testing. The upside of this is that the game is rapidly becoming much more fun and playable in totality.

There are still areas of the game which need significant attention - the AI and the repetitiveness of the maps, for example. Also, the research text is mostly absent, plus the UI and quite a few of the tactical combat assets still need visual improvement. This will all improve incrementally over time.

Chris' plans for June are to get all the UFOs and Xenonaut dropship tiles added to the tactical missions, and to be able to play a campaign all the way through to the final type of UFO without suffering any game-breaking bugs or ridiculous difficulty spikes.

This will be a major milestone, and will mark the point where Xenonauts 2 becomes a properly playable game in its own right. The rest of the team will probably spend most of their time fixing the various gameplay / usability issues encountered along the way but we're also going to be making some time to upgrade the AI.

[h2]AI[/h2]

Last month Chris created a large number of test scenes for the AI so we could test whether it properly understood the different aspects of how to play the game. These were scenarios where there is a clearly optimal course of action (e.g. use the best weapon / fire mode for the situation, use clearly the best cover, etc), and this makes it much easier to identify exactly what the AI is doing wrong and why. We should have a number of AI fixes and updates in our next major build as a result.

[h2]Eye Candy[/h2]

The visual upgrades are continuing but we are taking some time to work through the pipeline. We've got new Xenonaut early-game models that are ready to be rigged and animated, a new Light Drone model and an updated model for the X1 Praetor equivalents that also need rigging and animation. The 2D art for the aircraft weapons / equipment is nearly done now, and the final 3D model for the sentry guns is also nearing completion. The biggest ongoing project is the concept work on our updated strategy layer UI, which is progressing nicely but still isn't ready for implementation because there's so much UI that needs to be concepted up.

[h2]Onwards to Beta[/h2]

Closed Beta Build V19 came out last week, and we will be releasing a hotfix early this week. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of changes we've made recently means that you may well not understand what's happening in the latest versions of the game - the gameplay changes are some way ahead of the tooltips and the research text, making the experience confusing / frustrating unless you've been following the patch notes closely. Chris will begin work on updating the tooltips / research text once it's possible to play the campaign all the way to the final UFO type, and once that work is done we should be able to commence the open beta.

Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do join us on Discord, the forums or the Steam community if you have any questions.

Welcome to this month's update!

As we mentioned last time, Project Lead Chris took some personal leave recently - he's now back to full-time work. A quick shout-out to everyone in the community who posted supportive comments when we mentioned this - there can be a lot of negativity in game communities and it's great to hear from the majority of you who are continuing to support the project and make positive contributions! Thank you for this and for being patient as we work towards more public releases.

While progress has understandably been a little slower due to this, the team have used the opportunity to focus on some important back-end tasks....



The first of these is the final part of the change from a single-base Geoscape to a multi-base Geoscape, which is the final separation of the base stores so that each base is pulling from its own inventory just like in the first game (previously items, soldier equipment, etc were shared globally across all bases). This is now done and bases have been fully separated from one another - it's quite a significant change and it's almost certainly caused quite a few bugs which we'll need to catch, but it's good to get this in at this point.



The second thing was adding "nested tooltips" that contain hyperlinks to other tooltips, similar to those seen in Crusader Kings 3. It's a little tricky to explain but you can see a quick example of it in action in CK3 here. This system allows us to prioritise helpful information given to the player while also providing links that lead to more detailed explanations.

Each tooltip ends up being shorter and more focused, but more overall information is available than before.



The third major thing is setting the game up to support translation. This is actually a very big task, but we figured we'd tackle it now given we're going to have to write a lot of text into the tooltips. Essentially we have to find every piece of text in the game that is displayed to the player and reference it into a single giant file that can then be translated into other languages. This system is made more complex because this system also needs to combine with our planned modding system, so that new text added in mods could also be translated if needed.



In terms of art, we've started work on the final set of Xenonaut 3D models and we've been working on an updated design for the alien Gun Drone. We've also been working on the final designs for the two advanced dropships (up to this point we've just been using the old X1 designs as placeholders). There's also been some work done on the 2D art for the aircraft weapons and equipment, and further work on the new strategy UI concepts we've been working on for a while now.



The current plan is to start putting public builds out again in May - we hope to get the entire schedule back on track soon. I will obviously keep you updated as soon as the team is able to target a more specific release date for the Open Beta.

Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do join us on Discord, the forums or the Steam community if you have any questions.

Greetings everyone - we'll start this update by addressing the delay to the Open Beta.

One factor here is that Project Lead Chris is currently working reduced hours due to a personal matter - here's a note from him:

"It's unlikely there will be any public releases (including the open beta) for the next four weeks or so. I'm now not sure exactly when the open beta will happen, but I'll let you know once my plans do start to return to normality. However, the time I do have has been spent on project management and I'm therefore hoping overall progress on the project won't suffer too much as a result of my absence. We've also made some decent overall progress this month."

So, apologies for that delay - we're aware that people are very keen to jump in and we appreciate that it's difficult to keep waiting. However, given the above and the fact that the game continues to receive regular updates to (and useful feedback from) the Closed Beta, we're going to have to ask you to continue to be patient on that front. Thanks!

With all that in mind, let's take a look at our recent progress…



We've placed a significant amount of emphasis this month on air combat.

Beta V18 arrived at the start of the month and that contained our new air combat damage model where UFOs / aircraft now have both Armour HP and Hull HP, with weapons doing different amounts of damage to each (damage is always assigned to Armour HP first). This allows us to differentiate between different types of tough UFOs, as different weapons are stronger against UFOs with lots of Armour HP compared to those that just have vast amounts of standard Hull HP.

This change added some welcome variety to the air combat, but it didn't change the fact that the air combat can be very repetitive. We've therefore spent the last couple of weeks trying out some new ideas to make it more reactive - the key change being that we've added a vision radius to all air combat units, added clouds that block vision (and weapons cannot fire though), and set UFOs to only go into attack / escape behaviour when they spot your aircraft.

The basic idea is to generate more interesting combat scenarios. The early tests suggest that these new systems do make everything more interesting but we'll probably need to build further upon them to make the most out of them.



We've added a generic system that allows us to set basic logic on items that modifies their accuracy - e.g. if a soldier has less than 60 Strength, give -1 Accuracy for each Strength below 60. This is interesting because it allows us to add unique values to certain weapons, for example we could say Laser weapons are easy to use so a soldier gets +0.5 Accuracy for each point of Accuracy below 65. This potentially means Lasers would remain viable weapons for rookie soldiers even towards the end of the game, without making them overpowered in the early game.

We've also been looking at how to support Recoil. We can now easily add in the system from the original Xenonauts (the 60 Strength example given in the paragraph above) but we've been experimenting with a system where the accuracy of each subsequent shot in a burst is reduced by a set percentage. For example, a weapon with 20% recoil and 50% hit chance would have the following hit chances in a 5-round burst: 50%, 40%, 32%, 25%, 20%.

This setup means we should be able to permit the option for longer bursts. Short bursts are relatively accurate but cost a lot of TU per shot, whereas longer bursts are more TU efficient but waste ammo.
This becomes interesting because you can do two things - firstly, we can add in a recoil penalty for certain weapons depending on whether they have moved (representing a bipod). So a machinegun might be able to shoot relatively accurate long bursts provided the shooter had not moved, whereas only short bursts would be worthwhile if the user had moved. Secondly, we can use the generic system mentioned above to modify Recoil based on the Strength of the soldier so that stronger soldiers suffer less from the effects of recoil.

Taken together these systems just allow us to differentiate the weapons a bit more and give the player a few more tactical decisions, without rendering weapons like the LMG completely useless if they aren't fired from a stationary position. I imagine modders will also find them useful tools.



We've added quite a lot of new art for various vehicle weapons, we've added support for keybindings, we've made a number of usability improvements to the tactical combat based on feedback on our Steam demo, and we've added proper jetpack movement to the game too. There's also been lots of smaller fixes / additions not worth individually mentioning.

Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do post here in the Steam community, join the Discord or ask in the Forums if you have any questions.

While we don't respond to everything, we do our best to read every thread that is posted.

As we gear up to release version 18 of the closed beta next week, we thought we'd let you know what we've been working on for that. This month we've been focussing on your feedback from the Steam Demo, so let's dive into that a bit...

The reaction to the demo was generally good, but we also saw a lot of people who bounced off the game because they just didn't understand what was going on and how the controls worked. Reading the feedback from players and seeing what streamers struggled with when they played the game gave us a good opportunity to try and improve the controls and accessibility, as a lot of the pre-release feedback we get tends to be from experienced X-Com / Xenonauts players who already know how things work.



We have therefore implemented a number of systems that make things easier for players. Many of these things are small things - the fire path better shows when weapons are being fired beyond range; the camera briefly focuses on newly-sighted aliens; bleeding wounds are more clearly displayed, etc - but we've added a number of larger new systems too.

The first of these is the "soldier finished" system that exists in classic X-Com and was added to Xenonauts by the Community Edition. There is now a "done" button you can click to select a soldier as finished for the turn, and it will automatically select the next soldier that is not finished. If you click it and all your soldiers are now marked as finished, the turn ends. Additionally, clicking the End Turn button will now check whether there are any "forgotten" soldiers (i.e. not marked as done, and have not spent any TU) and automatically select them if there are. This just ensures the player doesn't accidentally forget about their soldiers, and we think in practice there won't be many situations where it's annoying (although you can just Ctrl+click the End Turn button to instantly end the turn if you want).

We've also updated the "ability buttons" that appear above the UI during tactical combat and allow you to select the different weapon fire modes and reload / throw grenades, etc. The most important change is that these are now a "stance" - clicking a button to set a fire mode as active just means that fire mode will be used when you hover over an alien, or when you activate free fire mode by holding Ctrl. Clicking the button no longer activates "sticky" free fire mode (which can only be cancelled by pressing Esc) unless it's a specialist item like a grenade or a medikit.

This change to free fire mode is probably the biggest usability change we've made. Free fire mode allows you to target anything, so it's very fiddly and it's easy to accidentally click a nearby object such as the ground tile that the target is standing on rather than the target themselves - we saw a lot of people doing this in the demo. The standard targeting method where the game only shows a fire crosshair over things you actually want to shoot at is the best method of targeting in most instances, and if you do want to use free fire mode then it's much easier to simply hold Ctrl as you can then cancel it by letting go of Ctrl (having to press Esc is much more clunky).

Key Rebindings

We've also been experimenting with some changes to the control system. I'm unsure if we'll persist with these control system changes, but we've implemented key rebinding functionality so people can switch them back if they don't like our changes (plus it's something we'd have needed to implement before anyway). This system was a surprising amount of work but we're in the process of ironing out the final few kinks with it right now.





Chris has mostly been busy with the air combat for the past couple of weeks. The first balance pass is now complete, so interceptors and their equipment are now balanced to inflict and receive the appropriate amount of damage when fighting different tiers of UFOs. The various items are set up in the research tree, and as part of the next closed beta update (v18) we'll now be able to start balancing the air war in the context of the campaign (are aircraft too expensive, do they unlock at the right point in the tech tree, etc).

Several new systems / changes will be made to the X1 air combat model. Only the first of these (a change to the way Armour works) has been implemented so far, but you'll likely be seeing more polish added to the air combat in the next month or two.



A curveball recently thrown our way was that our animator / particle artist needed to finish up his contract with us sooner than we anticipated, so we had to devote some extra resources to making sure all his work was done before he departed. Various kinds of new explosions have been added to the game and we've got some gib animations done too, but the two big things we've been looking at are the jetpack movement animations and the Reaper zombie transform animations.
The jetpack animation work is fairly straightforward (it works the same as in the first Xenonauts), but we're planning the Reaper zombies to work a little differently. Instead of replacing the unfortunate target with a generic zombie unit, what will now happen is that the target falls dead to the ground and will then rise back to life with a special set of zombie animations and an additional "covered in blood" texture. Not only does this look cooler, we might be able to make it more interesting from a gameplay perspective too - e.g. the zombie could retain any remaining Armour HP that the unfortunate victim had when they were killed.

The jetpack work is now mostly done and the animation work on the new zombies is now done too, but we still need to implement all the code for the zombies. I'm not sure if they'll arrive in V18 yet or whether you'll have to wait until V19, but they'll definitely be a big improvement over the current zombification visuals when they do arrive!



We've done a load of other work, but we'll close out by mentioning that we've dramatically improved the speed of our prerequisite system. This system is a piece of code that governs many different parts of the game - everything from when research projects are unlocked, when UFOs spawn, which units can equip which items, anything to do with the power capacity / living capacity / stores capacity systems, etc.

We've rewritten this to speed it up and give us access to more functionality, and in some cases it's made the Geoscape up to 100 times faster than before. There are still plenty of other slowdowns on the Geoscape that are caused by other things, but it should hopefully fix the persistent slowdown that starts to occur as the game enters the mid / late game (particularly if there's an alien base on the map).
Sadly, because the prerequisites are used so widely we have ended up having to deal with a lot of bugs in a lot of different systems. I think we've now found and fixed most of them but we imagine V18 is going to have some stability issues when it is first released! These will of course be worked on as soon as we can.

As we mentioned at the top of the post, we're hoping to put V18 out either at the end of this week or the start of next week. We've been working hard on it for a while now but we keep finding little gremlins that slow us down ..,but we're nearly there now.

As you have no doubt inferred, this means that we don't have a firm date for the Open Beta yet but we will, as ever, keep you posted.

Many thanks for reading and for staying up-to-date with our work - as ever please do join us on Discord, the forums or the Steam community if you have any questions.

Based on community feedback as well as our own schedule, we've decided to push the Early Access release of Xenonauts-2 back a few months. We know this will be a disappointment to those of you who have been waiting a long time for this, and we apologise again for the delays.

However, we have managed to secure additional development funding and this gives us a lot more flexibility in terms of when we launch. Ultimately, this is the best decision for the game and one which will enable us to come into Early Access with something much more polished and complete.

But what if you want to play the game right now? Well, here's some good news...



If you don't already own the game on Steam, you can play the demo which is part of the Steam Festival right now. Just go here, hit the "DOWNLOAD DEMO" button on the right-hand side and get going with a single level of tactical combat.

As many of you are backers, you will own the game on Steam and thus not be able to access the demo, but please feel free to show it to friends.



In lieu of the Early Access release, we have decided to start a public beta for the game in March using the new Steam Playtest function. This beta will be entirely free and will be open to everybody eventually, but will be deactivated once the game launches into Early Access. It'll contain a significant amount of the content that we were originally planning to launch with, so you won't be missing out on anything if you give it a try.

We might let a small cohort into the beta initially to get testing started, but the aim is to make this open to everyone until the Early Access version is ready.

This will enable us to get a much wider spread of feedback, helping us to tune the game ready for its fuller release. You, our community, have been a massive help in this regard already, so we have high hopes for this process going forward



If you, or your friends, are playing the demo or current backer builds then we would love some feedback on the game's UI and UX. If you'd like to help, then here are the ways that you can do that:

- Respond in the Steam thread here
- Post your thoughts on Discord in the UI / UX Feedback channel



Thanks once again for bearing with us. This has been a long and difficult project but we feel strongly that momentum is building - now we have the time to continue polishing, rooting out issues and making the game as good as it can be.