Xenonauts 2 News

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.

Hello! Apologies for the slight delay in getting this update out - things have been very busy around here as Xenonauts 2 is gathering momentum and we're responding to a lot of your enthusiastic community feedback as we go. Here's what we were working on during January…



[h2]New Content and Polish[/h2]

We released Closed Beta V17 on the Experimental branches last week and patched a number of bugs. We'll leave it a few more days and see how many more bugs are reported by the community after the latest patch, and if no further hotfixes are required we'll likely push V17 out to the default stable Steam / GOG branches.

The main new feature is an adjacency system for the base structures on the strategy layer. This system makes buildings more effective if they are built next to other buildings of the same type; for example Living Quarters grant additional living space if constructed next to other Living Quarters. Although the system is quite simple in principle, it makes planning your bases far more interesting than before and I think it'll be one of the first new features in X2 that returning players will notice, because it adds a wholly new dimension to a familiar system.

We've also been doing further work on the visuals. The MARS vehicles now update their art on the strategy layer and model in the tactical combat when you change their weapons. We've started working with a new particle artist, which has allowed us to replace the truly awful fire animation we were previously using, and we'll be updating the smoke / explosions / etc over the coming months so they look a bit more polished. There's been a few new pieces of research art added, we're designing the first new dropship for the game, and we're also working on the inventory art for the various vehicle weapons. We're hopefully going to start work with a new UI artist shortly too, so there's plenty going on.

However, we've prioritised improving the stability and usability of the game above everything else. We've fixed upwards of a hundred bugs or small stability issues every month since about August and we're starting to see the results. You still shouldn't expect Xenonauts 2 to feel like a finished game when you play it initially (it's still a much worse experience than Xenonauts 1) but it certainly seems possible to play it for a time and enjoy it - which is good news, because we've still got lots of polish and improvements planned!

[h2]Upcoming Work[/h2]

It's hard to plan too far ahead when so much of our work is responding to issues experienced by the community, but there's a few things we have our eye on.

The first thing is to get the final two UFOs that create crash sites into the game. We've finalised the 2D art for these UFOs and we've got the basic model in place, but doing the final texture work and setting up the tiles in the tactical combat is rather time-consuming for UFOs this big (plus we'll have to create maps for them for all the different biomes). However, having all the UFOs done will be a nice mini-milestone for the project and will allow us to test the tech tree all the way through to the very end of the game.

We're also going to be looking into some optimisations. This month we removed quite a chunk of unused old assets from the game directories, which reduced install size by 20% and sped up load times a little. We've also been working on improving the performance of the Geoscape by optimising the prerequisite system, as this controls everything from what time UFOs spawn and when research projects unlock to whether base structures are being constructed in a valid location or whether a specific unit can equip a specific item. Hopefully this will speed things up noticeably on low-end systems.

Other things we're hoping to be able to spend some time on are AI improvements, putting in a penalty for going over your Stores Capacity, and making further improvements to the Stress system so that the stress accumulated by soldiers is tied more closely to what actually happens to them on the battlefield.

[h2]Early Access[/h2]

Our current plan is to launch into Early Access towards the end of next month, but we'll be evaluating the game in a week or two and making a final decision on whether to postpone the launch or not. If you've been eagerly awaiting the Early Access launch so you can finally get your hands on the game, fear not - we've been working on alternate arrangements to allow new people into the Closed Beta even if the Early Access launch does get delayed! More details on all that once we've made the decision to postpone or not.

Before we get into things, we hope everyone had an excellent Christmas and that you're all set for a thoroughly Reaper-free New Year.

Here's your update for December…





A new version was released for backers this week with a host of gameplay improvements but a few juicy new features as well.

We've added a Soldier Memorial screen (based on the popular Xenonauts: Community Edition feature) which allows you to view your fallen soldiers and the date on which they died.

The second feature is the new soldier Stress / Fatigue system. The purpose of this is to discourage the player from running too many missions: the player isn't meant to fight a crash site battle every time they shoot down a UFO).

Soldiers gain stress from taking part in missions, but stress diminishes gradually over time. If a soldier ever goes over 100 Stress they suffer a breakdown and are set to Wounded for a certain number of days until they recover. At the moment the system is a little basic but I'm hoping we'll find time to integrate it into the ground combat mechanics in a more interesting way (i.e. high Stress soldiers are more likely to suffer morale events / psionic attacks in battle than well-rested soldiers).

There's a long list of gameplay and UX updates - most of which are small in isolation, but have a large collective effect: we've added tooltips to various parts of the game, as previously it was impossible to view the stats of certain items anywhere; we've done some work to ensure fewer things are being incorrectly hidden below the Hidden Movement screen; and we've brought back the cover icons from X1 that people have been asking for a while, etc. Switching between the primary and secondary weapons is now "sticky", making using secondary items a much more pleasant experience than it was before. Many of the bugs reported in the later versions of V15 have also been fixed in V16 too, as well as countless more small fixes.



We've also added quite a bit of new art to this build. There's a new 3D model for the Colossus armour (the most advanced suit of Xenonaut armour) and we've done some texture work on a number of the basic aliens that has made the Sebillians in particular look nicer than they did before. There's inventory art for our new Electroshock weapons and updated designs for items like the Medikit, Stun Baton and the Alien Magnetic Weapons. We've added the final background art to the Soldier UI screen, and we've rendered the new MARS models out for use in the Soldier Equip screen (these will be painted over by a 2D artist soon too).



For those who are not involved in the beta, the game is now starting to take shape reasonably well.

At this point this is mostly a matter of content. Although there's still a fair amount of coding to be done on the project, most of the things that are likely to jump out at people as being wrong with the game is missing content like missing parts of the tech tree, research reports not having images or text, or seeing terrain objects or aliens that look bad because they're still using semi-placeholder assets, etc. We're making steady progress on this front and the presentation of the game will continue to improve and the missing content will continue to arrive in the coming months.

It's been nice to see the bugs and issues reported on the forums gradually shift from being technical issues to gameplay issues, and to see people starting to properly play the game. We've been working hard to try and remove as many of the annoying / broken / jarringly ugly things that get in the way of players enjoying the game and with the Early Access launch still planned for late February we'll be continuing to prioritise this - having a more polished and enjoyable game is probably better than having one or two extra features!

November has been a productive month for us on Xenonauts 2. We're making good progress and the support we've received in terms of testing and feedback from the community has been outstanding - it's hugely appreciated.



[h2]Closed Beta V15[/h2]

This was released on the Experimental branch a week ago and has already received two hotfixes, with another one planned for this week. We're currently working on bugs and hope to have a stable version out on the standard Steam and GOG branches next week.

There are quite a few new features in this version but it's also significantly more polished. We've added some new UI screen background art and some new weapon art on the strategy layer, and in the tactical missions we've introduced improved ground textures to our maps and fixed lots of small things like the distracting pink error textures that were appearing frequently during combat.

Various parts of the UI have had tabs added to them to make navigation easier. There's more ambient sound than there was previously, etc. Lots of little things that collectively make the game look better and play better than before. You can take a look at the full changelog here if you are so inclined.

[h2]Training[/h2]

The Training system is new in Xenonauts 2. It allows your soldiers to gain experience passively outside of combat (assuming they are stationed at a base with suitable training facilities), but the initial rate of gain is fairly slow. However, completing autopsies on dead aliens and interrogating captured aliens will increase your institutional knowledge about the aliens and their tactics, and therefore increase the training speed of your soldiers. Soldiers will train up relatively quickly towards the end of a campaign, allowing you to replace lost veterans with semi-experienced troops.

We like the training system for two reasons: firstly, it gives a good reason for the player to complete autopsy research (autopsies might not autocomplete in X2) and also for them to try to capture at least one specimen of each alien type. Secondly, it fits the theme of the game quite well - it's about the humans gradually learning the alien weaknesses and reverse engineering their technology, then eventually steamrollering them.

[h2]Undersuits[/h2]

The Undersuit system is simple but adds more depth. Each soldier now has an additional armour slot in which they can put an Undersuit, which is a garment that can provide a variety of benefits from additional armour to stat boosts or even regenerative effects (it's quite similar to the Vest system in XCOM in many ways). This is just a way of expanding the tech tree and adding more ways of customising your soldiers - it seemed like an easy way to give the player some fun new toys to play with.

[h2]Next Month[/h2]

Once we get V15 Stable out, we'll be turning our attention to V16 - but with our Early Access launch planned for late February the emphasis will be on polishing and improving what we already have rather than adding major new features (although we might add one or two). As we play the Campaign now, it feels as if things are starting to click together nicely - we're looking forward to seeing how much better we can make it over the next three months!

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