Xenonauts 2 News

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

[h3]Gameplay Changes:[/h3]

• Alien Base missions will no longer re-randomise the map and aliens present if you abort a mission and return to that same particular base.
  
• On the Experimental branch, the game has now been set to crash immediately when the game UI gets into a corrupted state. Previously the game would not crash immediately, but the corrupted UI would sometimes lead to further problems that eventually do cause a crash (at which point it is very hard to identify the original source of the corruption). Hopefully this will allow us to find and fix those issues.
  

[h3]Bugfixes:[/h3]

• Fixed an AI turn crash that could occur if an evacuating civilian was mind controlled before they evacuated.
  
• Fixed pressing Space on the Geoscape not correctly centring the camera on the map like it used to.
  
• Attempted a fix for areas of the map and UFOs sometimes not revealing from the shroud when you move soldiers.
  
• Fixed a minor issue where partially visible multi-tile objects could sometimes be incorrectly hidden after loading a save.
  

This is another hotfix for Milestone 5 that fixes a couple of gameplay issues. We're still tracking a small number of stability issues in Milestone 5 and will continue to release patches when we have fixes for them.

Please do report any bugs you encounter on the bug reporting subforums and we'll do our best to look into them!
[h3]Gameplay Changes:[/h3]

• Quantum Teleportation research now correctly requires you to complete a Destroyer UFO (or more advanced UFO type) mission to unlock. Previously it was unlocking too early.
  

[h3]Bugfixes:[/h3]

• Fixed another crash that could occur in the AI turn during tactical combat.
  
• Fixed being able to see through some of the interior walls in the entry room of one of the Cruiser UFO variants,
  

This is another hotfix for Milestone 5 that fixes a couple of gameplay issues. We're still tracking a small number of stability issues in Milestone 5 and will continue to release patches when we have fixes for them.

Please do report any bugs you encounter on the bug reporting subforums and we'll do our best to look into them!

[h3]Bugfixes:[/h3]

• Fixed yet another way where soldiers could suffer a permanent accuracy reduction from being wounded in the tactical combat.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur during the AI turn in tactical missions.
  
• Attempted a fix for certain UFO interior walls being invisible in crash sites but still present in gameplay terms, which was caused by Cyberdrones being killed in the UFO crash and exploding before the battle begun (causing them to destroy nearby walls before they had been properly initialised).
  

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!
[h3]Gameplay Changes:[/h3]

• Quantum Teleportation research now correctly requires you to complete a Destroyer UFO (or more advanced UFO type) mission to unlock. Previously it was unlocking too early.
  

[h3]Bugfixes:[/h3]

• Fixed another crash that could occur in the AI turn during tactical combat.
  
• Fixed being able to see through some of the interior walls in the entry room of one of the Cruiser UFO variants,
  

Hello everyone - it's time for our monthly development update on the progress we made in April.

[h2]Gameplay Fixes[/h2]
Over the past month our top priority was releasing hotfixes for Milestone 5 whenever players reported bugs. This ended up being rather time consuming, because it turned out there were quite a lot of crashes related to rare occurrences in some of the new systems - but thankfully, the vast majority of these issues are now fixed (although we'll continue to hotfix any further bugs reported by the community!)

As we're now looking towards the end of our Early Access journey, we also took the opportunity to fix some long-standing visual bugs. The most obvious of these was the bug where the interior walls of restaurant buildings on Terror maps would always appear pure black, along with other minor issues -- for example, dropships / UFOs having ugly solid shadows rather than a soft gradient like on other objects. These should all be fixed in Milestone 6.

[h2]New Content[/h2]
Progress continues on the final cutscene, with the rough sketch for each illustration now complete and sent over to the animation team that will be putting the cinematic together. We've completed another couple of pieces of research art (there's now only a handful remaining), and we've also added brand new models for the Cyberdrone and Heavy Cyberdrone that look better, have proper animations, and make the two variants much easier to tell apart.

Lots of new tiles have been added to the tactical combat, too. We've added the final environmental tiles for the ATLAS Base mission command room, and the Cleaner Base command room (including some updated tiles for the "Cleaner Device"). We've also added a lot of new tiles to the Soviet Town biome and we are in the process of creating our first proper test maps for that new environment, which we're hoping to include in Milestone 6 as an alternative tileset for Terror Site missions.

We've also added a lot of new tiles to the Jungle biome so we can create dedicated Jungle abduction maps - previously this biome lacked the tiles required to make the urban / industrial setting of an abduction map (whereas a jungle wilderness environment worked perfectly well for Crash Sites). The first Jungle abduction map is now complete and we should have all four in place when Milestone 6 launches.

[h2]Defender UFO[/h2]
A new UFO will be arriving in Milestone 6 - the Defender, a dedicated escort fighter that appears some time after basic Fighter UFOs. While less agile than Fighter UFOs, it is tougher and is equipped with a medium-range weapon that can target both Xenonaut interceptors and incoming missiles. As it's an escort craft it doesn't produce crash sites and won't appear in the tactical combat, but it should add a bit more variety to interceptions on the strategic layer.

[h2]Graphics Settings[/h2]
Finally, we've been working on proper graphics settings for the game. There's now sliders that allow players to control brightness / contrast / gamma, and we've evaluated the various quality settings to ensure that only things that actually affect performance are changed - previously the lower graphics settings would disable a lot of things that didn't actually affect performance, but still made the game look worse. We're largely done with this task; all we have remaining is to finish updating the UI with the new options.

That's everything we worked on last month. Thanks for reading, and I'll write another update at the end of this month!