Xenonauts 2 News

[p]Hello everyone - we're now into December, so it's time to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year before filling you in on our progress during November. As I'm unlikely to write a separate development update for December due to the way the holidays fall (I'm not back in the office until 5th January), I'll also give an update on our plans for the 2-3 weeks before we shut down for the festive season.
[/p][h3]Milestone 6 Released[/h3][p]The big news in the last month is we finally managed to release Milestone 6 onto our public branches. We're glad this update is finally in the hands of the players after it spent a solid couple of months stuck in the final bugfixing phase - but the overall reaction to the launch has been positive, and people seem to be enjoying the new content and improvements.[/p][p]The launch also went relatively smoothly in stability terms, and we've not been fighting too many fires post-launch. Quite a few bug reports have come in for relatively minor gameplay issues, and we've been steadily working through them, but most of the fixes for these are being rolled into Milestone 7. 
[/p][h3]Performance Improvements[/h3][p]Although the various fixes for Milestone 6 have absorbed a fair bit of programmer time, we did also start working on performance improvements for Milestone 7. We asked the community what parts of the game they felt needed the most optimisation, and we're currently working to this list:[/p]

• [p]Speeding up load times[/p]
• [p]Reducing slowdown when alien UFOs spawn on the Geoscape[/p]
• [p]Duration of the AI turn in tactical combat[/p]
• [p]Explosions in the tactical combat causing framedrops[/p]

[p]However we didn't have too many replies on this particular topic, so if you're reading this and feel there are other areas of the game where the performance needs improving then please do let us know (remember that this should be based on playing standard builds of the game, as Experimental builds have much worse performance due to all their additional logging).[/p][p]We've already made some improvements to the tactical mission load times and the AI turn duration, and we'll be continuing with these during December. The goal here is to get these completely finished before we start public testing of Milestone 7, because these are the changes most likely to cause gameplay bugs!
[/p][h3]New Content[/h3][p]We continued to work on the new content for Milestone 7 over the past month. The strategy UI background art progression system is now fully functional (it had some teething problems when we tested it last month), and the artwork has been added to the game for the research and engineering screens, and we're now halfway through the base stores screen.[/p][p]The programming work to implement the aircraft paperdoll system (where the plane artwork updates as you change weapons and equip items) was also completed last month, and we finished the artwork for the Angel interceptor and all of the weapons. Work on the Phantom is now well advanced, and we expect to have moved onto the Gemini by the end of December.[/p][p]We've also been working on various smaller content tasks, such as adding an additional tier of extra-tough Psyon / Sebillian / Wraith soldiers that accompany Eternals and appear on the hardest missions. These new aliens have claimed the "praetorian" rank, so we've added a new alien "warrior" rank and demoted the former elite / praetorian aliens down a level (the rank sequence now goes soldier / warrior / elite / praetorian). The game files for this have now been completed, and we'll be adding the 3D models for these new units after Christmas.[/p][p]We're also adding a new interrogation project for the Cleaner Leaders, as a few people have pointed out that it was weird that they didn't have one when the other types of Cleaner do. Again, the game files for this have been completed, and we're hoping to get the research art and research text completed by the end of December.
[/p][h3]Conclusion[/h3][p]I think that's everything I wanted to cover. The only releases we have planned for the remainder of the month are our ongoing hotfixes for Milestone 6, with Milestone 7 not arriving on the Experimental branch until January - so I hope everyone has a good festive season and we'll see you all next year![/p]

[p]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![/p][p]Bugfixes:[/p]

• [p]Fixed a crash that could occur on strategy when changing the dropship soldier arrangement on the aircraft screen.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a crash that could occur if a blank "construction complete" notification appears.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a crash that could occur if a Mind Control capable unit (usually an Eternal) going berserk.[/p]
• [p]Added extra logging around a couple of crashes that occur on the soldier equip screen, and set the error not to crash in non-experimental builds.[/p]
• [p]The game will no longer crash if you attempt to create a new campaign with the same name as an existing one, but the game doesn't have the required permission to delete the old files.[/p]
• [p]Fixed doing a F9 quickload during the air combat messing up the UI.[/p]

[p]This update contains the next round of fixes for Milestone 6. Please continue to report any issues that you encounter and we'll do our best to fix them![/p][p]These hotfixes can sometimes break tactical mission saves, so if you experience unexpected crashes playing an existing tactical save immediately after the update please try restarting the mission by loading the pre-mission strategy save.[/p][p]Gameplay Changes:[/p]

• [p]Operation Points can now fall below zero and turn negative if you pay the UFO Delegation cost while not having enough OP available to cover it.[/p]
• [p]Temporarily removed the air combat ambience track, as some people were complaining it contains a painful high-pitched whine that makes the air combat almost unplayable. Sadly I'm in my late thirties and I apparently lack the auditory range to be able to hear this (ouch), but we'll add the sound back in once our sound engineer has had a chance to strip out the offending whine.[/p]
• [p]Added a tooltip for the UFO Delegation campaign option that explains what the system does.[/p]
• [p]Removed the obsolete "Evasive Roll: Enabled / Disabled" tooltip line from the various air combat weapons.[/p]

[p]Bugfixes:[/p]

• [p]Fixed an issue where you could see round a wall in the Battleship UFO.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the Sentinel Module tooltip not displaying the correct vision angle increase.[/p]

[p]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![/p][p]Gameplay Changes:[/p]

• [p]Operation Points can now fall below zero and turn negative if you pay the UFO Delegation cost while not having enough OP available to cover it.[/p]
• [p]Temporarily removed the air combat ambience track, as some people were complaining it contains a painful high-pitched whine that makes the air combat almost unplayable. Sadly I'm in my late thirties and I apparently lack the auditory range to be able to hear this (ouch), but we'll add the sound back in once our sound engineer has had a chance to strip out the offending whine.[/p]
• [p]Added a tooltip for the UFO Delegation campaign option that explains what the system does.[/p]
• [p]Removed the obsolete "Evasive Roll: Enabled / Disabled" tooltip line from the various air combat weapons.[/p]

[p]Bugfixes:[/p]

• [p]Fixed an issue where you could see round a wall in the Battleship UFO.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the Sentinel Module tooltip not displaying the correct vision angle increase.[/p]

[p]This update contains the first round of stability fixes for Milestone 6. Please continue to report any issues that you encounter and we'll do our best to fix them![/p][p]These hotfixes can sometimes break tactical mission saves, so if you experience unexpected crashes playing an existing tactical save immediately after the update please try restarting the mission by loading the pre-mission strategy save.[/p][p]Gameplay Changes:[/p]

• [p]We've added a fallback trigger for the "endless war" system. This spawns endless waves of Battleships so people can continue to play the strategy layer for as long as they want, but in some cases it was not triggering correctly. We think we've fixed that bug, but it's a serious enough issue we've set up a fallback trigger that activates "endless war" at day 500 if it hasn't already been activated.[/p]
• [p]As it's now possible to capture an Eternal without first completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission, completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission is now required to unlock the Operation Endgame research project.[/p]
• [p]We've made some optimisations to the AI turn, which should mean processing civilian actions should be faster.[/p]

[p]Bugfixes:[/p]

• [p]Fixed an AI hang that could occur on the alien turn.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to close an open door that was touching an interactive object like a Cleaner data desk.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a crash that could occur if you unassigned the target rescue soldiers from the dropship on the Rescue Soldiers mission using the assignment dropdown, which previous fixes had not dealt with.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the tactical map randomisation being broken (it had started marking the wrong map as "played" after a tactical mission).[/p]
• [p]Hopefully fixed the issue where the post-Phase 4 event sequence that is supposed to eventually unlock endless waves of Battleships can get broken.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the bug where certain Project Available pop-ups that were not triggered by completing a research project (e.g. Corpse Analysis, MARS Rebuild, etc) would show a pop-up taking you to the research screen even though they only contained engineering projects.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a rounding issue that could cause the player to be unable to recruit a Geoscape Supporter despite seemingly having exactly the right amount of Operations Points to do so.[/p]
• [p]Fixed some z-fighting with the Pegasus dropship interior walls.[/p]
• [p]Hopefully fixed the issue where the shot crosshair would sometimes become offset when hovering over enemy Sentry Guns.[/p]
• [p]Removed Lock Time from various aircraft weapon tooltips, as it's not used in most cases and would show error text in the other cases.[/p]