Xenonauts 2 - Development Update

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A new development update for Xenonauts 2:

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Xenonauts 2 Monthly Development Update!

Hello everyone - as we're now a week into June, it's time for our regular update on what we were working on last month!

New Assets
We've added a lot of new assets to the game over the past month. The most notable of these are the new 3D models and animations for the alien Sebillian and Cyberdrone units, and while the visual improvement is hopefully clear from the screenshot, the Cyberdrone in particular also benefits from having proper animation set (e.g. movement / shooting) rather than just being a static lump of floating alien amour. The various ranks of alien are also a bit more distinctive now; again this is most obvious with the two Cyberdrone variants!

Work is currently continuing on more of these new alien models. Both the Heavy Mentarch and the Heavy Servitor units are currently just palette swaps of the corresponding basic unit, but we're aiming to have distinct designs and 3d models for both in place before Milestone 6 releases.

Further progress was also made in other areas too. We finished another research illustration this month, leaving three remaining (one of which is already in progress). The inventory tile artwork and 3D model for the recently-introduced Alien Bio Rifle is nearly finished. We've added some new sound effects to some of the aliens to help make them more distinctive, and we finished up our level design work on the updated Tropical biome and started adding various new tiles and maps to the new Soviet Town biome.

Aircraft Paired Slots
One of the major goals for Milestone 6 is a refresh of the air combat that improves the visuals and polishes the gameplay. The first part of this has been to improve the UI on the Aircraft screen, so we can use our new "paired slot" system to replace the existing "Hardpoints" system (the blue numbers on the aircraft weapons that previously sat alongside the Weight values). This work is now complete.

The Hardpoint system reflected the size of different weapons, with each aircraft having up to four hardpoints and missile / torpedo weapons filling one and cannon / lance weapons filling two. Rather than represent this numerically, we can now pair weapon slots together to produce a linked double slot. Putting a cannon / lance into a paired slot will fill both of the linked slots, while missiles and torpedoes only fill a single slot - effectively the same system as before, but much easier to understand.

This change is also beneficial from a design standpoint, as it gives another method of differentiating interceptors. For instance, we may decide to give the basic Angel interceptor four weapon slots, with only two of them being paired together - this would limit the plane to only being able to carry a maximum of one cannon / lance. More advanced aircraft could have two sets of paired slots, allowing them to carry dual cannons. These extra options should help with the balancing work we'll be doing as part of the air combat refresh!

Bugfixes
Once again, we ended up spending significant amounts of time last month on bugfixes. We released five more stability hotfixes for Milestone 5 last month, fixing a lot of crashes and other gameplay problems - including several annoying bugs we'd been trying to track down for several months, plus a number of older bugs that predated Milestone 5.

Our work on Milestone 6 also includes bugfixes, and one of our programmers spent rather a lot of last month doing the painstaking job of tracking down the numerous places in the game where text was not being properly translated and figuring out why. Hopefully we'll be finished with this by the end of next week and non-English users will have a fully localised Milestone 6.

Modding
Our technical director spent some time fixing the remaining issues with our mod loading system last month, so it's now possible to create and share "mod packs" that modify the game files. The Mod Loader panel on the Main Menu screen will now read and apply these mods correctly. From a purely technical standpoint, we can now officially say that Xenonauts 2 supports modding.

Additionally, we've added support for code injection - basically, mods that can change the code of the game itself (e.g. one user has been experimenting with changing the game code so flight paths on the Geoscape follow the realistic curvature of the Earth). There's now a proper C# framework for doing this, and the process is integrated with the mod packs so that Steam Workshop will be able to distribute these mods once enabled. We'll be creating some documentation and an example project for this system in the next couple of weeks.

However, it would still be misleading to claim that Xenonauts 2 is a genuinely moddable game right now - we won't start work on the official mod editor until after Milestone 6 is complete, so modding the game remains painful and difficult due to the format of the JSON files we use to store data. It'll still be a few months until most users can start making mods!

Milestone 6
So when will Milestone 6 actually arrive? Sadly, it's still hard to say. Milestone 6 contains a lot of small / medium sized tasks, and the much larger task that is the update to the air combat. We've made good progress through all the smaller tasks, but we've not yet begun work on the core parts of the air combat refresh. We'll have a better idea of how long it'll take to complete once we get started on it, which we're hoping to do in the next two weeks.

Of course, that timeline may slip if more hotfixes are needed for Milestone 5. While I think prioritising stability has been the correct decision, it has unfortunately sucked programmer time away from working on the planned new content. Thankfully, the number of bug reports has started to drop off recently - hopefully that's an indication we've dealt with most of the bugs and can switch focus to Milestone 6, but we'll just have to wait and see.

I think that's plenty for this update. Thanks for reading!