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 - 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.

Milestone 6 Released
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.

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.

Performance Improvements
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:

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

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).

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!

New Content
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.

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.

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.

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.

Conclusion
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!