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KickStarter Xenonauts 2 - now available on Early Access

ValeVelKal

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Aug 24, 2011
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1,605
Phantom Doctrine was pretty great if you don't abuse the "magic disappearance of corpses" technique.

Then of course, Phoenix Point
Really? Didn't see it's combat as being too great especially when the best way of handling the game was to judo chop everybody. Even in combat.
I never tried the melee judo chop, maybe that’s why.

Tactical phase is certainly inferior to XCOM2 (XCOM1 was terrible due to the “spawn” system of the enemy, without mod anyway) but I really like the whole strategic layer, the fact that you can prepare missions with observators/snipers, the various objectives, the whole scenarios action,…
 

ERYFKRAD

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Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Mission prep and objectives were ok, but the entire setup encouraged ninja behaviour and judo chops and yes, corpse disposal.
I also disliked the no-brainer of a corkboard, though I would be at my wit's end as to how to make it more involving AND make it affect the game more meaningfully, so I'm not blaming @kacper syzmczak or however you spell his name for that.
 
Unwanted

CancerUnlimited

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Jun 12, 2021
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Hey you guyz. CancerUnlimited here. Everybody knows what this genre needs. Space lobsters. Even better space diseased lobsters. Yeah. And chopping your legs off. No, wait...
 
Glory to Ukraine
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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
Its good to see that they are introducing human enemies too - I really liked the concept of X-COM Files, where you start off fighting against human cults and various monsters before the aliens even show up. This was IMO a missed opportunity for the original UFO/X-COM too, since there actually was talk about "inflitrators" and "agents" that the aliens used to subvert the governments, but they were never shown.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Projectiles still don't look clean. I mean how they traverse through the environment. Looks really awkward to be honest. Makes me think the world isn't really 3D, maybe some weird hybrid thing like Pillars.
 
Glory to Ukraine
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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
IIRC the original Xenonauts also went through pretty complicated development and its not like Goldhawk transformed into some sort of a huge studio that can do stuff more efficiently. Personaly I expect full release in 2023.
 

*-*/\--/\~

Cipher
Joined
Jul 10, 2014
Messages
909
Exactly. I checked out two betas that were a year apart and it felt like a month of development added. Game looks good, but they are really, really shit in the speed department.
 

agris

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Cleaners are the aliens' human collaborators, right?

They are gopniks that have drank too much blueberry juice.


Thanks for the video, it's interesting to see how flat and X1-like the map and assets look after I jumped into the very first beta way back when with the jungle biome/assets.

It is a bit too flat and X1 like to me. I hope they plan to upgrade their assets to add animation. Suspension tanks that swirl, desk computers with beeps and bops, that kinda thing. Map assets are a bit spartan atm.
 
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Grotesque

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Divinity: Original Sin Divinity: Original Sin 2
Is the revamped/improved/the same air combat in?

This shit was talked about a long time ago and they didn't even have anything to show not even to this day.

Star Citizen SQ 42 before this game.
Heard t first!
 

udm

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Make the Codex Great Again!
I don't understand why they went with the weird LOS system from Xenonauts 1 when they've changed the engine. That was one of my major gripes from the first game, where you thought your soldier had LOS to something but he actually didn't because of the way the engine rendered irregularly shaped objects.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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https://www.xenonauts.com/2021/11/02/xenonauts-2-october-update/
Xenonauts 2 – October Update
Post Info

Posted by Paul KTNovember 2, 2021

With October over, it’s once again time for our monthly update.


The big news this month has been the release of Closed Beta V22, which is a fairly significant upgrade on previous builds. This is currently only on our Experimental branch but it should be making its way to the main / default Steam and GOG branches in a week or two when it has had a bit more testing. We’ve done three hotfixes for this build since it was first released and there is a fourth due out shortly that should iron out the most serious remaining bugs we’re aware of.

Establishing Shots

Our priority for V22 has been to improve the opening hour or two of the game, which we’ve done in several ways. The first is to establish the game setting more clearly right from the start of the game, which we’ve done by adding a short text intro that is played when you start a new campaign. Some of you may remember that we’ve set Xenonauts 2 a little before the alien invasion properly begins, with the player first having to deal with the Cleaners and transition from being an intelligence agency into being a military organisation. Of course, we’ve also put some further lore and explanation in the first Research project popup that the player gets.


polar-300x169.jpg


Visual Polish

The second thing we’ve done is to continue to improve the visuals. The new UI graphics for the loading screen and strategy topbar have been added to the game, and all the Xenonauts are now using their final 3D models in the tactical combat. Another cool little detail is that we’ve added a lot more hairstyles to the 3D models, so now a soldier in the ground combat will change hairstyle and colour to (roughly) match the hair shown in their soldier portrait – something that took a surprisingly long time to implement, but makes your starting squad much more distinguished from one another. The visual updates to the tactical mission environments continue too, with the Polar biome getting some attention this month – we’ll be moving onto the fourth Biome (likely the Dock) next month.

Maps and Missions

Thirdly, we’ve added another dozen maps to the game. There’s a lot of Raid missions in the early part of the game, but there was previously only one Raid map per biome. There’s now three Raid maps per biome which means there’s way more variety in the early missions, something that will improve further once we set up the new mission types in the early game in the next major build. We’re hoping to get that out before we break for Christmas, so stay tuned.
 

Grotesque

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this update is laughable, a text, hairstyles, visual upgrade

no new air combat implementation to this day.

at this pace, Squadron 42 will launch before this game
 

cyborgboy95

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https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/538030/view/3114798182498961205

As November draws to a close it's once again time for our monthly update. This month we've mostly been working on turning the experimental builds of V22 into something ready to be released on our main Steam / GOG branches. This has involved a total of 6 hotfixes, which might be a record for us!

New Builds

Anyway, V22 is now out. This is the first major update on our main branches since March (apologies for that) and I think anyone who hasn't been playing on the Experimental branches is in for quite a treat given how much the game has changed since then.

The reception to the V22 Experimental builds overall has been very positive, both in terms of comments and the pattern of play that we're seeing from users. Part of the reason that we released so many hotfixes for V22 was that many of our testers have been playing much further through their campaigns than previously, so they're encountering bugs in areas of the game towards the end that haven't yet been tested (or balanced) properly. A couple of the late-game UFOs had broken teleporters that meant you couldn't actually complete those missions, for example. It's very encouraging to see that people are already able to spend 5+ hours playing a campaign, when we as developers know we've still got a lot of improvements left to make.

Content Additions

There haven't been too many new features added this month, unfortunately: the coders have been busy fixing bugs and Chris has been off for a couple of weeks on paternity leave, so there's not been too much time. Nonetheless, a few pieces of new content have arrived - a couple more research projects have been written up, some new terrain tiles have been added and more destruction states set up on existing tiles, various corpse art for the aliens has been done, and a little bit of new UI art has arrived.

We've done quite a bit of work on 3D characters this month too. Now the Xenonaut models are complete, we're working on the final high-quality 3D models for the local civilians in each map. This is quite a big job as there's probably about 30 different clothing items that need to be modelled and combined in different ways to give us all the variants we need to have realistic-looking locals across the many different biomes in our game, but the progress so far is looking good.

We're also starting to work on the rank / armour variants for various aliens, which we want to look a little more distinctive than they did in Xenonauts 1. We've now finished the Psyons and will be moving onto the Sebillians next.

Spacebar Speedup

The one new code feature we spent some time on this month was trying to make controlling multiple soldiers easier during tactical combat. We've done this by setting up the spacebar to accelerate unit movement - pressing space while a unit is moving causes them to finish their move pretty much instantaneously. Pressing space when a unit isn't moving causes the game to mark that soldier as having finished their turn and automatically select the next nearest soldier that hasn't finished their turn (of course, you can re-select "finished" soldiers manually if you want). Once all the soldiers have been marked as finished, space will end the turn. You can now play through a turn relatively quickly if you want, which can often be useful towards the end of a mission.

With December including the Christmas holidays we'll be having another truncated month, but with V22 done we are hoping we can get some cool new features in for testers in January.
 

cyborgboy95

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Aug 24, 2019
Messages
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https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/538030/view/3114800719199557061

Happy New Year and all that! Here's a quick update from the Goldhawk team on work that took place in December - this was a slightly short month owing to team holidays but we're back and on track now.

Morale Boost

The main focus of recent work has been the soldier Morale system which causes soldiers to panic when things go horribly wrong on a mission. We actually planned not to include this in Xenonauts 2 for quite a while, but ultimately we felt the game would be weaker without it and not having it gives us fewer tools when it comes to designing the alien abilities (particularly psionic ones). This system is mostly now implemented but there's still quite a few bugs and edge cases we're working through.

We've made a few improvements relative to the first Xenonauts. The first is that Morale always starts at 100 for every soldier, and the Bravery of a soldier (boosted by the squad commander bonus) reduces the amount of Morale damage taken when something bad happens (a soldier with 0 Bravery takes about 3x the morale damage that soldier with 100 Bravery does). There's now a button that allows you to spend TU in order to gain Morale, and the morale system is a bit more sensible in general. Units are generally only vulnerable to panic if Xenonaut soldiers are dying around them (particularly high-ranking ones) or the unit itself has been wounded, or if there are psionic aliens messing with their heads.

Balancing is still required but overall it should be a little smoother and easier to understand than it was in Xenonauts 1.

Ongoing Art

Work on the updated UI designs and final art assets also continues. We've done an updated layout for the tactical combat UI due to the fact that we added several new features since our current design was done, including the Morale system which now needs to be displayed somewhere.

Our UI artist is working on styling that at the moment, and in the meantime we've finished styling several more of the strategy panels. Work on the 3d models for the human civilians and alien armour variants also continues.
 

Darth Canoli

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Jun 8, 2018
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Perched on a tree
This is the new Grimoire.
I'm not sure we'll see the day a complete Xenonauts 2 is released.

Seriously, i'm not sure how many people work on this but either they work on it on their free time 4 hours a week or there is something very wrong with the project's management.
 

Eyestabber

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
I might be going senile and getting games mixed up, but I remember playing an earlier version of X2 that started with soldiers inside a helicopter and was mostly 3D and looked different from X1. But newer screenshots make the game look like a X1 expansion of sorts. What happened? Did the game get scrapped at some point? Help?
 

geno

Savant
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Aug 21, 2018
Messages
718
Location
Spain
I might be going senile and getting games mixed up, but I remember playing an earlier version of X2 that started with soldiers inside a helicopter and was mostly 3D and looked different from X1. But newer screenshots make the game look like a X1 expansion of sorts. What happened? Did the game get scrapped at some point? Help?
You played the alpha demo with the night mission right?
The most noticeable difference viusally is the fixed perspective, which give it that 2D feeling. And of course it used a new biome that the current builds don't have (IIRC there was another biome, a military base). But yes it feels a lot like X1.
 

agris

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I might be going senile and getting games mixed up, but I remember playing an earlier version of X2 that started with soldiers inside a helicopter and was mostly 3D and looked different from X1. But newer screenshots make the game look like a X1 expansion of sorts. What happened? Did the game get scrapped at some point? Help?
They're also using a lot of X1 art as placeholder, which further reinforces the similarities.

It is a shame what happened to their map art, I remember the very first technical alpha in a tropical / jungle biome. The environment looked very natural, not tile based. I guess it wasn't practical from a development standpoint.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Some areas seem to really lack in detail, which I don't think was the case in Xeno 1. Don't know why, but like the base for the new faction. The interiors are hilariously sparse. Looks terrible and cheap.
 

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