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KickStarter Xenonauts 2 - now available on Early Access

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Kickstarter in May 4th (provisional). May the 4th be with them: https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com...c/19429-xenonauts-2-april-kickstarter-update/

Xenonauts-2 April & Kickstarter Update

This update will cover what we've been working on in the last two months, and our plans for our Kickstarter - which is provisionally expected to happen on 4th May. Our plans for the Kickstarter are summarized in brief at the bottom of this article but there'll be a proper announcement and full details of what we're planning in the near future.

The most visible thing we've produced in the past two months has been the new map in the public builds, which I consider a significant step up in visual quality from what we had before. Our plan is to use that map in our Kickstarter public build demo and we've been iterating and refining it with the subsequent releases - it's now on its third incarnation and we've got another couple of builds before the Kickstarter date for us to make more progress. If you're reading this and haven't yet played the new map, it'd be great if you could give it a try and then give us some feedback on the experience because we're hoping a lot of people will play the build during the Kickstarter and we want to make as good an impression as possible!

Less visible but no less important has been our work on the strategy layer. I think we've now pretty much reached the point where Xenonauts-2 is playable as a game (at least in the early stages of the invasion). Obviously the functionality and visuals are still very rough in certain areas and we've got a lot more work to do before we can call it a finished product, but about a month ago I finally had the lightbulb moment where I realized that I was actually playing the game and making decisions and having fun. It's not a good game yet, but it's definitely a game, and I consider that a pretty big milestone.

We've also made enough progress with the level editor and game tiles that we've nailed down the all the different combat map biomes we're going to support and which mission types each will be used for. We've also started blocking out one or two example maps in each biome to give us a better idea of what art assets we'll need by the end of the project, so I've been doing a lot of map design recently. Some of these maps look quite polished whilst other ones still look pretty primitive, but having a "proper" map to play for each mission makes properly testing the game much more efficient even if the maps repeat quickly and some of them don't look great.

The mission types we settled on are:
  • UFO Crash Site: these take place in wilderness areas with only a few buildings, and are good for getting research artifacts and Alloys
  • Abduction Missions: these take place in isolated inhabited areas with densely packed buildings such as farms / polar outposts / dockyards etc, and allow you to capture Alenium
  • DEFCON / VIP Elimination: a new mission type against human opponents where you have to capture / kill a VIP in order to lower global tensions, but you suffer relations penalties in the region based on how many people you kill (stunning them is fine). These take place in either a NATO or Soviet military base.
  • Terror Attack: very similar to X1, still takes place in either a NATO or Soviet town
  • Alien Base Attack: as in X1
  • Xenonaut Base Defence: broadly the same as in X1 (although there's a few differences that aren't worth explaining until everyone understands how the new Geoscape works!)
As you can see all the familiar faces from X1 have returned, with the "standard" missions split out into the fairly open Crash Sites and much denser Abduction missions that have slightly different strategic goals (Alloys are good for mass-producing weaker advanced tech, whereas Alenium is used to "power-up" individual items) and the addition of the DEFCON mission to spice things up a bit.

The biomes we settled on are:
  • Polar / Research Outpost
  • Boreal / Logging Camp
  • Temperate / Farm
  • Tropical / Dockyard
  • Arid / Village
  • Desert / Junkyard
  • NATO Town / Military Base
  • Soviet Town / Military Base
  • Alien Base
  • Xenonaut Base
There's not a 1-to-1 mapping versus what we had in the first game (e.g. the Farm was its own tileset and the military base was part of the Desert tileset in X1), I think we'll have quite a lot more map than X1 variety once the game is finished. We've produced quite a lot of assets since the start of the project and we're still in the process of sorting and retouching the older stuff as we set up each new biome, but I think things are coming together nicely.

Finally, the Kickstarter - as mentioned at the top of the post we're planning to launch this on Friday 4th May (although as always this may slip a little). This will be your first chance to buy the game and the full game including the strategy layer will be available to play at the end of the Kickstarter, assuming you've backed at the appropriate tier.

I'm working on the Kickstarter page and the reward structure at the moment and I'll hopefully post that up for general comment in the next couple of weeks as it's always useful to have community feedback on that sort of thing. A few key things to mention:
  • We're not planning any physical rewards because unfortunately we don't actually make any profit from them and organising the production / shipping is very time consuming, and I'd rather spend that time polishing the game instead
  • $25 gets you a copy of Xenonauts-2 on Steam / GOG when we launch into Early Access (planned for three months after the end of the Kickstarter)
  • $35 also gives you access to the closed beta which will start immediately after the end of the Kickstarter (this is limited to 2000 backers)
  • The higher reward tiers get you closed beta access plus an additional key of X2, a custom soldier with a portrait from our portrait editor, and eventually a unique portrait painted from a photo of you by our portrait artist
I'll hopefully be posting up a version of the custom portrait editor for people to play with and give us feedback on in our Kickstarter discussion thread, which I'll probably put up next week.

The $35 reward tier exists because the game is going to be rather rough in the closed beta period, so we want to limit it to the people who are most interested in the project and prepared to give us useful feedback. What I want to avoid is too many people seeing the game in its worst form and having lots of people bounce off it; I expect us to make a LOT of progress in three months in terms of gameplay balance and visual polish and usability. Personally I don't think asking the average backer to wait three months after the end of the Kickstarter is unreasonable, but I also know that many people have a strong reaction to being asked to pay extra to get the earliest access to a game (although I feel it's become the norm these days).

I'm curious as to how people feel about that sort of thing - does anyone have any thoughts on that that they would like to share?
 

udm

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We're not planning any physical rewards because unfortunately we don't actually make any profit from them and organising the production / shipping is very time consuming, and I'd rather spend that time polishing the game instead

:negative:
 

udm

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mJ1VfpM.jpg
 
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I will throw a lot of money at this KS. I normally don't but I got a lot of hours of fun out of the first Xenonauts.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com...s-2-version-0230-public-combat-test-released/
This version of Xenonauts 2 is a free public test build only available on GOG Galaxy, released free because it is still an early build and we don't yet think we can justify charging for it; full details on where to get the build can be found in this thread.

This build may be the final iteration of our free public builds ... the actual build we will during our Kickstarter as the public demo! However, it's also possible we'll release one more version next week depending on whether we see any more major bugs or gameplay issues that need a fix. Ultimately the purpose here is not to make a "perfect" level as we don't have unlimited time and there's still quite a lot of development to be done, we just want something that plays okay for an alpha demo!

If you're interested in hearing about the development of the project or getting notifications about our impending Kickstarter, please sign up for our mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/4FKe9

CHANGELOG:

  • Fixed AI Turn Hang: There's been a rather annoying hang happening in the Friendly AI turn that we've been chasing for a while - this should now finally be fixed.
  • Fixed Civilian / Dropship Crash: The game previously crashed if a civilian managed to get into your dropship, which was somewhat unfortunate given they think it's the safest place on the map and sprint directly towards it at the first opportunity ... but this is also fixed now.
  • Faster AI Turn: We spent a bit of time looking over the AI turn in an attempt to speed it up, and we tweaked a few things to make it run faster. One specific issue was that the AI turn camera was previously set to focus on any actions that affected friendly units (i.e. including civilians and local forces) rather than just Xenonaut units; we've now fixed that up.
  • Non-Symmetric LOS Fix: There were a few spots in the buildings where units could shoot out, but enemies on the other side were unable to shoot back due to an issue in the line of fire calculation. This should now be fixed up and shooting should be fully symmetrical again.
  • Elevation Bonus: There's now an elevation bonus for shooting down at a target from higher ground. This does not increase your base hit % chance, but it does reduce the stopping chance of any (non-100%) intervening cover.
  • Weapon Overwatch Defaults: We've added support for a tag that controls whether a weapon is set to overwatch fire by default or not, and we've now set the Grenade Launcher not to overwatch fire by default. This can be manually overriden (there's a toggle on the left of the UI that controls it) but I imagine the number of friendly fire incidents will be significantly reduced!
  • General Fixes:
    • Clicking on an alien head now sets the camera to the appropriate height - meaning enemies on roofs are much less confusing!
    • Local forces have had their Accuracy dropped from 60 down to 45
    • Fixed a bug preventing you from shooting at adjacent building walls
    • Smoke is now less visually opaque
    • Alien plasma projectiles have been slowed down slightly
  • Balance Changes:
    • Shotguns now grant +10TU
    • SMGs nerfed to do 20 dmg instead of 30 dmg
I think this fixes most of the major issues with the game, so let us know if you find any further weirdness. Your feedback has been enormously helpful over the past two months or so as we've turned this level from something with somewhat clunky and frustrating gameplay into something that is a much better advert for the type of game we're trying to make!

Regarding the Kickstarter - we've put out a load of info on the game out on the forums here, but we're still beavering away on the background getting the Kickstarter page and video set up. We're clearly not going to hit the original 4th May deadline but the page is shaping up nicely and the video is progressing, and I'm hoping for a comfortable mid-May unveiling date. Our mailing list doesn't get much use but it definitely will be used in the run-up to the launch, so make sure you're on that if you want to stay informed and you're not a forum regular!
 

Eyestabber

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NEW CONTENT CONFIRMED, BOYOS.

Map is completely different now. Aliens show up right after you leave the chopper.

Friendlies have been added. 3D models are looking gr8 too!

Dat grenade launcher is fucking BOSS. The destructible environments are making me jizz my pants really hard. :incline::incline::incline:
 
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Stavrophore

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NEW CONTENT CONFIRMED, BOYOS.

Map is completely different now. Aliens show up right after you leave the chopper.

Friendlies have been added. 3D models are looking gr8 too!

Dat grenade launcher is fucking BOSS. The destructible environments are making me jizz my pants really hard. :incline::incline::incline:

Can confirm. I would like to see some super sprayable machinegun, blowing walls would be great fun with current engine. Right now LMG is kinda weak for that. A minigun or some GAU-19 would be awesome.

Graphically the game is a massive improvements, they've ditched sprites, and make full use of 3d models. That's great, and will be easier to work of moders.
 
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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.
Tried the demo and it's good. Feels like Xenonauts but vastly improved. There still seems to be some LOS issues though, like it's hard to tell if you will be protected by a wall or not if you have a weird angle to the aliens. Also, the curse of Unity strikes again. For some reason I'm getting abysmal performance. 40 fps at best but feels sluggish as hell. Climbed on top of a roof and suddenly I was playing with 20 fps. I hope this won't be an issue in the full release.

Took some screens:

R3SdCKM.jpg

Climbing the roof. He got sniped by an alien before doing any actual sniping himself.

WGkrLGe.png

Breaching the small building. Some cool destruction from rifle fire and grenades.

xwr3Wy9.jpg

Attacking entrenched aliens with grenades.

LJupNab.jpg

Cool visual of the last alien holdout. Really like the destruction and the dead alien with the blood pooling looks dramatic enough.
 

agris

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Pretty sure it’s in UE4 Alienman. Also its a dev demo, of course the performance isn’t good.
 
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i sort of like the graphics, which were xenonauts weakest points. i like a little less the holes in the walls, they're all the same. give me an almost circular hole, i can believe it. but those irregular holes, repeated? that's a punch in the eye.
 

udm

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There still seems to be some LOS issues though, like it's hard to tell if you will be protected by a wall or not if you have a weird angle to the aliens.

Yeah I agree. I do hope Goldhawk considers making LOS more simulationist, like in X-COM and JA2.
 

Eyestabber

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Nice screens Alienman . I was trying to record a video, but both shadowplay and Action! decided to give me the middle finger. Shame. I had two aliens in cover eating a grenade that deals damage and destroys their cover to show.

Oh well, use your imagination guys. The destructible environments are looking like massive :incline:.
 

Stavrophore

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Nice screens Alienman . I was trying to record a video, but both shadowplay and Action! decided to give me the middle finger. Shame. I had two aliens in cover eating a grenade that deals damage and destroys their cover to show.

Oh well, use your imagination guys. The destructible environments are looking like massive :incline:.

I won't lie, i can't wait for xenonauts 2. They have good ground combat engine, now it's time to deliver all strategic mechanics around it. And some mission variety, because that was a problem with original xenonauts, that it was just more of the same -"oh another alien crash, sure, i will airstrike it, since im sick of doing it".
 

Alienman

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Forgot to mention for you that haven't tried it yet, it seems that Chris decided to remove the ragdoll effects again from corpses. Please add them back! Especially now that we get a 40mm grenade gun or whatever it is. I wanna see those alien bastards fly!
 

lightbane

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Tried the demo. As mentioned, Unity makes the whole thing move slowly and you barely have any option to edit graphic details, but it's a playable "proof of concept" so it's okay. Either way much better than the first one. I wonder how detailed terrain destruction will get, especially if Fusion Launcher-equivalents show up.

Hopefully you do get the chance of getting psionics of your own, OR get mind shields instead of praying to RNG Jesus every time psionic aliens show up.
 

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