Xenonauts news & patch notes

If you played and enjoyed the original Xenonauts, you may be interested to know that the Kickstarter for the sequel Xenonauts-2 has now gone live: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69341191/xenonauts-2-strategic-planetary-defence-simulator/ Full details of the new game are available on the Kickstarter page, along with a free alpha demo of a tactical combat mission - we've still got plenty of work left to do, but hopefully you can see the improvement! Xenonauts-2 is not a chronological sequel to Xenonauts, but rather an updated portrayal of similar events. We've moved to a much more modern engine (Unity) and improved the quality of the visuals, and we're making all sorts of changes to the design to fix some of the gameplay issues that meant not everyone enjoyed Xenonauts as much as they could have! We're expecting Xenonauts-2 to move into closed beta in about three months, followed by a general Early Access release on Steam / GOG before the end of the year. The more money we can raise on Kickstarter and in Early Access, the longer we'll be able to spend adding new content to the game and fixing the bugs / balance issues / usability issues reported by the community. If you enjoyed Xenonauts, we'd appreciate your support in making a sequel that builds on those foundations!

Two things to discuss in this announcement - cloud saves and the Community Edition of Xenonauts. We've now enabled cloud saves for Xenonauts. Steam should save your save games and you should now be able to access them if you want to play Xenonauts on a different machine. Hopefully that will make things more convenient for you guys! The second thing is the Community Edition of Xenonauts. A lot of people already know about this, but not everyone does - it's an optional free upgrade to Xenonauts that has been created by coders from the community who were given access to the source code of the game, fixing bugs and adding various new features to the game. Whilst Xenonauts is no longer under active development, Xenonauts: Community Edition is still being worked on and will likely continue to improve. You can access the Community Edition by right clicking on the game in your Steam library, and then going to Properties > Betas > community (in the dropdown). You can switch back to vanilla Xenonauts by selecting NONE in the same dropdown. A word of warning, though - Community Edition is not an official product and as such Goldhawk can't help you with support issues if you've got either that or mods enabled (we can't debug other people's code). There's also a mod active by default in X:CE that provides a bit more flavor research to the game, attempting to give additional information on some of the aliens and game mechanics. It is designed to blend in with the official research and most people seem to like it, but be aware the research artwork and text were not created by the developers and it is technically not canon. That said, most fans consider X:CE the "ultimate" version of Xenonauts, as by now it has evolved to have more content, more features and less bugs than the base game. If you're not already aware of it, it might be worth checking out!

Two things to discuss in this announcement - cloud saves and the Community Edition of Xenonauts. We've now enabled cloud saves for Xenonauts. Steam should save your save games and you should now be able to access them if you want to play Xenonauts on a different machine. Hopefully that will make things more convenient for you guys! The second thing is the Community Edition of Xenonauts. A lot of people already know about this, but not everyone does - it's an optional free upgrade to Xenonauts that has been created by coders from the community who were given access to the source code of the game, fixing bugs and adding various new features to the game. Whilst Xenonauts is no longer under active development, Xenonauts: Community Edition is still being worked on and will likely continue to improve. You can access the Community Edition by right clicking on the game in your Steam library, and then going to Properties > Betas > community (in the dropdown). You can switch back to vanilla Xenonauts by selecting NONE in the same dropdown. A word of warning, though - Community Edition is not an official product and as such Goldhawk can't help you with support issues if you've got either that or mods enabled (we can't debug other people's code). There's also a mod active by default in X:CE that provides a bit more flavor research to the game, attempting to give additional information on some of the aliens and game mechanics. It is designed to blend in with the official research and most people seem to like it, but be aware the research artwork and text were not created by the developers and it is technically not canon. That said, most fans consider X:CE the "ultimate" version of Xenonauts, as by now it has evolved to have more content, more features and less bugs than the base game. If you're not already aware of it, it might be worth checking out!

This is a brief update, as we've pushed V1.65 from the Experimental branch to the Stable branch. I've post the patch notes from V1.65 Experimental below so you can see what has changed, but the main reason we've pushed this update to Stable is that there's a Windows 10 specific bug that is fixed by V1.65 which is affecting some of our users. We'll be monitoring V1.65 to see if it causes any additional problems (in which case we'll roll back to V1.64 and let people who want to keep it opt in to the Experimental branch), but we think all will be well. Please let us know if you see any new issues appearing though! Changes:

Miss shots should no longer go through walls; the trajectory code has been updated so they should only hit tiles that a "hit" shot would be able to hit.

Grenade scatter calculation updated, so "miss" throws can actually miss by a meaningful amount. This applies to both Xenonauts and aliens throwing grenades.

Stunned zombies (which appear dead) will no longer spawn zombies. This will eliminate the bug where Reapers apparently spawn from thin air, and occasionally were also invulnerable for reasons that remain unclear

Damage from base defence turrets now correctly reduces the number of attacking aliens it fails to destroy an attacking UFO.

Soldiers now gain Bravery from taking suppression damage, as it was virtually impossible to train up before.

Soldier Strength now updates correctly, as there was a bug in the formula before.

Manufacturing screen now displays the number of required items in your stores when previewing a project, rather than just the number of required items.

Saviour Medal and Crux Solaris medals can now be awarded and displayed correctly.

Alien bases are now correctly destroyed if you blow the Cores and then suffer a squadwipe.

Fixed an issue in the air combat where the aircraft throttles would sometimes not work properly.

Geoscape performance has been optimised on some systems.

Game startup speed has been improved.

Fixed crash when a building collapses with a drone inside.

Minor revisions to game manual.

This is a brief update, as we've pushed V1.65 from the Experimental branch to the Stable branch. I've post the patch notes from V1.65 Experimental below so you can see what has changed, but the main reason we've pushed this update to Stable is that there's a Windows 10 specific bug that is fixed by V1.65 which is affecting some of our users. We'll be monitoring V1.65 to see if it causes any additional problems (in which case we'll roll back to V1.64 and let people who want to keep it opt in to the Experimental branch), but we think all will be well. Please let us know if you see any new issues appearing though! Changes:

Miss shots should no longer go through walls; the trajectory code has been updated so they should only hit tiles that a "hit" shot would be able to hit.

Grenade scatter calculation updated, so "miss" throws can actually miss by a meaningful amount. This applies to both Xenonauts and aliens throwing grenades.

Stunned zombies (which appear dead) will no longer spawn zombies. This will eliminate the bug where Reapers apparently spawn from thin air, and occasionally were also invulnerable for reasons that remain unclear

Damage from base defence turrets now correctly reduces the number of attacking aliens it fails to destroy an attacking UFO.

Soldiers now gain Bravery from taking suppression damage, as it was virtually impossible to train up before.

Soldier Strength now updates correctly, as there was a bug in the formula before.

Manufacturing screen now displays the number of required items in your stores when previewing a project, rather than just the number of required items.

Saviour Medal and Crux Solaris medals can now be awarded and displayed correctly.

Alien bases are now correctly destroyed if you blow the Cores and then suffer a squadwipe.

Fixed an issue in the air combat where the aircraft throttles would sometimes not work properly.

Geoscape performance has been optimised on some systems.

Game startup speed has been improved.

Fixed crash when a building collapses with a drone inside.

Minor revisions to game manual.

We have now officially confirmed we are working on Xenonauts 2, and we're currently hoping for a 2017 release for the game! The full statement and some basic details on the sequel can be read here (with more to follow in the next couple of months): http://www.xenonauts2.com Thanks to everyone that has supported us by buying the first game - the experience we've gained making it and the feedback received from the community should allow us to create something even better second time around!

We have now officially confirmed we are working on Xenonauts 2, and we're currently hoping for a 2017 release for the game! The full statement and some basic details on the sequel can be read here (with more to follow in the next couple of months): http://www.xenonauts2.com Thanks to everyone that has supported us by buying the first game - the experience we've gained making it and the feedback received from the community should allow us to create something even better second time around!

We've released a new version of Xenonauts for Windows on the Experimental branch, V1.65. It contains some gameplay updates, but it will need some testing to see if it is stable before being rolled out to the default Stable branch for all Steam users, so if anyone can test it that would be appreciated. To access the Experimental branch, please follow the instructions here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5958-Xenonauts-Experimental-Builds-Instructions We will also merge these fixes into the native Mac / Linux builds in the future if they prove to be stable. Most of these fixes are drawn from improvements to the game made by the Xenonauts: Community Edition team, so a public thank you to those who contributed to X:CE in general and to Solver specifically for putting this patch together for us. Changes:

• Miss shots should no longer go through walls; the trajectory code has been updated so they should only hit tiles that a "hit" shot would be able to hit.
• Grenade scatter calculation updated, so "miss" throws can actually miss by a meaningful amount. This applies to both Xenonauts and aliens throwing grenades.
• Stunned zombies (which appear dead) will no longer spawn zombies. This will eliminate the bug where Reapers apparently spawn from thin air, and occasionally were also invulnerable for reasons that remain unclear
• Damage from base defence turrets now correctly reduces the number of attacking aliens it fails to destroy an attacking UFO.
• Soldiers now gain Bravery from taking suppression damage, as it was virtually impossible to train up before.
• Soldier Strength now updates correctly, as there was a bug in the formula before.
• Manufacturing screen now displays the number of required items in your stores when previewing a project, rather than just the number of required items.
• Saviour Medal and Crux Solaris medals can now be awarded and displayed correctly.
• Alien bases are now correctly destroyed if you blow the Cores and then suffer a squadwipe.
• Fixed an issue in the air combat where the aircraft throttles would sometimes not work properly.
• Geoscape performance has been optimised on some systems.
• Game startup speed has been improved.
• Fixed crash when a building collapses with a drone inside.
• Minor revisions to game manual.

This is likely to be the final gameplay update for vanilla Xenonauts, but Xenonauts: Community Edition is still under ongoing development so be sure to keep up to date with their progress in the future!

We've released a new version of Xenonauts for Windows on the Experimental branch, V1.65. It contains some gameplay updates, but it will need some testing to see if it is stable before being rolled out to the default Stable branch for all Steam users, so if anyone can test it that would be appreciated. To access the Experimental branch, please follow the instructions here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5958-Xenonauts-Experimental-Builds-Instructions We will also merge these fixes into the native Mac / Linux builds in the future if they prove to be stable. Most of these fixes are drawn from improvements to the game made by the Xenonauts: Community Edition team, so a public thank you to those who contributed to X:CE in general and to Solver specifically for putting this patch together for us. Changes:

• Miss shots should no longer go through walls; the trajectory code has been updated so they should only hit tiles that a "hit" shot would be able to hit.
• Grenade scatter calculation updated, so "miss" throws can actually miss by a meaningful amount. This applies to both Xenonauts and aliens throwing grenades.
• Stunned zombies (which appear dead) will no longer spawn zombies. This will eliminate the bug where Reapers apparently spawn from thin air, and occasionally were also invulnerable for reasons that remain unclear
• Damage from base defence turrets now correctly reduces the number of attacking aliens it fails to destroy an attacking UFO.
• Soldiers now gain Bravery from taking suppression damage, as it was virtually impossible to train up before.
• Soldier Strength now updates correctly, as there was a bug in the formula before.
• Manufacturing screen now displays the number of required items in your stores when previewing a project, rather than just the number of required items.
• Saviour Medal and Crux Solaris medals can now be awarded and displayed correctly.
• Alien bases are now correctly destroyed if you blow the Cores and then suffer a squadwipe.
• Fixed an issue in the air combat where the aircraft throttles would sometimes not work properly.
• Geoscape performance has been optimised on some systems.
• Game startup speed has been improved.
• Fixed crash when a building collapses with a drone inside.
• Minor revisions to game manual.

This is likely to be the final gameplay update for vanilla Xenonauts, but Xenonauts: Community Edition is still under ongoing development so be sure to keep up to date with their progress in the future!

We've had another patch for the Mac / Linux versions of Xenonauts available on the Experimental branch over the festive season, and it appears to fix some compatibility issues that some users have been experiencing without introducing any additional bugs. We have therefore now released it to the main default Steam branch. There's no changes to the gameplay mechanics so there are no changes to the Windows experience, it should just improve the experience on the native ports a little more. We here at Goldhawk hope everyone had a merry Christmas and we wish you all a happy new year!

We've had another patch for the Mac / Linux versions of Xenonauts available on the Experimental branch over the festive season, and it appears to fix some compatibility issues that some users have been experiencing without introducing any additional bugs. We have therefore now released it to the main default Steam branch. There's no changes to the gameplay mechanics so there are no changes to the Windows experience, it should just improve the experience on the native ports a little more. We here at Goldhawk hope everyone had a merry Christmas and we wish you all a happy new year!

Just a quick note to say there's been a further patch to the Mac / Linux native builds that were released last week, bringing them up to V1.60. This should address some bugs that were only affecting the Mac / Linux builds, the most annoying being the crashes / freezes during the alien turn that were making the game unplayable for some. Initial reports seem to suggest that the majority of these issues are now fixed but the porter is continuing to work hard on the stability of the new ports. If you're a Windows user, your version of the game will remain at V1.59 as all the fixes have been made to the port rather than the actual game code. You're therefore not missing out on any gameplay updates as a result of being on V1.59. Please keep us posted about any issues you're having with the Mac / Linux builds on the forums and we'll do our best to resolve them for you!

Just a quick note to say there's been a further patch to the Mac / Linux native builds that were released last week, bringing them up to V1.60. This should address some bugs that were only affecting the Mac / Linux builds, the most annoying being the crashes / freezes during the alien turn that were making the game unplayable for some. Initial reports seem to suggest that the majority of these issues are now fixed but the porter is continuing to work hard on the stability of the new ports. If you're a Windows user, your version of the game will remain at V1.59 as all the fixes have been made to the port rather than the actual game code. You're therefore not missing out on any gameplay updates as a result of being on V1.59. Please keep us posted about any issues you're having with the Mac / Linux builds on the forums and we'll do our best to resolve them for you!

Xenonauts now has native Mac and Linux ports available rather than the WINE-wrapped Windows version that we previously used as "ports" for these platforms. These have been produced by a porter who works with the Humble Bundle team and are not directly being produced by us. This is obviously great news and we've just made these versions available on Steam (the WINE builds are available in the Legacy branch). Unfortunately, these ports are still a work in progress and the porter is still busily working on making them fully stable. If you're trying the new native ports and you're struggling with bugs - sit tight, more updates are incoming! Hopefully we'll be done with the worst of the bugs by the weekend, but if you're really having problems then perhaps give the old WINE builds on the Legacy branch a go as they are known to be largely stable ... despite being a bit fiddly to set up!

Xenonauts now has native Mac and Linux ports available rather than the WINE-wrapped Windows version that we previously used as "ports" for these platforms. These have been produced by a porter who works with the Humble Bundle team and are not directly being produced by us. This is obviously great news and we've just made these versions available on Steam (the WINE builds are available in the Legacy branch). Unfortunately, these ports are still a work in progress and the porter is still busily working on making them fully stable. If you're trying the new native ports and you're struggling with bugs - sit tight, more updates are incoming! Hopefully we'll be done with the worst of the bugs by the weekend, but if you're really having problems then perhaps give the old WINE builds on the Legacy branch a go as they are known to be largely stable ... despite being a bit fiddly to set up!

We've just released Xenonauts V1.59 for PC and Linux, and will be releasing the Mac version shortly if no bugs appear in the next 24-48 hours. V1.59 is the revised version of V1.58, which we rolled back a week or so ago because we were concerned about stability issues. V1.58 included several fixes over V1.56, the biggest of which was a fix for an annoying AI hang. Thanks for your patience!

We've just released Xenonauts V1.59 for PC and Linux, and will be releasing the Mac version shortly if no bugs appear in the next 24-48 hours. V1.59 is the revised version of V1.58, which we rolled back a week or so ago because we were concerned about stability issues. V1.58 included several fixes over V1.56, the biggest of which was a fix for an annoying AI hang. Thanks for your patience!

As we've had a few reports of a bug within V1.58 that may be worse than the bugs fixed by the patch (it prevents some people loading ground combat), we've now rolled back the default branch to V1.56 while we look into it. This should not affect save games etc, but if it does or if you are playing V1.58 with no problems at all and want to continue using it, it is available on our Experimental Steam branch (under the Betas tab of the Steam game options). Just switch over to that and you can keep playing. For everyone else, we're planning on investigating the reported bug in more detail over the next few days and will put out an updated version once we fully understand the situation.

As we've had a few reports of a bug within V1.58 that may be worse than the bugs fixed by the patch (it prevents some people loading ground combat), we've now rolled back the default branch to V1.56 while we look into it. This should not affect save games etc, but if it does or if you are playing V1.58 with no problems at all and want to continue using it, it is available on our Experimental Steam branch (under the Betas tab of the Steam game options). Just switch over to that and you can keep playing. For everyone else, we're planning on investigating the reported bug in more detail over the next few days and will put out an updated version once we fully understand the situation.

This is another small stability update for the game, fixing three occasional crashes / hangs that users have been experiencing. Two of the fixes here come from our Community Coders, so thanks to them for their efforts. Changelog: - Another fix to an AI hang with the Reapers - Alien base missions should now always load correctly on the Linux version of the game - Fixed an occasional crash related to the Fury interceptor destroying a UFO with escorts This will be available on the Windows / Linux branch for a few days, and if there are no new bugs introduced we'll roll it out to Mac and our other distribution services (likely by the end of the working week).

This is another small stability update for the game, fixing three occasional crashes / hangs that users have been experiencing. Two of the fixes here come from our Community Coders, so thanks to them for their efforts. Changelog: - Another fix to an AI hang with the Reapers - Alien base missions should now always load correctly on the Linux version of the game - Fixed an occasional crash related to the Fury interceptor destroying a UFO with escorts This will be available on the Windows / Linux branch for a few days, and if there are no new bugs introduced we'll roll it out to Mac and our other distribution services (likely by the end of the working week).

We're releasing two "Stable" builds today. V1.56 is an update that will immediately be released on the Steam default stable branch, whilst V1.57 is only available on the Steam Experimental branch. Our plans for releasing this on other platforms are explained after the changelogs: V1.56 Changelog:

• Fixed an issue with the mod manager deleting the entire mod directory when you tried to delete a mod
• Fixed an issue where the mod manager did not correctly save the priority order for deactive mods

V1.57 Changelog:

• We've created an experimental patch for the shooting code that should verify miss shots are actually able to hit the tile they scatter to. We hope this will correct the issue where shots are sometimes noclipping through walls or otherwise behaving incorrectly.

If the fix in V1.57 does its job, that will be the last update we make to Xenonauts. The problem is that the shooting code was pretty complex even before we spliced some of the Community Coder additions into it when we made V1.5, so we're really not sure if it will fully address the issue (or if it may cause any additional problems). V1.57 is therefore only available on the Steam Experiment branch - the old Experimental branch stopped working for some reason, so we've deleted it and created a new "Experiment" branch to do the same thing. We'll give this at least a week to see if it causes any major issues and if it fixed the issue as intended. Regarding the Mac / Linux builds and updates to the non-Steam distributors - this is a lengthy process (it literally takes me most of the day) so I'm going to wait until Monday to see if there are any issues with V1.56 before I roll it out, as if there's a bug in it I'll have wasted all that time and the distributors will be annoyed at me. And if V1.57 proves stable a week after that, I'll do it all again one final time.

We're releasing two "Stable" builds today. V1.56 is an update that will immediately be released on the Steam default stable branch, whilst V1.57 is only available on the Steam Experimental branch. Our plans for releasing this on other platforms are explained after the changelogs: V1.56 Changelog:

• Fixed an issue with the mod manager deleting the entire mod directory when you tried to delete a mod
• Fixed an issue where the mod manager did not correctly save the priority order for deactive mods

V1.57 Changelog:

• We've created an experimental patch for the shooting code that should verify miss shots are actually able to hit the tile they scatter to. We hope this will correct the issue where shots are sometimes noclipping through walls or otherwise behaving incorrectly.

If the fix in V1.57 does its job, that will be the last update we make to Xenonauts. The problem is that the shooting code was pretty complex even before we spliced some of the Community Coder additions into it when we made V1.5, so we're really not sure if it will fully address the issue (or if it may cause any additional problems). V1.57 is therefore only available on the Steam Experiment branch - the old Experimental branch stopped working for some reason, so we've deleted it and created a new "Experiment" branch to do the same thing. We'll give this at least a week to see if it causes any major issues and if it fixed the issue as intended. Regarding the Mac / Linux builds and updates to the non-Steam distributors - this is a lengthy process (it literally takes me most of the day) so I'm going to wait until Monday to see if there are any issues with V1.56 before I roll it out, as if there's a bug in it I'll have wasted all that time and the distributors will be annoyed at me. And if V1.57 proves stable a week after that, I'll do it all again one final time.

We've just released another hotfix for Xenonauts V1.5, addressing an AI hang that we considered the largest remaining bug in the game. Here's the changelog:

• Fixed a second AI hang that was locking the game up during the alien turn
• Updated the Carrier UFO maps to remove more areas where Harridans could fly inside the UFO walls and then snipe down at you
• A fix to the mod manager not remembering changes made to mod list priority if you exited the launcher without loading up the game

This is currently only available on Windows and on Steam; we're planning to wait 24-48 hours to check there are no major bugs caused by the hotfix (although there shouldn't be) before we start the laborious porting / upload process to bring the update to Mac / Linux / other distribution sites. We've also temporarily reverted the Steam Mac version back to V1.09 as it seems people were having some issues with the V1.5 series builds crashing (they're still available on the Experimental branch if you want them). We'll give the Mac versions a more thorough test and re-release them with the next bunch of updates. There's a couple more issues still on our bugfix radar so we're hoping a V1.56 will be along later this week / early next week to conclude the post-update bugfix support process.

We've just released another hotfix for Xenonauts V1.5, addressing an AI hang that we considered the largest remaining bug in the game. Here's the changelog:

• Fixed a second AI hang that was locking the game up during the alien turn
• Updated the Carrier UFO maps to remove more areas where Harridans could fly inside the UFO walls and then snipe down at you
• A fix to the mod manager not remembering changes made to mod list priority if you exited the launcher without loading up the game

This is currently only available on Windows and on Steam; we're planning to wait 24-48 hours to check there are no major bugs caused by the hotfix (although there shouldn't be) before we start the laborious porting / upload process to bring the update to Mac / Linux / other distribution sites. We've also temporarily reverted the Steam Mac version back to V1.09 as it seems people were having some issues with the V1.5 series builds crashing (they're still available on the Experimental branch if you want them). We'll give the Mac versions a more thorough test and re-release them with the next bunch of updates. There's a couple more issues still on our bugfix radar so we're hoping a V1.56 will be along later this week / early next week to conclude the post-update bugfix support process.

I've put out V1.54 on Steam for both Windows and Linux. It's just a small hotfix that fixes a few more of the issues that cropped up with V1.5:

Fixed a crash linked to corpse duplication when you stunned a mind controlled Xenonauts

Units that are stunned now take 1HP damage, which allows you to use a medikit on them to revive them

The Singularity Cannon now has a sell value, so should correctly appear in the base stores

I've put out V1.54 on Steam for both Windows and Linux. It's just a small hotfix that fixes a few more of the issues that cropped up with V1.5:

Fixed a crash linked to corpse duplication when you stunned a mind controlled Xenonauts

Units that are stunned now take 1HP damage, which allows you to use a medikit on them to revive them

The Singularity Cannon now has a sell value, so should correctly appear in the base stores

We've released another hotfix for Xenonauts V1.5, this time fixing a couple of bugs related to AI loops:

• A fix to the reaction fire / teleporter hang
• A fix to an AI turn hang caused by Reapers getting in an animation loop

We're also aware there's some unusual behaviour going on V1.5, firstly something a little fishy going on with "miss" shots occasionally passing through solid walls / otherwise misbehaving and secondly a bug where autoresolving air combat can sometimes lead to your interceptors being turned into UFOs and being rendered unusable. We're looking into both of those issues as neither is much fun for any players affected. V1.5 was tested for a couple of months before release but it seems we weren't able to catch everything, so we'll do our best to correct the issues as soon as possible (remember you can always revert to V1.09 any time you want using the legacy branch). Unfortunately for some reason we've lost the use of our Experimental branch (it's not registering new updates any more) and thus we're now pushing updates directly to our Stable branch. These hotfixes shouldn't break anything new, but if they do then we'll roll back to the previous version as soon as we have confirmation of it happening. Thanks.