Another quick update to let everyone know that the Kickstarter for Xenonauts-2 has entered its final three days. You can see it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69341191/xenonauts-2-strategic-planetary-defence-simulator/

It's been very successful, so huge thanks to anyone that backed us - we asked for £50,000 and were fully funded in 8 hours, and we're now well over 300% funded!

Some cool stretch goals have already been unlocked (like weapon attachments and locational injuries in combat) and we're hoping to hit the next one at 400% which involves us giving extra support to the Community Edition and modding teams that created such great extra content for everyone in the first Xenonauts (although the game will still be moddable even if we don't get there).

Anyway, if you're interested in the sequel then this is your last chance to grab some of the Kickstarter-exclusive rewards - e.g. putting yourself in the game as a soldier with a custom name, nationality and portrait made with our portrait editor is £35 and 1700 people have already done so!

I should also mention that there's been some quite productive community discussions since the Kickstarter began on some of the design decisions we've made (some of which were raised in the comments of our last Steam update).

It's really useful to hear people's opinions at this stage of development when we still have time to change things, and we've been looking at how we can achieve what we want to achieve with the new systems without taking away stuff from Xenonauts 1 that people like. This is the first time people have seen our full plans for the sequel and it's good to get feedback on the ideas we've come up with!

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!

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'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!

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!