Xenonauts - October Development Update

Xenonauts has a new development update on the games official forums.

Hello everybody. As it's been about a month since we brought V19 Stable out and there's no sign of a new experimental release, I thought I'd write a development update to explain what's happening.

Firstly, it's vacation time for the team. Aaron is off on his honeymoon for two weeks tomorrow, which he'll spend hiking around glaciers in Iceland. My "vacation" is slightly less exciting and has come about because the flat I was due to be moving into last week has not been finished yet and now I have nowhere in London to live. I've headed abroad to visit my family for a bit and am still working a bit, but it hasn't really helped production.

That's not to say we've not been making progress - it's just that we've been making progress on some rather boring things. We've rewritten the night mission lighting code, as that was very performance intensive and was causing noticeable slowdown particularly on slower machines. The new code is roughly 1,000 times faster, but ironing all the bugs and unusual behaviors out of it took the best part of a week.

Similarly, we spent a week rewriting the accuracy code to make it behave a bit better. Previously it suffered from a problem where shots would ALWAYS hit a (standing) unit if they passed through that tile, which caused issues when shots missed. For example, at close range units would have to turn 45 degrees to not hit the target. There was also an exploit where firing at the ground tile directly behind a target would pretty much guarantee a hit on them