V19 Stable Released! news

It's time for another update from the team busily working on Xenonauts! We have recently released V19 Stable of the game and have finished the process of porting the updates over to Mac and Linux uploading the game to Steam / Desura / Humble Store. These are all uploaded and should be authorised in the next 24 hours if they are not already available for download.

The first thing to mention is that there was previously an error with our Desura version that meant people had to claim a Steam key and enter that before they could play on Desura. This should now be fixed, and we apologise for this.

V19 Stable is basically three months of changes to the game rolled into a single large patch that has had much more testing than our usual updates, and should therefore be fairly stable (though it is still in beta and will not be completely bug-free).This is a brief summary of the improvements made in V19 over V18:

• Vastly improved game balance
• Dramatically improved AI
• Alien Base missions fully functional
• All research descriptions written and edited
• Various visual updates like a new world map, many more painted ground tiles, etc
• Lots and lots of bugfixes

That only covers the changes at a very high level; the full changelog can be found here in a (very long) forum post. Things like balance and the AI are still being worked on, and there are still missing art assets that have not yet been completed. However V19 was the first time someone sat down and worked on balance for several weeks and the result is something that feels much more like a "game" than it has before. It's still a bit rough around the edges, perhaps, but you can see the final shape starting to emerge.

We are presently working on V20. We are planning this to be the last update to the game that will include new features, and will be where we integrate the new interface, add all the maps, finish the AI, fix some problems with the game accuracy model etc. If all goes to plan, anything after V20 will simply be bugfixing and final balancing on the existing systems.

We are hoping to get the game by the end of the year. This is by no means a firm commitment, but it is the internal deadline we're working towards. The game has come together well over the past three months and if progress continues at this pace then completing the game in another three months is feasible provided nothing major goes wrong.

Thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered the game already, as there is no way we would have been able to get the game to the standard that it is currently at without your help!