This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

• Fixed a rare crash that could occur on the Aircraft screen when viewing a dropship and re-ordering the soldier list.

• Fixed an issue where moving soldiers would sometimes not interrupt their move correctly after sighting an alien when rotating midway through their movement.

• Fixed an issue where the "New Projects Available" Geoscape popup would sometimes incorrectly appear before the research report that is supposed to trigger it.

• Fixed an issue where the HP / Armour bars above the heads of alien units would not appear after loading a save if the camera was above level 0.

• Hopefully fixed an issue where the game would not load correctly for some Linux users.

• Hopefully fixed a rare crash that could occur during the autosave process.

Hello everyone - as we're now a week into June, it's time for our regular update on what we were working on last month!

We've added a lot of new assets to the game over the past month. The most notable of these are the new 3D models and animations for the alien Sebillian and Cyberdrone units, and while the visual improvement is hopefully clear from the screenshot, the Cyberdrone in particular also benefits from having proper animation set (e.g. movement / shooting) rather than just being a static lump of floating alien amour. The various ranks of alien are also a bit more distinctive now; again this is most obvious with the two Cyberdrone variants!

Work is currently continuing on more of these new alien models. Both the Heavy Mentarch and the Heavy Servitor units are currently just palette swaps of the corresponding basic unit, but we're aiming to have distinct designs and 3d models for both in place before Milestone 6 releases.

Further progress was also made in other areas too. We finished another research illustration this month, leaving three remaining (one of which is already in progress). The inventory tile artwork and 3D model for the recently-introduced Alien Bio Rifle is nearly finished. We've added some new sound effects to some of the aliens to help make them more distinctive, and we finished up our level design work on the updated Tropical biome and started adding various new tiles and maps to the new Soviet Town biome.

One of the major goals for Milestone 6 is a refresh of the air combat that improves the visuals and polishes the gameplay. The first part of this has been to improve the UI on the Aircraft screen, so we can use our new "paired slot" system to replace the existing "Hardpoints" system (the blue numbers on the aircraft weapons that previously sat alongside the Weight values). This work is now complete.

The Hardpoint system reflected the size of different weapons, with each aircraft having up to four hardpoints and missile / torpedo weapons filling one and cannon / lance weapons filling two. Rather than represent this numerically, we can now pair weapon slots together to produce a linked double slot. Putting a cannon / lance into a paired slot will fill both of the linked slots, while missiles and torpedoes only fill a single slot - effectively the same system as before, but much easier to understand.

This change is also beneficial from a design standpoint, as it gives another method of differentiating interceptors. For instance, we may decide to give the basic Angel interceptor four weapon slots, with only two of them being paired together - this would limit the plane to only being able to carry a maximum of one cannon / lance. More advanced aircraft could have two sets of paired slots, allowing them to carry dual cannons. These extra options should help with the balancing work we'll be doing as part of the air combat refresh!

Once again, we ended up spending significant amounts of time last month on bugfixes. We released five more stability hotfixes for Milestone 5 last month, fixing a lot of crashes and other gameplay problems - including several annoying bugs we'd been trying to track down for several months, plus a number of older bugs that predated Milestone 5.

Our work on Milestone 6 also includes bugfixes, and one of our programmers spent rather a lot of last month doing the painstaking job of tracking down the numerous places in the game where text was not being properly translated and figuring out why. Hopefully we'll be finished with this by the end of next week and non-English users will have a fully localised Milestone 6.

Our technical director spent some time fixing the remaining issues with our mod loading system last month, so it's now possible to create and share "mod packs" that modify the game files. The Mod Loader panel on the Main Menu screen will now read and apply these mods correctly. From a purely technical standpoint, we can now officially say that Xenonauts 2 supports modding.

Additionally, we've added support for code injection - basically, mods that can change the code of the game itself (e.g. one user has been experimenting with changing the game code so flight paths on the Geoscape follow the realistic curvature of the Earth). There's now a proper C# framework for doing this, and the process is integrated with the mod packs so that Steam Workshop will be able to distribute these mods once enabled. We'll be creating some documentation and an example project for this system in the next couple of weeks.

However, it would still be misleading to claim that Xenonauts 2 is a genuinely moddable game right now - we won't start work on the official mod editor until after Milestone 6 is complete, so modding the game remains painful and difficult due to the format of the JSON files we use to store data. It'll still be a few months until most users can start making mods!

So when will Milestone 6 actually arrive? Sadly, it's still hard to say. Milestone 6 contains a lot of small / medium sized tasks, and the much larger task that is the update to the air combat. We've made good progress through all the smaller tasks, but we've not yet begun work on the core parts of the air combat refresh. We'll have a better idea of how long it'll take to complete once we get started on it, which we're hoping to do in the next two weeks.

Of course, that timeline may slip if more hotfixes are needed for Milestone 5. While I think prioritising stability has been the correct decision, it has unfortunately sucked programmer time away from working on the planned new content. Thankfully, the number of bug reports has started to drop off recently - hopefully that's an indication we've dealt with most of the bugs and can switch focus to Milestone 6, but we'll just have to wait and see.

I think that's plenty for this update. Thanks for reading!

• Fixed a crash in the air combat that would occur if a Xenonaut interceptor was shot down while you were hovering the mouse over its evasive roll buttons.
  
• Fixed what we think is the source of a lot of mysterious crashes on the Armory screen, which seems to be a bug linked to placing HEVY ammo back into weapon selection UI on top of itself, which caused it to get "stuck". Trying to remove the ammo would then cause a chain of things to start going wrong and various parts of the Armory would stop working correctly, but any crash would usually only occur when you tried to leave the screen.
  
• Fixed a couple of strategic UI crashes that were only occurring in the Experimental builds that were linked to dragging soldiers around in the soldier list on the Armory screen, and on the Aircraft screen (when a dropship was selected). 
  
• Fixed a bug where combat shields would sometimes not visually disappear from the soldier's model if destroyed.
  
• Fixed a bug where the camera at the start of a tactical mission could end up showing an empty black space (as the camera was incorrectly accepting scroll input under the last few moments of the loading screen).
  
• Attempted a fix for some strange UI behaviour that some users have reported when they have a controller or joystick plugged in.

• Fixed a very complicated bug where explosions could indirectly reveal areas of the shroud that the player should not be able to see (this bug has been responsible for quite a lot of strange behaviour in Milestone 5).
  
• Fixed the displayed TU costs for the medikit / melee weapons incorrectly not including soldier rotation costs if the soldier was already adjacent to their intended target.
  
• Fixed a common 2x1 alien console prop not correctly disappearing when destroyed.
  
• Fixed the ARES heavy armour variants incorrectly using the MARS movement sound.

• Fixed an AI hang that could occur during the alien turn during tactical missions.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur starting the Endgame mission (only on Experimental branch).
  
• Fixed an issue where re-ordering engineering projects would sometimes not save correctly when you exited the engineering screen.

• Fixed a very complicated bug where explosions could indirectly reveal areas of the shroud that the player should not be able to see (this bug has been responsible for quite a lot of strange behaviour in Milestone 5).
  
• Fixed the displayed TU costs for the medikit / melee weapons incorrectly not including soldier rotation costs if the soldier was already adjacent to their intended target.
  
• Fixed a common 2x1 alien console prop not correctly disappearing when destroyed.
  
• Fixed the ARES heavy armour variants incorrectly using the MARS movement sound.

• Fixed a crash that could occur starting the Endgame mission (only on Experimental branch).
  
• Fixed an AI hang that could occur during the alien turn.
  
• Fixed an issue where re-ordering engineering projects would sometimes not save correctly when you exited the engineering screen.

• Alien Base missions will no longer re-randomise the map and aliens present if you abort a mission and return to that same particular base.

• Fixed an AI turn crash that could occur if an evacuating civilian was mind controlled before they evacuated.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur during the AI turn in tactical missions.
  
• Fixed pressing Space on the Geoscape not correctly centring the camera on the map like it used to.
  
• Attempted a fix for areas of the map and UFOs sometimes not revealing from the shroud when you move soldiers.
  
• Fixed a minor issue where partially visible multi-tile objects could sometimes be incorrectly hidden after loading a save.

• Alien Base missions will no longer re-randomise the map and aliens present if you abort a mission and return to that same particular base.
  
• On the Experimental branch, the game has now been set to crash immediately when the game UI gets into a corrupted state. Previously the game would not crash immediately, but the corrupted UI would sometimes lead to further problems that eventually do cause a crash (at which point it is very hard to identify the original source of the corruption). Hopefully this will allow us to find and fix those issues.

• Fixed an AI turn crash that could occur if an evacuating civilian was mind controlled before they evacuated.
  
• Fixed pressing Space on the Geoscape not correctly centring the camera on the map like it used to.
  
• Attempted a fix for areas of the map and UFOs sometimes not revealing from the shroud when you move soldiers.
  
• Fixed a minor issue where partially visible multi-tile objects could sometimes be incorrectly hidden after loading a save.

• Quantum Teleportation research now correctly requires you to complete a Destroyer UFO (or more advanced UFO type) mission to unlock. Previously it was unlocking too early.

• Fixed another crash that could occur in the AI turn during tactical combat.
  
• Fixed being able to see through some of the interior walls in the entry room of one of the Cruiser UFO variants,