We entered beta on October 15th! I’m really happy with how it is going, and I hope you all are enjoying playing XO!
If you backed at beta level and have not received your Steam key, first check your spam folder and then reach out to us at beta @ jmpdrv.com.
The best place to give feedback is directly through the game (hit Esc), or on our discord server.
Status
There are well under 10 (known) bugs remaining. We are balancing the end game, implementing basic interactive music, polishing the UI and tutorial and adding events. Mac and Linux versions have been improved and we will be releasing them soon, Mac first. We are still on track for release to Steam early access by the end of the year!
Known issues
If you’re having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. This is a temporary workaround.
There’s a bug related to AkSoundEngine.dll that should be fixed when we release v1.22 in a few days.
Here are the changelogs from our past five releases on Steam:
XO 1.16: The Last Alpha
The universe size was increased by about 80%. You’ll notice a delay when starting a new game, that’s why. Get the the rendezvous if you can, now!
Bug logging was greatly simplified and improved.
The jump button is greyed out and inactive while the scan window is active.
Conditions were added to a number of events allowing for more variation and player agency.
The cruiseliner speed was increased.
A number of tweaks were made to the event spawning algorithms. Quite a number.
Anti-lifeboat logic was introduced to avoid too many early lifeboat rescue events.
Hovering ship icons in the story dialog now shows the proper ship class.
The main menu button now works when the game is over.
A small explanation was added to the trade dialog.
A number of pretty nasty lockup/can’t save bugs were banished to a dark place.
A few annoying bugs were wiped out that don’t merit a lot of space.
Enabling shield on the gatherer always enables it.
A shield visibility issue was corrected.
Proximity destruct now works in a resumed game.
Nuked ships now tumble as they should.
Many, many minor issues were corrected with events.
XO 1.17 (beta1): Into a thousand parts divide
I adjusted the frequency of trade and cache events to be a little more sane.
In alpha, ships given an attack order would automatically change their ROE to weapons free. That turned out to be annoying and unexpected, so ships now retain their ROE.
We have a much better bug reporting and feedback system that is working really well. It took a couple of tweaks to get it just right.
Abort now has mouse hover text.
A multitude of minor tweaks were made to a heck of a lot of events.
The ‘plotting jump’ text is now much more visible.
A bug that gave you a strangely stretched ship if you jumped at just the right time while a scout was returning was unstretched.
Mission titles now are much more likely to take on the color of the timer bar.
Hovering ship weapons in trade now no longer crashes the game. Betcha didn’t know you could trade for ships, huh?
‘Need fuel to jump’ now resets on new game and clears properly when the jump timer ends.
Harvester intro events were refactored to work better and more consistently.
A few last minute bugs crept in that had to be given a hard smack-down: NREs, flipped grids, transparent starmaps and the magic erasing mouse pointer were all dropped to the mat.
A curious bug related to timers and destinations was fixed.
Some goofiness with the jump button and opacity layers was de-goofified.
A particular event needed fixing to make sure that ships jumped in at the right time.
Several autobugs (as we call them) from the new bug reporting system were repaired.
XO 1.18: A More Forgiving Struggle
Faction leaders no longer spawn from rescuing crew from certain ships.
When a new game is started the splash screen is loaded, helps to make it clear the game hasn’t crashed.
Fuel pips are now displayed correctly for weapons (more pips is always better).
Weapon pips are now relative to other similar weapons vs. relative to all weapons.
Sending feedback no longer exits the game.
The tutorial is now a little more forgiving, and should no longer throw an unclosable dialog box that basically ends the game.
Re-crewing the battleship in the tutorial has been removed; crew is now automatically added to the battleship.
The station in the tutorial now self-destructs as indicated in the narrative (if you hang around long enough).
I made some minor adjustments to laser/mining laser text. We’ll be improving the UI for mining lasers soon.
An edge case with food ships and water was corrected.
I cleaned up a bunch of event tags.
We also fixed some Mac and Linux bugs.
XO 1.19: The Formation of Reversal
Some more minor event bugs were fixed.
A bug where you could accidentally uncrew your battleship was fixed. That was leading to all manner of chaos.
Heru fixed a bug where if you tried putting a ship into a formation slot that you’d removed another ship from, the game cried real tears.
I fixed a few more wayward box collider issues, hopefully those won’t trouble us any more.
XO 1.20: The Sound of Vision
Our third and largest beta update is now live on Steam! This will erase your existing save.
The tutorial was massively reworked to add a lot more clarity. Tell us what you think!
We have sound and volume sliders, please test them. What volume levels should be default?
Harvested planets are more obvious in the starmap. Rocky, Ice and Molten worlds coming soon.
Additional events and conditions were added to clarify early/mid gameplay.
Save and quit now works from end game.
Hailing pact caches with ships that have enemy relations now shows the proper message.
Trying to rescue when your ship is full now shows grey with a warning.
Disabling freighters before the event starts now ends the event, although rescue is still possible.
Abandoned gatherers can now be crewed properly.
Trade events should be more evenly balanced.
The ‘quality of water’ event now triggers appropriately.
Trying to use mining lasers against an armored ship now gets a warning.
XO 1.21: How many gigawatts does it take to fix a fixer
If XO confused you, try the tutorial again. It has been worked, reworked, expanded and polished.
A new advanced start option that eliminates all tips was added. The intermediate start that skips the tutorial but still presents tips as the game unfolds remains.
Fuel use for weapons now says ‘efficiency’ making it clearer that more pips = better.
All harvested planet types now show up much clearer in the starmap.
A new command ‘maroon’ was added. This helps reinforce when attempting to crew abandoned ships with a non-compatible crew, and suggests a rather Machiavellian strategy for averting an upcoming water riot. Some tweaks were made to ensure this works properly.
You can no longer issue a crew command from the battleship on an abandoned ship unless you have passengers and a tooltip is shown if this is tried. On all other ships this is possible to allow for swaps.
I’m actively testing the end game, although it is still not turned on in 1.21, saving/restoring also now works. It is currently both way too hard and way too easy, so more work will be needed before it is ready for testing. A couple of minor functional pieces are being added to end game as well.
Turns out trade and repair events were not spawning correctly (huge oopsie), they are now.
We added several new event conditions to support the tutorial, and these had to be tested and debugged. It should now be running smoothly and as expected.
A bug was fixed where a battleship in formation under repairs would cause other ships in the formation to behave strangely after emerging from jump.
You can now properly attack a reaper with the mining laser.
Fixers can now fix in all conditions where they should be able to fix.
The icons for transmogrify now show correctly.
Hovering a ship during a water riot no longer displays an upside down portrait of a character.
I added additional lore to explain other game functions and rules. More to come.
A lot of polish was done with the events, catching loopholes and correcting minor issues. I also cleaned up some tags with missing text.
A few variations of a hard crash bug were hopefully once and for all eliminated.
A dialog bug with some Harvester intro events was dispatched.
A time-related bug that was cropping up from time to time was summarily dispatched.
Several automatically submitted bugs were confirmed and removed, including an annoying non-issue that will now stop flooding our bug reporting system.
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Well, that’s it for this month’s update! If you made it this far, thanks for reading, for your support and the positivity!