This week, we're introducing a new type of status update on Xenonauts - the Game Update. The Sitreps are in-character intelligence reports, revealing information on units or equipment that will be in the game, but they don't give much information on the technical side of the game or how development is coming along. The Game Update will fill that niche, likely being a bit longer and more in-depth than the Sitreps too.

Firstly, the customary nice pictures for everyone to gawk at have been dotted through the post to break up the text. This week, a selection of the models that've been done in the last couple of months - we've actually got quite a few more done than this, but the rest are all for units and equipment that appear in the mid-to-late game, so we're not revealing them for a while yet (if at all).

As you can see, the modellers have done a great job of sticking to the concepts and produced some really good assets. The next steps for these models is to be animated up and rendered into 2D sprites, at which point they can be inserted into the game.

Okay, so for those of you who haven't been following development super-closely on our forums, here's a quick rundown of our current position. We've implemented the following:

• An isometric battlefield with different height levels (as in the original X-Com).
• Fog of War and Line of Sight mechanics, with unexplored areas covered in shroud and explored areas not in any friendly unit's sight range during the turn hidden beneath fog of war.
• Movement and pathfinding, with a movement path highlighted and a numeric value for the number of APs it will take to reach the destination.
• Destructible terrain, with objects having three states - undamaged, damaged and destroyed (though buildings are not collapsing yet).
• Firing of weapons (with ammo counting), and throwing of grenades.
• APs and HPs for humans and aliens, with turn-based functionality implemented to restore APs every turn.
• Reaction fire for humans and aliens.
• Switching weapons, and the ability to drop and pick up equipment from the battlefield.
• Basic flamethrower functionality (cone of fire works, but objects are not catching fire yet).
• Cover system (manually triggered at the moment, needs to be handled automatically on entering 'cover tile').
• Terrain editor/mapbuilder.

The following are systems that we have theoretically implemented, but are waiting for the assets/supporting systems to be finished so we can test them properly:

• Morale system for both humans and aliens
• Vehicles
• Soldier statistics (Strength/Accuracy/HP etc)
• Civilians / Friendly NPC soldiers

The following are systems that are not yet implemented yet:

• Combat GUI (mocked up, but not yet functional)
• Sound
• Victory Conditions (at present the 'mission' doesn't end)
• Reaction dodge
• The entire Geoscape systems (the difficult part of the game is the combat, the Geoscape is mostly menus and won't take anywhere near as long to code)

It's also worth noting that the lead programmer was on holiday this week and I've not received a new build of the game for about two weeks - I know sound and the GUI are high on the programmers' priorities, so they may both already be in game. Anyway, I think that list is mostly complete, and it gives you a good idea of where we've got to in development.

So, what's happened recently in terms of game development? Well, as the observant among you would have noticed from earlier in the post, we're using 2D sprites and tiles in the game, and over the last month or so we've had to terminate our agreement with the outsourced studio that was producing the tiles for the game and start producing them ourselves instead. This is a good thing in the long run, as it is cheaper and gives us far more direct control over the process, and means we can produce tiles exactly to our specifications and at a much higher quality than before. In the short term, however, it has caused chaos - the tile providers were also the guys who rendered up our models into sprites so we could import them into the game.

As such, we've spent the last month trying to come up with an automated workflow that turns 3D models (whether they be a house, random prop, or soldier/alien model) into 2D sprites ready to be inserted into the game. If you've not done much work with isometric tiles, you've probably got no idea of how challenging this can actually be. The good news is that we've got it sorted for terrain tiles (barring minor tweaks to make sure everything is pixel perfect), and setting up the character rendering pipeline should be much easier now we know how it should be done. We've got a test tileset finished now, and we'll be working with the programmers over the next couple of days to ensure everything in them is perfect, and then we can begin to produce our tiles in earnest.

The flip side to this is that, if all goes to plan with the rendering pipeline, you might be seeing screenshots and gameplay videos in the next month or so. That's by no means a promise, but we've got all the pieces of the jigsaw in front of us and now it's just a question of working out how to slot them all together.

As always, questions and suggestions are welcome and best directed to us on our forums, particularly with regards to technical stuff - I don't tend to bother answering detailed questions on other boards. We also get quite a lot of emails about people interested in joining the team. At present, we're currently looking for some really good animators (industry standard, or very close to that). If you happen to be a talented animator and you're happy working for appreciably less than industry rates, fire us an email. Sadly, though, we're not looking to pick up any beta testers, community managers or writers at this point in time - and when we do, we'll look to draw them from our community first.