- New Terror Mission Map Blocks

Sick of the same old terror site? Want some variety in your life? Well Luke83 brings us  a pack of brand new map pieces to spice up your terror sites. They’ll even be playable in v0.4!

- Hostile gangs and civilians

Remember all those times you happily blasted civilians out of your way? What if they actually fought back? Luke83 poses a dangerous dilemma for X-Com players everywhere.

- Aliens inventory

What if you could see aliens’ inventory? It… probably wouldn’t be that interesting, but regardless, luke83 has whipped up some inventory graphics just in case.

- New weapon graphics

Not enough weapons for you? Here are some interesting variations made by Chiko.

- HWPs suggestions

Have HWPs gotten too cold and lifeless for you? Do you wish you could make them more personal, change their weapon slots, maybe give them legs? Well Chiko has got you covered.

Note that most of these are just concepts, but they do give us ideas on what to add in the future. What about you, got some interesting ideas? Have you made custom maps, sprites or other mods for X-Com and would like to see them carried over to OpenXcom? We’d love to see what you got and support any fellow modding communities out there, so spread the word and show us what you got.

New features:

• Geoscape:
  • Random mission generation.
  • New Geoscape pathfinding.
  • New globe lighting.
  • UFOpaedia.
• Basescape:
  • Research.
  • Manufacture.
  • New side base view.
• Battlescape:
  • Abort screen.
  • Debriefing screen.
  • Battlescape save game.
  • Panicking units.
  • Skill increase and promotions.
  • Ranged based accuracy is now optional (see UFO Extender for details on Ranged Based Accuracy).
  • Minimap.
  • First-peron camera.
  • Flying units.
  • Grav lifts.
  • Optional pathfinding preview.
  • Medikits.
  • Laser weapons.
  • Large units.
  • Motion scanner.
  • Alien deployment rules.
  • AI taking cover & throwing grenades.
• Terror missions.
• Moral choice system.
• External rulesets.
• Options screen.
• RPG conversation wheel.

Bugfixes:

• Damage modifier against blob alien types corrected.
• Research camera was incorrectly capturing information when the Y-axis was over 30º.
• Removed instances where soldiers were actually dying.
• Agent’s hat not correctly flipped when dispatching units towards a target waypoint.
• Fixed areas where bloom was missing.
• Tweaked interface where time units were still erroneously displayed.
• Terrain was vanishing when hit by a powerful-enough weapon.
• Corrected timing in quick-time events found in introductory cutscene before a specific terror mission.
• Removed unnecessary complexity from inventory system.
• Reticulated extra splines from Geoscape globe interface.
• Fixed items vanishing after going into the 5th tier of terror ship missions.
• Replaced random instances of PC controls being displayed with the equivalent console controls.
• Replaced all instances of yellow with green.
• Corrected difficulty bug where all games were defaulting to Beginner after being loaded.
• Added support for Kinect for a more accurate aiming innovative intuitive aiming experience.
• Changed Chrysalid spawning chance from 99% to 99.99%.
• Corrected instances when grenades weren’t exploding randomly while being anywhere close to the Skyranger.
• Negative conversation option in the romance subplot with Miss Jane in the Radar Room now properly awards a -5 bravery modifier.
• Tweaked soldier accuracy to correct situations where bullets were actually hitting their targets instead of the X-Com Commander.

Get it while it’s hot!

But I don’t wanna keep you in the dark. After all, development is still happening. Honest! Look at all those… words! I’ve been getting rid of everything possible in the colossal almighty XcomRuleset.cpp and moving it out to external files. So no more this crap:

However, there’s no telling what I might be breaking as I do this! So, I’d like everyone to specially test the latest ruleset-based code, you know play the game as you would normally, and make sure there’s no regressions (things that worked before but now don’t). If you’d rather have some fun, you can always play with the ruleset and make your own nuke pistols or something… though I’m not held responsible for whatever crazy things you break then.

So, what more do I have planned until v0.4? Well just finishing the rulesets, implement mission generation, maybe add in an Options GUI or something, and that’s it! I know I know, this doesn’t sound like much, but think about it… have you looked at the roadmap? We’re over half-way done! Most of the Geoscape, Basescape and Battlescape features are done! We just need to put in all the missing content, the weapons, the aliens, the missions, the scoring, etc. Which is probably still gonna take a while… but whatever, I’m excited! And you should be too!

The Eclipse and CodeBlocks projects were also dropped from the codebase  since they were hardly used and changed based on people’s individual configurations. If you use these IDEs I suggest just making your own local project.

Developers for other platforms don’t need to worry as you probably aren’t affected.

So, I’m dropping my Linux testing and binary builds (I don’t think they ever worked anyways).  Instead, I’m welcoming all the Linux enthusiasts to help maintain OpenXcom on their favorite platform of choice. This isn’t a serious commitment, just make sure to test it regularly and let us know of any issues, or even help distribute it by making builds, creating fancy packages or spreading it among your repositories. If it’s good I’ll even place your builds on the Downloads page and credit you.

This doesn’t apply to just Linux though, OpenXcom is a cross-platform project and I love to see it running on new platforms. If you’re good at porting to some esoteric platform or just optimizing for lighter devices, don’t be shy, share your experiences on the forum and help spread OpenXcom everywhere!

Update: There is now a new section on the forums to post and discuss your own builds, and I will try to inform you of upcoming stable releases there. I also welcome you to contribute to the Compiling section on the wiki with instructions for your particular platform/IDE/etc.

In the meantime, I’ve put up a poll about Which development tools do you use? on the forums, for those that compile OpenXcom themselves. This will help us decide which platforms/tools to focus on supporting as we develop the project, so please vote honestly.