Boy, that was a rough ride wasn’t it? Pardon the dust, still trying to work out all the kinks, but didn’t wanna leave you all in the dark forever. You know how these things go, you promise a thing, technical issues arise, yada yada yada.
But here it is. The wiki has been updated, and we have a Twitter now to complete the social circle. However the subpages still all need to be redone, and the new version 0.9 (yes, 0.9) will come shortly. Watch this space.
Coming within the next two weeks, stay tuned.
What better way to make sure there are no bugs left than a Jade Stream? 😀 As usual no specific time, but it should happen in a few hours. I’ll post a link here when it goes up and page you if you hang around IRC.
Update: And the stream is over, Jade finished OpenXcom without any crashes! Some bugs were still found though…
To make sure the next release comes out within this century, we are instituting a feature freeze. The priority right now is to fix all remaining bugs and finish any remaining features. Any new feature additions, code improvements, suggestions and whatever else will be postponed until the next release.
To help speed this process along, please test the latest Git Builds in a variety of platforms and scenarios. Don’t just keep loading the same old saves, but make new saves, new missions, new setups, etc. Prioritize reporting any critical bugs and crashes, and save any cosmetic problems for later.
Congratulations to nilsge for being the first to successfully finish a game of OpenXcom!
Stream’s over, here’s the recording:
Watch from 3:00:00 in, unless you like seeing crazy spaceships explode. 😉
It’s been a long time hasn’t it? I don’t usually keep track of project anniversaries because I wasn’t smart enough to register the exact date this all started (protip: use a repository from the start so you’ll at least have a start date saved). But I’m pretty sure it’s been around… 4 years since I first started. How time flies, how far we’ve come from a one-man team to a… crazy-man team. I’d like to take this time to thank everyone involved. Everyone in the community, all the developers, modders, translators, testers, suggesters, supporters or just pains in the butt. 😛 I’m sure this wouldn’t have come this far without you.
Boy, OpenXcom sure has… changed all these years. Yet something remains. Something has been the same since the start. This website. I never really paid much attention to it, its purpose was just to convey news to you guys. But over time I’ve realized just how terrible it is. It’s ugly, it’s tiny, it’s cluttered, it’s a nuisance. It doesn’t convey anything, people keep missing obvious instructions and information, it’s not doing its job. I can’t even customize the menu or properly fit Youtube videos on it. The project has definitely outgrown it. I need something that you look at it and it just says “that’s X-Com”. So like most things, I decided to take matters into my own hands and put this prototype together:
I’ll be honest. It fulfils my design goals. It’s bigger, clearer, more readable, and the “Geoscape look” does give you X-Com vibes. But… I dunno, I’m not a designer. At all. I’m a programmer through and through. And I can’t help but wonder because of how stubborn I am, if I’m just wasting hours messing with HTML/CSS on something vaguely competent when a professional designer would put something together in minutes.
Same thing with the logo. I really like the skull-and-crossbones = OX motif, it’s distinct and it works really well as a scalable game icon. It looks good to me. But maybe I’m secretly infuriating every actual designer ever with my total incompetence? 😛
What do you guys think? Keep pursuing my crazy design sense? Or any of you out there would do a much better job taking over website design duties and putting up with me and my stubbornness? If you’re interested feel free to email. And don’t just go “oh the website doesn’t matter, keep programming away” because look at this website. Look at it. Then look at any other game website. Yeah. Come on. Really.
We fixed a linker error in the yaml-cpp library for Windows (and submitted it to their developers), so if you’re compiling on Windows, you’ll need to update your dependencies.