Author Archives: SupSuper

The most requested feature

For the years I’ve been working on OpenXcom, I’ve gotten a lot of feature requests. A lot.ย I don’t personally comment on everything, for obvious reasons, but trust me, I do make a note of it for future reference. Oh yes, I know all about your suggestions to have an X-Com which starts in a more realistic date and can take place in different planets where the regional map actually changes over time maybe it actually takes place in a fantasy or steampunk or cyberpunk setting and is combined with TFTD simultaneously where you can automatically intercept UFOs in groups based on the lowest craft denominator and you could plot advanced flight paths or even have a more advanced interception minigame and you can have predefined equipment layouts automatically assigned based on a soldier’s stats that you can pick out of a pool or hire mercenaries with better stats but higher cost and they can have various different races and different weapon skills and keep various detailed stats for the memorial room while they’re not getting advanced training and medical attention in specialized facilities and also should be able to melee and use chainsaws and shotguns and flamethrowers and scientists and engineers should be distinct and also a research tree and more advanced bonuses for interrogating aliens and details on research progress as well as auto-sell and crafts should be able to bomb sites on command for a score penalty or the damage the craft does should affect the resulting crew when you go down attacking the site where you should get to pick where your craft lands and there should be advanced lighting and destruction physics which actually cause damage based on the impact and the bullets should be more realistic and penetrate different kinds of terrain or ricochet and have a noise and smell detection system to help track down the last alien that should run towards you after a while and being able to target different body parts and attach to cover for increased defense which they can climb over with grappling hooks while psi attacks should be limited to direct line of sight and you should be able to control all the alien’s abilities and make them your own but only if you specificaly mind control them in these exact circumstances while civilians should be able to fight back and there should be various factions fighting against/for you which you have to please and you actually get penalized by the country and they all serve different interests but you can do missions to get them on your side and everything should be chryssalids and the interface should be flexible for all resolutions but also resize and use a variety of scalers and stay true to the old original or a new modern look while making everything fully customizable through a fully fixed layout and also featuring tooltips and a built-in tutorial and syncing all your settings on the cloud and importing original saves and the rendering engine should support 2D and 3D with 8-bit and 24-bpp while using all the latest new OpenGL features and still support old hardware and it should have multiplayer co-op and competitive with dedicated servers but I actually only like to play in hotseat and you should be able to get drop-in help from various players with different crafts and play simultaneously or turn-based and also you could be the aliens and it should also be like Apocalypse and Silent Storm and Jagged Alliance and Laser Squadย and Enforcer also ponies.

But in all this, there’s one feature that stands out. One that’s been requested for years and years, on the forums, on GitHub, on e-mail, on IRC, on my personal messenger, every day, every week, even right now as I am working on it and people just can’t wait because it’s not finished yet and oh gawd. So here it is:

ย 

Weekend streaming

Well it seems people really like the idea of live streams. ๐Ÿ™‚ Well I’ve set some up for this weekend, so you can expect something today and tomorrow night (around 9pm+ GMT) at the Livestream channel. No fixed times as usual, this isn’t professionals we’re working with… but I’ll be sure to update this post and IRC as I get more details.

Update: Sorry guys, didn’t manage to get any streams going. This is why these things are unplanned. I’ll still try to arrange one in the future and keep you posted on any further news.

In the meantime, here’s a feature I’m sure a lot of you have been asking for:

OpenXcom live streams

As we ramp up to release the next version of OpenXcom, nothing is more important than getting rid of all those pesky bugs and crashes that always litter our development. And what better way than to team up with X-Com veterans to play through it live and test it for us?

Watch as Jade Star tries OpenXcom for the first time! Listen as SupSuper and Warboy occasionally commentate and answer audience’s questions with a variety of “yes”, “no” or even “maybe”! Suffer as the game explodes and we get more bugs to fix!


(Part 1 got eaten by Livestream)
Part 3
Part 4

Wanna know when the next stream is gonna be? Well these things are kinda unplanned, but hang around onย IRC and you might catch one. Or maybe you’d like to try it yourselves? Just contact us! We’re always happy to hang out with the community. ๐Ÿ™‚

A new addition to the team!

Starting off his debut in the community with a very different version of OpenXcom, he followed up with sending a lot of valuable contributions to us (read: an absolute fuckton of code), including:

  • Hyperwave Decoder
  • Geoscape alien base handling
  • Live alien research
  • Psi training
  • Laser tanks
  • Battlescape alien unit rendering
  • More!

The team deliberated on this matter carefully, and we decided such intense passion and effort for the project should not go to waste. So everyone welcome Warboy1982 to the OpenXcom team! We hope he enjoys his stay here and becomes a valuable member of the project. ๐Ÿ™‚

I’ve broken up with Ubuntu

I’m sorry babe, but it just wasn’t meant to be. While I once grew fond of your sleek graphical UI, your apparent lightweightness and your simplicity of ย use, the fact of the matter is you’ve changed. You’re a mess. You let yourself get inflated with ego and bloat, tried to hide your real nature to appease to those mainstream boys and keep pretending everything’s alright when it’s all falling apart on the inside. I’ve gotten fed up with your demand for updates that just end up bricking my VM and your frustrating and maddening new Unity interface that just led me to hunt down lengthy workarounds to deal with it. It’s over, we’re true. Now that Debian girl, hmm…

On a related note, Linux downloads have been updated, and an Ubuntu package introduced thanks to Knapsu. Enjoy!

The handymen’s version!

Version 0.4.5 is officially out! This version is so fully packed with all sorts of fixes that some even grew into improvements and new features. We guarantee you will not experience another crash ever again, or your money back. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Updated Windows downloads are now available, other platforms/versions will follow shortly (yes I will make a proper tarball…). Here’s the full changelog:

New features:

  • Ufopaedia
  • Hungarian translation
  • Rightclick mouse scrolling
  • Rightclick arrow buttons to min/max values
  • Weapons can be toggled on/off during dogfights
  • Modular rulesets (specified in options.cfg)
  • Soldier reordering
  • New options
  • Man page / command-line help
  • Logging

Bugfixes:

  • Updated translations
  • Updated soldier names
  • Various string clipping issues
  • Various UI issues
  • Infinite error message when tanks didn’t have ammo
  • Tanks getting it on in the storage room (recovered when mission ended)
  • Multiple “Tracking Lost” windows per UFO
  • Improved auto-equipping to ignore empty weapons and load weapons on the ground
  • Brought alien weapons counted towards score
  • Civilians didn’t count towards score
  • Crash when completing a research
  • Crash during dogfights
  • Wrong mouse input in minimap
  • Starting inventory didn’t work correctly in mission simulator
  • HWP ammo popped up in soldier inventory
  • Incorrect armor damage modifiers
  • Workaround for big corpse pieces being recovered
  • Missing rules for Reaper (crashed terror missions)
  • Ammo being reused after loaded
  • Civilians counting as saved when mission failed
  • Projectiles went through UFO if missed
  • Weird avenger spawn point
  • Item in elevator crash
  • Diagonally walking through trees
  • Items flying in the air when flying unit drops items
  • Fixed proximity grenade
  • Wrong craft speed when patrolling
  • Crash when patrolling after UFO lost
  • “Go to last known UFO position” button not working
  • Incorrect UFO recovery items
  • Ammo in weapons wasn’t recovered after missions
  • Crafts were fully unloaded after missions
  • New crafts don’t start in base position
  • Ammo graphics weren’t cleared after unloading weapon
  • Minimap doesn’t update level when using scroll wheel
  • Missing “Not enough equipment to fully re-equip squad” screen
  • Incorrect title in Promotions screen
  • Various changes to item creation/recovery in Battlescape
  • Wrong UFO graphics in interception window
  • Wrong craft/UFO altitudes
  • “UFO tracking lost” window missing sometimes
  • Crash when targeted terror site disappears
  • Reapers having incorrect behavior
  • Soldiers can turn without TUs
  • Walking through knocked down walls takes 4 TUs
  • Primed state of a grenade is not saved in the savegame
  • Firing and throwing accuracy does not decrease on injury
  • Diagonal line of sight through windows
  • Minimap not showing visible aliens on invisible tiles
  • Visible units not stored in save
  • Beam weapons not dealing any damage to UFOs
  • Rewritten dogfight radar animation
  • Dogfight UFO hit animation
  • Dogfight UFO crash animation
  • Dogfight projectiles animation
  • Projectiles could hit UFO even if it was out of their range
  • Added craft damage indication
  • Added translated terrain names to New Battle
  • Sound and graphics of flying suit
  • Small pathfinding issue
  • Segfault when mindprobing empty space
  • Untranslated Geoscape sidebar
  • Implemented faster unit walk speed off screen
  • Items visible on minimap on undiscovered tiles
  • Units walking on top of each other
  • Incorrect behavior with ground items in inventory
  • Options screen and resolution selection
  • Craft has wrong position when transferred
  • Craft doesn’t reequip when transferred
  • Game returns to the actual game after saving (instead of previous menu)
  • Drawing issue in medikit and scanner view
  • Improved explosion animation scaling with power
  • Explosion sound
  • Added Elerium-115 to battlescape
  • Vertical pathfinding
  • Cancel firing mode when pressing move up/down
  • Flying up/down graphics
  • Show damage percent of craft on its state-panel
  • Buttons not pressing with right-clicks
  • Bugs in soldier name generation
  • Added geoscape position to saves
  • Added “We can now produce” Geoscape window
  • Walk/move sounds
  • Proper ammo accounting after battles
  • Added “loading/saving…” messages to savegame screens
  • Being able to input text in resolution
  • Non-ASCII character input
  • Non-ASCII savegame names
  • Crash when trying to rearm crafts with empty weapon slots
  • Weapons glitching when dropped by panicked soldiers
  • UFO trying to escape after being destroyed
  • Freeze in wordwrapping
  • Big text automatically switches to small if string doesn’t fit
  • Battlescape crash when items were dropped
  • Unlimited ammo weapons being incorrectly recovered
  • Mouse being restricted to 320×200 area in some systems
  • Not being able to overwrite saves with non-ASCII names
  • Save list not synchronizing with text input
  • Weapon unload not clearing text
  • Basescape not resetting time to 5 Secs
  • Random seed missing in saves
  • Crash when large units tried to move outside the map
  • Wrong reaper sound