For the most part, fixing bugs is all well and good. Who likes’em? Bunch of ugly buggy annoying things. Just limiting us and getting in our way, right?

But what about those bugs we’ve all grown fond of (because they worked to our advantage)? Our old friends the exploits? Like being able to keep terror sites alive as long as they’re targeted? And not paying bills for crew in transfer? And the apparently infinite alien contaiment? And being able to overflow storage capacity with recoveries? And more stuff like that? I bet you’re not so keen about seeing them get fixed.

So what do you think? Should all bad and good things be fixed for the sake of fairness? Or will you miss those handy little exploits?

There’s a new SVN build out with all the latest optimizations, tweaks and base facilities. It’s still a bit rough around the edges (you can break the base apart and can’t place hangars) but I’ll fix it up eventually.

Also, I’d like to talk about contributions. A lot of people would like to help out in coding and I just kinda pushed them away since I don’t want to form a team. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want your help! If there’s anything in the code I missed but you solved, some kind of bugfix, enhancement or other handy change, feel free to post a patch in the Contributions forum and I’ll integrate them if they’re good.

Also, I’ve posted some problems I’ve ran into on the forum with [TASK] in the title. I will do this more regularly as development progresses. These are issues I need to figure out eventually but I’m currently stumped on and would appreciate any kind of help. Whether you have any programming knowledge or not, feel free to check it out and lend a hand. You’ll be credited for all your effort.

Our friendly neighbourhood host NineX bought a new server to host all these mighty X-Com projects so we can all serve you better. So if you wanna help him out, here’s a list of hardware he could use:

• 4x 1GB PC3200 DDR 400MHz 184-Pin DIMM ECC Non-Registered memory modules (eBay page showing some potential RAM modules).

If you wanna donate some, you can contact NineX here:

• IRC: ninex@freenode, ninex@quakenet, ninex@IRCNet
• Jabber: kosh@volron.net
• Skype: Nine-X

While fixing bugs and getting X-Com running on modern systems is all well and good, there’s always that part of us that wants more. That keeps coming up with ideas whenever we play a game. Of how we would’ve done things even better if we were in charge.

So in an attempt to get some more discussion going, tell me. How would you fix X-Com? What kind of crazy ideas do you have in mind? What improvements could the gameplay use? What extra features would make your job easier?

New SVN builds are out for Windows, Mac and Linux users. Feel free to try them on the Downloads section. While they are nothing major, I do appreciate feedback on whether you got it running on your system fine and any changes I might need to make to the instructions. Specially Mac users that had problems before, let us know if it works for you now, and post in the forums if you run into problems. Thanks again to marabus for maintaining that version.

Aside from various fixes and additions mentioned before, there are some little extras available:

• As per request, there’s a new command line parameter. X-Com is a 320×200 resolution game. This is a very tiny non-standard resolution on modern systems, so by default the game is resized to twice its size (640×400). If this is not enough for you, you can now change the scaling with -scale x (x being the scaling factor, eg. -scale 3 will start the game with triple the default size) to get a bigger image. You can also combine this with