Gotta run before the translators skin me alive.

Ever since OpenXcom has added support to infinite saves, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. Having a lot more saves means a lot more stuff to manage. Some people missed the custom ordering of the original 1-10 system. Some people wanted more details to sort out their saves. Some people kept messing up their save names. Some people just kept getting lost in it all. So here’s a recap of all the changes to it since 0.9.

One of the problems was save names are the same as file names, and while this makes it easy to find your saves in the OpenXcom folder (as opposed to figuring out what GAME_5 is all about), it meant you couldn’t use any characters invalid in a filename. So now the actual name is stored in the save, so you can type in whatever you want, and the filename is just a sanitized version of that. We also resolved a bunch of issues with unintended renames, overwrites, Unicode, etc. (eg. if you accidentally name two saves the same, you’ll just get two saves with the same name instead of randomly losing one)

Another problem was saves were only shown alphabetically, so you quickly lost track of what save came first/last, and if you had a bunch of saves running, the Geoscape date didn’t help any. So now the save list can be sorted by file name and date, similar to file explorers and modern games, so you can easily see the latest/oldest saves, or use some alphabetical system instead (to avoid confusion, the file dates are shown in ISO format, different from the Geoscape date). The Geoscape date column wasn’t really useful for sorting so it was dropped.

Finally, if all this is not enough and you’re just really bad at naming saves, we also show you some extra save info. Hovering over a save will tell you if it’s a Geoscape or Battlescape save, and the respective Geoscape date or Battlescape mission turn. Hopefully that helps clear it up for you.

They are a bug. They are not coming back.

Seriously it doesn’t even have any side windows, where do you get that from.

Technically it’s all the same road. Anyways a lot of people wonder what was left to do after 0.9. Surely it was all done and playable, right? Well, I think the 200+ issues that have been resolved have something to say about that. 😛 But while we come closer to release, here’s some topics I wanna tackle.

Live Stream

Last weekend’s stream was a huge success, thanks to you guys we raised $175 for charity! But I still haven’t filled my quota yet, so this Saturday tune in for more OpenXcom, more mayhem, more gruesome deaths! Should start at around 3pm-4pm GMT, I’ll make a new post when it starts so your feeds notify you.

Terror from the Deep

After 1.0. Got it? After 1.0. OK? After 1.0. Ok that’s that elephant out of the room.

The amount of people requesting this has just been staggering. In e-mail, in chat, in forums, in blogs, in crop circles, in my garden, etc.. Sheesh guys, I thought you all hated it. 😛 Yes, we have looked into it. No, it’s not as simple as you think. However, we do have a new modding framework planned and TFTD will pretty much be its proof-of-concept. So if you thought we were just gonna kick back and relax after 1.0, you thought wrong. And I was really looking forward to that vacation in Hawaii…

Feature Freeze

Yes, we know you love to send us all your amazing new ideas, but if we’re gonna get this done this year we gotta lock down on new features. Every new line of code is a new possible bug! So please focus on testing and keep your pull requests to important-red-alert-priority-fix level. We’ll still be revising existing pull requests and some UI enhancements of our own for 1.0 inclusion, but any other extras will just have to be saved for later. There’s always 1.1! 😉

Known Issues

However, there’s some stuff we simply can’t fix. It’s out of our hands. Really. Like the fact that when asked for an original X-Com copy, most of you just rush to google “xcom ufo defense” and download it off the first abandonware website that you can find. We know, we know, it’s the internet. But most of these have old versions of the game that cause all kinds of fun bugs. So if you’re gonna go that route, save us all the trouble and get it patched.

There’s also some strange bugs with SDL_Mixer. In some systems, the game may crash when changing music track. In Windows Vista and later, changing the music volume will actually change the entire game volume. If you experience these problems, try using a digital music pack like the ones available in the Extras, even try different file formats. While you’re there, make sure you have the latest Data Patch (included with the Windows installer) to avoid any kind of original map oddities and LOF bugs.