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.

Pay respect to your fallen comrades…

Edit: Fixed captcha, comment away.

Warboy has finished rewriting the AI for upcoming 1.0 to crush fulfill all your hopes and dreams. It’s bigger! It’s badder! It’s Just Like The Original™!

So now it’s your turn to give it a spin and let us know of any bugs and crashes you experience. Test it throughly! Never stop playing OpenXcom!

This is an announcement for all translators, wanna-be translators, could-be translators and all sorts of non-English native speakers.

We’ve ditched the old translation system. And by system I mean “edit a text file by hand, hope you didn’t mess up the format, manually keep track of any updates and changes, get angry everytime it breaks and becomes out of date, give up, etc”. It wasn’t that great.

Now we’ve moved it all over to the GetLocalization website, so you can just log in, choose your language and have at it. You can translate as little or as much as you want, collaborate and discuss with other translators, help improve or vote the existing translations, discuss with other people, etc. Even better, the website will automatically update with any game changes and notify you of any new text that needs revising, so you don’t need to worry about your stuff breaking anymore.

If you were a translator before, don’t worry all your stuff’s been moved to the website, so you can just pick up where you left off. If your translation isn’t there just send us the file and we’ll import it to the website. If you need more details check the wiki and forums.

Now I know most of you are probably fine with English and don’t really care about any of this. But given 65% of our views come from non-English countries, I imagine there’s a significant demographic out there that could use a native version. So if not for yourself, do it for your fellow man, and together we’ll make OpenXcom 1.0 take over the world!!! …erm I mean spread all over the world… *cough cough*

Sliders!

Woo!

Now you can access soldier inventories from the Geoscape to pre-equip them.

And duplicate items stack to reduce the massive piles of base equipment.

And you can Ctrl-click items to automatically drop/pick them up.

By popular request, we’ve updated the whole codebase to support the new version 0.5 of the yaml-cpp library. Uhhh… what does this mean you might ask:

For developers: You need to update your dependencies! Yaml-cpp 0.5 API is not backwards-compatible, so the new code will not compile until you update the library to the latest version. Take the time to make sure your distro supports the new version. For Windows developers, pre-built Visual Studio dependencies are available as usual.

For players: All load/saving will probably just be faster and better in general. Savegames are more robust now so they shouldn’t break everytime we update something. Your task now is to throughly test all loading/saving and make sure nothing broke. All savegames/rulesets/options should still work like before, so if they don’t, let us know.

Coming within the next two weeks, stay tuned.