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.

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. 🙂

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  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!

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. 😉

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

To celebrate the renewed interesting in XCOM with the new released title, v0.4.5 is coming this week! And we need your help to get us there!

Testers: Test the hell out of those Git builds and make sure no completely horrible serious fatal mind-bending bug sneak past us this time! Remember, the more info you give us about the bug (what you were doing, how to reproduce it, etc), the better chance it has of getting fixed!

Translators: OpenXcom supports a variety of languages, and some new text has been added to 0.4 and 0.4.5 so translations are falling out of date! If you are a native speaker of any of them, please help out by reviewing and updating them, it only takes a few minutes. Here’s a list of out-of-date languages (marked as Incomplete) and recently added text. Feel free to post a new thread if none is available.

Package Maintaners: Let me know if you wanna be contacted when the source for 0.4.5 is ready so you can get all your stuff prepped ahead of time. WARNING: I might add a new dependency. Watch this space.

Everyone Else: Keep anxiously waiting!

Ok got that out of the way. 😛 So here’s what’s going on:

• Yeah v0.4 was released in a bit of a rush right before I had to head off for a vacation, so a lot of bugs and problems slipped in, most critical one being the crash when you finish a research, but if you avoid that you should be mostly fine. Even worse, GitHub stopped sending me notifications, so I missed a whole bunch of fixes submitted there, sorry about that. 🙁 We’re working on a v0.45 that will fix all the nasties so you don’t have to wait all the way for v0.5, but if that’s not enough for you, you can always just try the latest Git build.
• This website is old! Dusty! Wrinkly! Web 1.0! So I’m working on something better. If you’ve got suggestions on what’s missing on this website, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see, feel free to throw them at us! Also would you like to see OpenXcom on all those new-fangled social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc? Let us know! I’m too much of an old coot to have any clue about what’s hip and cool and what kids are into these days, you gotta help me out here. 😉
• Linux! Where did you go? Back when I announced the end of Linux builds, plenty of people were volunteering to do it, where did they all go? I guess most of you are happy compiling it yourselves, but it would still be nice to help get some archives and packages out there in the wild to streamline the process and spread the project around the various distributions (and even other platforms) out there.