Hello all,
2022 will be a special year for me because it marks the 20th anniversary of my first major fan project related to a videogame, the fanfic novel
XCOM: The Unknown Menace, which tells the story of the First Alien War in a whooping 692 pages.
And that year also kinda marks the beginning of my XCOM modding with the first map mod I ever made as a replacement for the original game's Terror Site terrain, originally called 'City' and later adapted to OpenXCom as 'Commercial'. My map modding then extended to making part of the UFO2000 project, a multiplayer clone of the original game, where I created several terrains that eventually I later adapted to the Terrain Pack and Area 51 OXC mods, which included even more new terrains I made, and that have been unavailable for the past years due to a number of issues and the lack of time to solve them, which caused me to make a pause from XCOM/OXC modding, after a really long time involved.
But my personal love for XCOM modding has never disappeared, and over the past years I received requests and feedback to make my mods available once again, for the OXC community to play and enjoy. It is then my pleasure to announce that I'm currently actively working on a new OXC mod, called the
XCOM: The Unknown Menace in homage and inspired by my original fanfic (which also inspired Area 51, thus the circle becomes complete).
I won't provide more details at his point, other that it will be an expansion to the original game built upon my previous work and new original material, and it will include selected features from other mods that I'm currently in the process of contacting the authors to obtain their permissions, in order to add them. It won't be a mod pack though since I'm done for good with that kind of projects, so those contributions are going to be on a needed basis and I won't take requests to add additional features.
ETA is currently unknown but stay tuned: there's a fast mover on its way.
PS (January 18th, 2022) - Things have changed after I posted this, because of my decision to make Terrain Pack to go open source. So the stated above will not be exactly like it turns out.