I have a question about OXCE+: Are there any features I can use in the mod without breaking compatibility with OXC? I'd like to start a new thread on the topic, but I figured I'd ask first, in case the answer is a flat no.
OXCE and OXCE+ mostly
add new functionality,
not change existing.
This means that in majority of cases (more than 95%) your mod will stay backwards-compatible with OXC... meaning it will still run... just the new stuff will not be "enabled".
In less than 5%, things are changed, i.e. working differently in OXC and OXCE/OXCE+... but even these should mostly work.
There is less than 1% of stuff, which will not be backwards-compatible... as an example: OXC is not able to use more than 1000 bigobs in a mod... OXCE/OXCE+ can use unlimited number of bigobs. So if your mod grows big and you'll be using 5000 bigobs... it won't work in OXC anymore.
And another question: I gather that OXCE was a project by Yankes to expand OXC, but then he stopped working on it and you took over and made an extension of the extension called OXCE+. Is that accurate? Or is OXCE truly a separately-maintained thing that some people use today over OXCE+?
Yankes is still working on OXCE (less, but still)... and I am merging his changes into OXCE+ too.
And yes, OXCE+ is extension of OXCE, which is an extension of OXC.
Most people use OXCE+, because it contains 99.8% of OXCE (there is a small 0.2% difference, where OXCE features conflicted with OXCE+ features, but nothing critical).
More info here:
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,5251.0.html