For as long as X-COM has existed, so have people trying to fix it and improve it. Patches, mods, remakes, etc. So as we get ready for v1.0, crushing all remaining bugs, checking all suggestions, reviewing all that needs reviewing, we should never forget what came before us.

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.