The (other) road to 1.0

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.

OpenXcom stream for Extra Life charity

Hey everyone, me and Warboy will be doing an OpenXcom live stream this Sunday (3rd November) 3pm GMT for the Extra Life charity to help support sick kids in hospitals (we are specifically targeting international efforts so everyone benefits).

Feel free to join us, ask questions, laugh at my incompetence, and of course donate to the charity. This is not your typical Jade stream, so the commentary won’t be as stellar, but hey, it’s for the kids!

Edit: Stream is over, thanks to everyone that joined in, we had a blast! We ended up doing a Superhuman Ironman run as the chat requested. Here’s the outcome.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way

Yaml 5 may have taken away the best of my ability to break your saves, but i’ve managed it anyway!
i’ve altered grenade behaviour, and the roll-on effect of that is that now all the grenades in your saved loadouts and battlescape games will be primed to go off immediately.

in the interest of public health and safety, please double check all pre-equipped grenades before your next battle after you update to the latest nightly.

Scheduled domain transfer

On the 15th October, the “openxcom.org” domain is gonna be transferred to a new host. During that time the website may become temporarily unavailable for a few hours while the transfer takes place and the DNS records update. This does not affect any other NineX websites. We apologize for any inconvenience.