News/2014
Monthly update for November, 2014
- Battlescape
- Revamped the soldier lua ai
- Implemented inverse herding for the AI
- Tweaked lua ai scripts
- Make the lua ai take morale into account.
- Fixes
In total, 31 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in November.
Monthly update for October, 2014
- Battlescape
- Major work in the LUA AI.
- Some improvements in the AI.
- General
- Tweaked shot origins for most weapons, and shot origin actually changes when crouching now.
- Updated Spanish translation.
- UI
- Re-added alien rush option to skirmish.
- Fixed the team load screen for skirmish.
- Allow player to select equipment for custom skirmish squad.
- Fixes
- Stopped endless alien spawn from persisting to other game modes after a skirmish game.
- Fixed employee capacity issues on transfer.
In total, 37 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in October.
Monthly update for September, 2014
- Battlescape
- Improvements and fixes in the AI.
- Improvements to the lua AI.
- Campaign
- Speed up employee loading
- General
- New Danish translation by Joe Hansen.
- Spanish translation update.
- Fixes
- Fixed non-hardlinked cgame-skirmish crash on battle end
- replaced and removed tex_buildings/carpet016.png due to copyright issues
In total, 51 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in September.
Monthly update for August, 2014
- Campaign
- More improvements in transfer code.
- Open scientists tab from hire/fire buttons in laboratory
- Battlescape
- Minor improvements and fixes in the AI
- More work on the LUA AI.
- Characters caught in an explosion now play hurt sounds.
- #5246 Applying medikits doesn't trigger hurt sound.
- Maps
- Several improvements in +industrial map theme.
- Fixed fixed square where actors got trapped in wilderness map
- Adapted the warehouse building from transport for +industrial map theme.
- Some fixes in the +village2 map theme.
- Some improvements in various prefabs.
- UI
- Merged singleplayer and multiplayer windows into one unified mission menu.
- Updated the default HUD's WorldLevel component.
- Enhancement for audio options: hide other audio options if sound is disabled
- General
- Updated Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian translations.
- Started new Ukrainian translation for uforadiant.
- Bugs fixed
- #5328 Snipers aborting RF get wrong TU cost on subsequent RF.
- #5379 Mission icons gone.
- #5376 trigger_hurt entity does not play a hurt sound.
- #5365 Soldier vanishes from equip screen after renaming.
- #5317 Shot hits when fired over friend in diagonal square.
- #5364 Zero-weight armor after revitalising.
- #5208 Fixed po parser.
- Tools
- vim syntax highlightning for ufo script files (wip)
In total, 88 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in August.
A new game in the Google Play Store
I've created yet another small game - just for fun - in the last few days. Its name is CavePacker. It's now available in the Google Play Store, the source is on github. Other supported platforms are Windows, Linux, MacOSX and NaCl.
It is a Sokoban game. I think everyone knows this (or at least should know) - for those who don't: Sokoban is a puzzle game, in which the player has to push boxes to storage locations to finish a map. The lesser moves you do to achieve this, the better the result.
Monthly update for July, 2014
- Campaign
- Some improvements in transfer code.
- Maps
- More improvements in +village map theme
- Moved small_street map to +village map theme
- Map [+village2] updated
- Moved the main tile of +tower map to +urban map theme
- New tiles for +urban map theme
- Moved clinic map to +urban map theme
- Some improvements in various prefabs
- General
- Continued work on LUA AI
- Added 1366x768 for laptop resolutions
- Enable build on OpenBSD
- Bugfixes
In total, 173 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in July.
Monthly update for June, 2014
- UI
- Started to convert the hospital window
- Fix some hospital employee sceen issues
- Prevent building more facility of a type than its maxCount limit
- Battlescape
- Campaign
- Reduce use of UFO_HARVESTER
- Continued work on Implants
- Cleanup in employee code
- Maps
- Updated multiplayer support
- Updated +village map theme
- Map [gate] - cleanup
- Map [+farm] added Gunboat UFO
- Some minor fixes in +farm, +africa, +desert and alienbase maps
- Updated +mansion map theme
- Map [mine] added alternative entrance
- Translation
- Ukrainian & Russian translations: small fixes and updates
- General
- Replaced sound files with gpl versions
- Continued work to make aircraft types scriptable
- Continued work on LUA AI
- Failed attempt to compile the project in c++11 mode
- Use libgtest for our tests - libcunit is no more
- Updated SDL to latest mercurial version
- Added GameTest::CountSpawnpoints
- Bugfixes
- #5323 make the whole message header clickable
- #5334 Complitly destroed ui
- #5335 Compile error on Mac OS 10.9: ...
- #5336 Compile error on Mac OS 10.9: ...
- #5253 [mapcompiler] -fix option writes unnecessary content
- #5337 Compile error on Mac OS 10.9: ...
- #5341 Armor icon in soldier equipment screen invisible
- Fixed newline at the beginning of a map file if you run ./ufo2map -fix <map>
- Fixed duplicated worldspawn settings for epairs
- Fixed new upload paths on sf.net
In total, 327 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in June.
Let's play
Ildamos - the guy behind a 5,000-word UFO: AI review is back. This time he created a Let's Play for our beloved game.
- Part 1: Where we equip our soldiers, assign tags, buy equipment, and task our scientists to research Continuous Wave Laser Operation.
- Part 2: Where we finish equipping our warbirds, shoot down a UFO, land in an area separate from the crash site, and take down three aliens who are killing civilians. More than two of our troops sustained serious wounds in the exchange.
- Part 3: Where we swap out wounded soldiers for fresh ones and land on the crash site where we shot down that UFO in Part 2. Killed four aliens in this round but not without a sniper taking a shot. One PHALANX operative --- an assault soldier got wounded gravely. He exchanged several shots with an alien though, taking it down but nearly dying --- 3 hit points left!! --- in the process.
Congratulations, it's an..... awesome game
At 12:53 MET UFO: Alien Invasion was reborn into a world without alien wars. We are proud to give it the name 2.5.
At the time we released 2.4 (2012-05) we planned to put out the next release a lot faster. So much for the theory. It took us more than two years to release the version 2.5. This version is the next big milestone for making the game feature complete. We took the time to balance and tweak a lot on the campaign to improve the fun and replayability for all of you.
As a sidenote we have replaced all our assets with Debian compatible licenses which will hopefully bring us a lot more players since we now can be part of the big Debian/Ubuntu universe. It only took us a few years to reach this goal. Thanks for everyone to support us.
Make sure to check out the Changelog and download the game. We hope to be able to provide some more binaries and installers in the next few days. Hopefully we will be available via apt-get install ufoai on Debian and Ubuntu very soon, too.
You should also make sure to not miss the next big thing we are working on since a few months now. The UI redesign. This is what we are going to call 2.6. The majority of this version will be about UI. Let's see how long it'll take to release that baby.
Please make sure to spread the word on facebook, twitter, blogs or whatever other social media channel you use. Reviews would be awesome, too - please let us know about them (so that we can link them). But most importantly - go and play the game!
We are also always looking for new contributors. If you know how to code c/c++ or want to learn it - or you know how to create models, textures or like to create maps, please please contact us.
Monthly update for May, 2014
- UI
- Updated won/lost screens
- Updated the research screen
- Updated the base attack popup
- Renamed nodes
- Improved widescreen support
- UFOPedia: Small model is now hidden when the big picture is chosen.
- Changed sequence color to white
- Added
ui_restartconsole command to test ufo script file changes without a restart - Fixed #5320 (Hitting close button in mailclient different from hitting esc)
- Battlescape
- Fixed #5318 (IR goggles don't work)
- Improved the lua AI
- Autostand for the AI.
- Adjusted the AI 'hiding' a bit.
- Tweaked the AI damage scoring a bit.
- Adjust the AI friendly fire check.
- Fixed: AI considering their own weapon instead of the enemy's when hiding
- Maps
- +solarplant: Fixed minor pathing issue
- mine: Fixed unpassable square
- office: Fixed some impassable squares
- General
- First attempts to make aircraft types scriptable
In total, 306 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in May.
Next licensing step
Our final goal for the licensing was reached today. We are now fully Debian compliant. This is true for both 2.6-dev and 2.5. You can find the list of licenses here.
We can now finally prepare the 2.5 release and we really hope that we are a part of the Debian world from that release on. We would reach a lot more users with that and hopefully would also get some new contributors.
Stay tuned for the monthly that is hopefully going to be posted soon.
The Ninex.info Server Team is once again in need of your help.
The server is currently hosting Two projects: "UFO: Alien Invasion," and "OpenXcom."
To continue providing hosting services we will need to raise funds for the coming year, to pay for both the service and possibly some new hardware, or a new server computer altogether, especially if such services are to be provided free of advertisements on the project websites.
In addition to the two projects mentioned, we also host additional programming and development tools for the community, including a snapshot autobuilder for OpenXcom, and a buildbot for UFO: Alien Invasion.
We also welcome new projects that are freely available and preferably open-source in nature, and hope to continue to provide tools for the community to grow, but we will need your help and support to do so.
Please consider a donation for our cause, which you can give via the following link:
Donate Bitcoin
We sincerely thank you for any support you provide.
Monthly update for April, 2014
- Battlescape
- Added stun damage bar to the hud
- Make smoke from grenades cause a small amount of stun damage
- Actors now also touch triggers at the start of the round
- Made stunned actors affected by fire fields and other hurt triggers
- Made use of the new weather system
- Also remove the stunnedactor particle when the actor dies!
- Remove stunnedactor particle when the actor perishes.
- Send death/stun states for invisible actors.
- Maps
- +resort: Minor fixes
- +frozen: Minor fixes
- +village2: New 2x2 map tile
- +city3: Updated
- +village2: Add connector tile and assembly
- Updated various prefabs
- Translations
- Italian translation update #5300
In total, 145 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in April.
New +village2 tile
New +village2 tile
New +village2 tile
CaveExpress source code release
As promissed, the CaveExpress source code is now available on http://github.com/mgerhardy/caveexpress. The source is released under the GPL3 and the game data is released under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
Angry dino
Multi packages
Flying dino
Monthly update for March, 2014
- Maps
- +harbour some minor fixes
- +city3 updated
- Scripting
- Fixed assert for MAX_AMMOS_PER_OBJDEF
- Attempt to improve alien team and equipment definitions
- Updated cities.ufo
- Sounds
- Fixed sounds with a bad sample rate (Thanks to Crystan)
- UI
- Correctly update info on actor wounds when opening the inv/stats window.
- Added toggle rescue zone button
- New mapicons for a lot of maps
- New icons for rescue zone (draft, could be somewhat changed)
- Battlescape
- Speedup for rerouting of stacked tiles
- Fixed an ancient bug in with box traces
- Bumped bsp version (recompile your maps)
- AI friendly fire check only used the weapon spread instead of effective spread
- Attempt to fix #5272 (Smoke grenade, while crouching)
- General
- Fixed SV_CompleteMapCommand
- Fixed Item::getFastestFireDef
In total, 220 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in March.
Monthly update for February, 2014
- General
- Lots of code refactoring.
- UI2 - reworked aircraft panel
- UI2 - reworked HUD functions
- Adjustments in AI code.
- Improved pathfinding code - rerouting for stacked tiles (city2 -40%, mansion_huge -10%
- Increased MAX_OBJDEFS by two.
- Implemented FR #5277 (Extend debug info about alien´s inventory/encumbrance)
- Translations
- Updated German translation
- Bugs
- Fixed bug #5235 (Crash when trying to max researchers in non researchable tech).
- Fixed a bug in the AI code that was causing the AI to always pick the last entity possible as target.
- Fixed dependencies in debian/control for newer deb-based distributives.
- Campaign
- Implemented FR #4939 (Move aircraft being transfered out from source base so it does not affect capacity checks).
- Changed option text in aircraft menu to "_Soldiers & Pilots".
- Fixed possible problem with aliens never equipping Kerrblades.
- Allow auto-equip to put a weapon in the backpack as last option.
- Some minor fixes and improvments in equipment definitions.
- Removed "Soldier entered/left the rescue zone" message.
- Maps
- Some minor fixes in harbour2 map.
- Implemented FR #4988 glowmaps for tex_ufo/ textures.
- Map [mansion] removed door entities to avoid 'strange-lighting' bug.
In total, 178 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in February.
Monthly update for January, 2014
- Battlescape
- Optimized the routing calculation code (speedup round about 33%)
- Now misc_mission spawned particles are freed correctly
- Splash effects for weather particles
- Basic implementation fo FR #5181 (Indicators for aborted reaction fire)
- General
- Improved SDL2 fullscreen and resolution handling
- Updated icon packs and a lot of work on the UI conversion
- Translations
- Updated German translation
- Updated English translation
- Updated Polish translation
- Updated Spanish translation
- Updated Russian translation
- Updated Ukrainian translation
- Bugs
- Campaign
- Hire employees by clicking on their heads in base view
- Added radartower, ufoyard and samsite models to ufopedia
- Skirmish
- Increased maximum soldiers limit in skirmish
- Fix alien skirmish counter
- Maps
- +harbour2 (Some minor fixes in mh_a_09.map)
In total, 168 commits were made in the UFO:AI repository in January.
A lot of work was made in the UI conversion - ensure to check the latest dev build out.