Hi.
So here's my story ...
Once upon a time, I was a great fan of the original UFO. Years passed by, and when I remembered about those old times and wanted to have them back, I had found that the Dosbox experience wasn't exactly appealing. So I crawled the net to find some alternative for Linux. Not successful at the first try, I hadn't forgotten about my mission, and eventually, after a few more years, I have found this aspiring UFO:AI project.
Amazed by that, I had started the Czech translation - big thanks to all followers, although the current state is far from complete.
Coincidentally, I became involved in Livna repository for Fedora, now RPMFusion, so I had also packaged ufo-ai for it and maintained the package for a few years. Then I got buried in stuff I did for living and also in family matters, and I had left that to rot.
Some more years passed, I'm slowly overcoming the worklife crisis, and I'm looking around to continue with my opensource activities. Looking at the progress here was one of the first things, and I was amazed, this turned to pretty playable thing - to be honest, although I spent lots of hours on the abovementioned jobs, I've only played the game for tenths of minutes as it felt too uncooked to me.
I was eager to give it a shot to try to package this for Fedora (and I mean Fedora proper, not some stupid Copr repo; nor RPMFusion as the code is now "clean"). But as I've already managed to run it on my system, I wanted to try the gameplay, possibly finishing the campaign at first.
Of course it didn't take long until I've found about the good ole inabilty to save during combat. I remembered that was one of the things why I considered the game uncooked those years ago, but now I have found it is a design decision.
A design decision which became more and more annoying, especially when I got my base attacked three times a row - a scenario where you cannot use automission, and where it takes lots of turns, i.e. lots of real time, to chase down one or two deadly beasts that hide off the cameras. Add to that I'm not much interested in combat but rather in advancing the storyline ... (Yes, it's kinda fun, but it becomes tedious when it keeps you from new research, and your storage is filing with UFOs faster than four workshops manage to dissassemble. - Even in the original Enemy Unkown I tried to shoot down UFOs over the sea to avoid combat/penalty for ignoring downed UFO.)
Today in the morning, I've discovered an alien base. So I've packed the fresh new Hercules and sent a dozen of soldiers on a raid. After about half or three quarters of an hour (which I have miraculously survived with only a few needle hits and one soldier bleeding while killing four aliens) I have had to deal with kids and other family issues. Lucky me that I didn't have to turn the machine off, and when our dishwasher decided to blow the residual current circuit breaker while we were out, I was even luckier to have the machine on unprotected and thus still live branch. So I could happily continue cleaning the alien base in the evening in two hours before going to bed. But instead, I'm spending the second hour by writing this. Just because after the first hour (and killing another four aliens with only half the squad injured), at the end of the alien turn, the game decided to enter an endless loop.
No, I'm not going to reload the game before the raid and spend another one or two hours just to get into position where I already had been (and maybe with some elite soldiers lost).
Congratulations core developers, you've just lost another player. But not only that -
your endless arrogance has costed you another contributor. For sure I'm not going to work on the Fedora package as I've planned, neither continue with translations or anything.
And in case someone doesn't understand what arrogance I'm talking about, here's one example:
The FAQ leads to "Saving game & replacing units" forum topic. And there you can read:
"We do not deny anything. We are just not going to neither code that nor include any patch regarding this into official release."
(
https://ufoai.org/forum/index.php/topic,937.msg9287.html#msg9287 )
This statement contradicts itself, as the developer says they're are going to deny contributed patch but they're not denying anything, eh?
This simple quotation would be enough to show how the users are treated as idiots, however it goes further - from forum 'rules', there's a link to 3 Taboos (
https://ufoai.org/wiki/3_Taboos ) where there is:
"Interestingly, nobody ever came up with a mod/patch that implements these saves."
Now the question is, who would bother to send a patch when the devs clearly stated that they would NOT include that patch, and are very vocal about the issue? - That sentence is a spit into the eye!
The developers mouths are full of cheating and that no one should have a real life in which he cannot afford to spend hours in a row on a combat mission. (An hour? - That's even bigger idiot who cannot play fast! ... hm, but in default settings, it takes tenths of seconds just to hear all the alien steps, and advancing your fresh recruits only a few squares per turn to keep them covered as they are too slow to reach farther position also takes time.) But the developers are sooo selfimportant that they even can't admit that they can make some stupid error like the abovementioned endless loop and players would rightfully like to be protected from such error!
