News/2012
UFO:AI made the finals for Indie Game of the Year 2012
We made the top 100 games in IndieDB's Indie of the Year competition, which means we face off against the other 99 for another 10 days of voting to see who will get the top spots.
Thanks to everyone who voted for us. Please go and vote again in the final round.
We face some stiff competition this year, but a high placing in the finals will bring us lots of free publicity. So please spread the word.
Monthly update for November, 2012
November was a big month for the game's development. All the major pieces in the campaign rebalancing for 2.5 were completed and a load of new features, new items and new maps were added. If you're wondering what's coming in 2.5, head over to our forums where we've made a list of the major changes. Here's the run-down for November:
- Campaign
- New aircraft equipment: Alien Polymer Armour, Alien Electronics Warfare System
- Production and disassembly values balanced
- Soldiers now retain equipment when not assigned to a dropship
- Equip soldiers from the employee hire screen
- Battlescape
- New weight/encumbrance system
- New weapons: Bolter Antimatter Ammo, Encased Plasma Ammo
- Late-game weapons (needlers/particle beam) adjusted
- New mission briefing window
- Smoke/fire/gas fields now last longer
- Support for cameras
- Maps
- New map theme: city3
- New map Solarplant
- Several map fixes
- Android
- New version released
- GUI Revamp
- Lightmap fixes
- Added battlescape touch scrolling
In total, 309 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in November.
Longer-lasting smoke grenades
Alien Electronics Warfare Suite
Solarplant map
Indie Game of the Year
Voting has begun for the Indie Game of the Year. IndieDB's yearly contest is one of the most widely watched competitions in the indie gaming world. A good showing will bring us lots of publicity, so please go and vote for us today.
Look for the banner just below the summary on our IndieDB profile to click and vote.
UFO: AI v2.5.0.07 available for Android
Pelya again updated our Android port. V2.5.0.07 fixes a lot of the recent problems and is now available at the Google Play page. There is also an updated Android package file available on Sourceforge.
Follow us on Twitter
We're on Twitter now, so follow us for some in-development notes, images, and whatever else we feel like posting.
Project of the month @ Sourceforge
Sourceforge has nominated us alongside eight other projects to be their Project of the Month for December. If we win we'll get a prominent link on their front page.
Vote today to help us attract more interest from players and developers. And spread the word so others will vote.
(Twitter account required to vote)
Monthly update for October, 2012
- Campaign
- Added Human-Alien Hybrid RPG Rocket
- Added Hybrid Missile aircraft weapon
- Preparing UFO flight squadrons
- Work on making soldiers equippable without assigning to a dropship
- Announce finding first alien base with the eventsystem
- Balancing and research/story text fixes
- Reduce UFO spawning rate
- Balance items
- Battlescape
- Security cameras
- Show mission briefing and victory conditions on battle start
- Artwork
- Added new armour images for equip screen.
- Engine
- Allow setting open speed for doors and sliding doors on maps
- Allow destroying windows and other breakable objects with buttons, switches (trigger_touch)
- Maps
- Updated prefabs (map tile templates)
- Add new tile and assembly to +laboratory
- Updates, fixes to various maps
- Translation updates: Polish, Russian
- UI
- Show aircraft name in "Aircraft arrived to mission" popup
- Allow equip items rotated on base equipment screen
- MaxOSX fixes
In total, 401 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in October.
Screenshots
We would just like to present you some of the work that is in progess:
New UI: Aliencontainment
New UI: Baseview
New UI: Baseview with extended facility view
New UI: Campaign window
New UI: Main startup screen
New UI: Market window
New UI: Research window
Alienbase
Alienbase
Alienbase
Alienbase
Mission briefings
We've implemented the long requested mission briefing window in a first step. You get a short introduction into the mission when it starts to load. We especially had problems in the past that people didn't know what to do on the fueldump map. It wasn't obvious to the player that one has to bomb the gate to get into the building. We will add new briefings for other missions in the future. This is also a nice way to set some more story elements into scene when the player can't do anything else then waiting (and reading).
This is the mission briefing for the fueldump map
We did it!
We finally achieved a long term goal. All our data is properly licensed now. As you can see from the chart below, this represents nearly two years of work replacing old, unlicensed or poorly licensed files. We would like to thank all contributors for making this possible. The next step is to replace some files that are not approved by the Debian maintainers to get the game in the Linux distributions. We hope to get a good push in terms of users once we are available in the big distribution repositories.
Thanks again for everyone involved in this process - and keep up the good work. And as everyone loves screenshots, here are some of the newer ones for your pleasure
This is going to be the new UFO supply ship
New city random map theme, street
New city random map theme, crossing
Monthly update for September, 2012
- Campaign
- Prevent starting transfer that would overload storage, show free/all storage sizes of destination base on UI
- Fixes and adjustments on tech documentations, proposals
- Deny retry battle on automission
- Added in game help if you did not have armed a samsite
- Battlescape
- End battle if no enemy in sight for many rounds (Draw game)
- Discourage AI from standing in stun gas
- Gas fields for stun gas weapons
- Make damage dealt by hurt triggers and fire/gas fields be affected by armour
- Maps
- Added crashed Gunboat UFO to maps: +ufocrash, +africa, +ice
- Added crashed Bomber UFO to map: +ufocrash
- Added crashed Harvester UFO to map: +africa
- New tiles for +ufocrash map
- Fixes on various maps
- Translation updates: Hungarian, Polish, Spanish
- Artwork
- Tech image Combat Bloodspider
- Gunboat UFO model
- Renderer
- Use deluxemap even if normalmap is disabled
- Implement city lights if GLSL shaders are not used
In total, 157 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in September.
Fan Fiction
Monthly update for August, 2012
- Campaign
- Balancing aircraft and UFOs
- Balancing item stats
- Fixes to ranks system, salaries of high ranked soldiers
- Fixed unplayable supply missions issue
- Battlescape
- Wounds system: localized wounds (arm, torso, etc)
- Fixed some smoke and fire field related bugs
- Fixed hurt aliens die from smoke grenades
- AI
- Discourage AI (aliens, civilians) from standing in fire
- Maps
- Added new Alien Base tile: Antimatter storage
- Added new Alien base map layout
- UI
- Redone New Installation popup
- Fixes on the Mail Client window
- Translations
- Moved long text IDs out from po files
- Updated German, Polish, Spanish translations
- Code
- Sound system fixes
- Some Renderer fixes
- Couple of Mac related fixes
- Artwork
- Tech image for Alien astrogation
In total, 114 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in August.
Best Open-Source turn-based strategy game
Linux Game News chose UFO: Alien Invasion as the best open-source game in their turn-based strategy category. Linux users should check out the other winners for some good games in this under-served OS.
Repository changes
We had to switch to a new Sourceforge project structure because they don't support the classic projects anymore. This includes a change of our git repository URLs. So if you are compiling on your own and already have a clone of our repository just type the following to be able to get the latest changes again:
git config remote.origin.url git://git.code.sf.net/p/ufoai/code
Translation system/workflow
We've changed our translation system to not rely on the wiki anymore. All our texts are now in ufo script files. We are still using gettext. The only thing that changed is now, that you don't have to translate at two places anymore. You only have to translate the po file.
Earlier we were not able to say which po files were up-to-date with source text changes due to the nature of the msgids that we used in the po files (e.g. bloodspider_autopsy_txt instead the full source text). This has now changed and if we now change the source text, the translations are marked as fuzzy and you know which translations you have to review.
It's now also possible to provide different texts for mods. A mod can override a msgid with an own version of its ufo script file and is able to provide the English full text for any updated/new item in the game without the need to edit or add anything to the wiki.
The wiki itself is not yet updated for the new workflow. Expect this to be done soon.
What we now beg our translators for - please review the translations in the po files and check that they are up-to-date with the wiki. We will not sync anymore with the wiki - so everything you edit there is not in the game automatically. They will soon be set to read-only and stay there for a while for reference purposes.
Monthly update for July, 2012
- AI
- Prevent AI actors from being unable to complete their moves/shoots due to ignoring reserved TUs
- Improve the AI handling of stunned targets
- Fix visibility check in AI_SearchBestTarget
- General
- Implemented a wounds system
- Basic implementation of pilot skills
- Eclipse tools: Extended the script editor DSL
- A little speedup for the random map assembly algorithm
- Tidy up new base popup
- Rename aircraft to default name if empty name is given
- Campaign rebalancing
- UI
- Use the left hand as the last option for autoplacing items
- Renderer
- Render brush geometry in batches
- Bump possible static lights
- Maps
- +africa: Improved and extended the whole theme
- +druglord: Fixed #3548533: alien spawning in the air
- +ice: Replaced crashed Gunboat UFO by actual prefab and added some new tiles
- +construction: Fixed #3546765
- +frozen: Made available for multiplayer
- +tower: Fixed misaligned brushes
- +italy: Replaced Firebird dropship by actual prefab
- +city3: Minor improvements
- Artwork
- Research image for New Twist
- Add tech image for the Advanced Hovernets
- Bugs
- Fixed #3487929 and #3529449: Can't find crashed UFO tiles
- Fixed #3526301: Tagged models still bright when they step into the shadow
- Fixed #3547382: Assert in UP_GetUnreadMails when pilot dies
- Fixed #3541027: Segfault when base defence shots down UFO
- Fixed potential endless alien round if no action is possible for a given alien but it still have some TUs left
- Fixed the 'stuns counter out of sync' error form occurring when killing actors stunned by a different team
In total, 205 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in July.
Monthly update for June, 2012
- Campaign
- Fixed max installation/base limit handling
- Added new tip system that pops up during the campaign
- Quickfix for #3530619: Can't rename soldiers in (equip) submenu
- Fixed #3534557: Aircraft in transit returns to base on ufo crash
- Adjusted campaign balancing like aliens and techtree
- Changed the number of hours before alien interest increases from 22 to 24
- Started to implement event triggers for the campaign
- New scriptable properties for campaigns
- Always open event mail as the pop up
- Added event mail for the UFO-Carrier
- AI
- Added separate logic for panicking units
- Avoid herding behaviour for aliens
- General
- Added mumble support
- More updates for UI2
- Extended the Eclipse tool
- Fixed cutscene rendering bugs
- Added a new system to manage our msgids via ufoscripts
- Made randomspawn on by default
- Removed the max alien team limit for a mission
- Added Combat Hovernet and Combat Bloodspider
- Allow to create new races from scripts only
- Battlescape
- Don't let irgoggles destroy windows and doors
- Fixed #3536136: MaxHP is not updated
- Maps
- Add +bridge crashed scout tile
- Map +italy fixed #3532961: Impassable squares in italy map
- Map oriental fixed #3531732: Impassable square in oriental map
- Map mine fixed #3528389 and #3531879: Impassable square in mine map
- Map +city2 fixed #3531196: Iimpassable square in city highrise map
- Map small_street fixed #3531257: Impassable squares in small street map
- Map village added some cars and other stuff for additional cover
- MapEditor
- UFORadiant: fixed textool initial window size
In total, 247 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in June.
Monthly update for May, 2012
- Artwork
- new solider models (by Origin)
- Battlescape
- make it possible to hit stunned actor with direct fire weapons
- fix for #3510632: alien turn does not complete
- allow the AI to crouch also
- Campaign
- add Gunboat UFO to campaign
- add Alien Launcher, Antimatter and Hybrid missiles to the game
- start developing the Orbital UFO Activity storyline event
- fix item loss on disassembling
- fix instant transfers on changing bases
- fix #3523095: Supply UFO flies backwards
- UI engine revamp, including rewriting the spinner widget
- UI2 "the new UI" development: base and market windows
- Maps
- add some missing dropships and UFOs to +ice theme
- add crashed Scout UFO to +bridge theme
- various map fixes
- Updated translations: Greek, Hungarian
- Sounds: updated, extended
- more MODs support, with mods directory, mods switchable
- making UFO:AI tools for Eclipse developer environment
In total, 363 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in May.
New aliens arrived, updated AI and campaign work
We've three new alien races in the game now. The Hovernet, the Combat Hovernet and the Combat Bloodspider. Furthermore we fixed some bugs in the battlescape AI which should make our aliens a lot smarter. Be prepared for a new challenge.
Along with these additions, we're working to overhaul our research tree, campaign progression and game balance. This means that there will soon be changes to when you will encounter new aliens, new weapons, new UFOs and new research items. A lot is staying the same, but when we're done we hope the game will play out a lot more smoothly.
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 three 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:
We sincerely thank you for any support you provide.
Review
One of our faithful users has written a review of almost 5000 words about the 2.3.1 version. Thanks a lot Ildamos. It's a nice addition to the "Let's Play UFO: Alien Invasion" that H-Hour posted yesterday and is worth a read.
Let's Play UFO: Alien Invasion
Last month, two Youtube users created a series of Let's Play videos which show off our latest version, 2.4. We don't do a lot of promo around here, but these videos are a great way to get a taste of our gameplay.
{{#ev:youtube|kfYoSuTUbZI|500||Frontfox's Let's Play: Part 1}}
Frontfox: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Kelderan13: Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 (Part 1, which uses version 2.3)
A big thanks to Frontfox and Kelderan13 for putting these videos up!
New soldier models merged!
After much work from Origin and others, we have finally merged the new soldier models into 2.5-dev! Check out the screenshots and download our latest nightly builds.
New soldier models
New crouch animations
Normalmap and specularity support
UFORadiant 1.6 available on MacOSX
We finally assembled a dmg for our mac users. This is still the first working version without fink or macports required. If you encounter any problems with it, please let us know.
Monthly update for April, 2012
Campaign
- added notification on aircraft arrived home
- balanced weapon and armour properties
- fix landed UFO missions not detected in some cases
- fix automission ended with both sides alive
UI
- reworking UI engine using C++ classes
- Upgrade some UIs to support more than 8 soldiers
- HUD upgrades for more than 8 soldiers and more
Battlescape
- AI checks now also for clear line-of-fire before shooting.
- fixed "autoreload" items (like Stunrod) in Skirmish and MultiPlayer
Maps
- added spawnpoints for dropship tiles to support more than 8 soldiers (where needed)
- fixed door of Workshop in Phalanx base map (once more)
- other map fixes and updates
In total, 513 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in April.
Version 2.4 is here!
The UFO: Alien Invasion development team is proud to announce the release of UFO:Alien Invasion version 2.4.
With more than a dozen new maps and dramatic speed improvements behind the scenes, 2.4 is a major step forward in our quest to build a fully free and open source tactical squad shooter and earth survival strategy game.
Here are just a few of the changes in 2.4:
- A dozen new maps to battle aliens
- Rescue soldiers in dropships shot down by aliens and retreat from battles
- New particle and sound effects for weapons
- Support for smoke and incendiary effects
- New skirmish options to save squads and respawn aliens
- Battlescape render speed dramatically improved
Download UFO:AI 2.4
UFO:AI 2.4 Changelog
Monthly update for March, 2012
Campaigns
- fix automission ended when all civilians died
- implement stored UFO transfers
- fixed bug that did not remove scientists from a sold object's research
- added savegame support to simple campaign
Sound and particles
- update weapon sounds
- updated fire and smoke field particles
- updated/new musics
UI
- UI engine updates
- fix #3512190: Building preview window ignores checkbox
- rework market UI backend
Battlescape
- more work on reaction fire system
- implemented fire fields for incendiary weapons
- finished the smoke bomb implementation
Renderer
- fix lights shining on models through the walls
- lightmaps: set -soft as the default MSAA kernel
- keep the postprocessing when disabling shaders
- fix material system terrain/dirtmap bug
Map
- various minor fixes on many maps
- updates to "neighbourhood" map
- work on harbour2 map
MapEditor
- fixed part of #3500237: [UFORadiant] level up/down feature
- fixed #3508587: 'group' property of func_doors
- fixed #3502371: [UFORadiant] cannot use <Brush> tools
- implemented #3499338: [UFORadiant] 'Find Brush' tool
Other
- converted the UFO:AI project to C++
Updated translations: Bulgarian, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian, German
In total, 434 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in March.
Debian packages
You can find updated debian/ubuntu/mint packages for i386 and x86_64 in our download section. Please report any problems to the proper topic in our forum.
Prepare for 2.4
We have begun preparing the release of UFO: Alien Invasion version 2.4 and we could use your help.
Please download the latest release candidate installer for Windows or Linux .deb packages for i386 or amd64 so you can help with testing, reporting bugs or making sure closed bug tickets are not still causing problems. Check the language files and send updates for confusing or inaccurate text.
We also have 18 unknown licensed files in our repository we hope to replace. If you can help us replace these files it would mark a major step forward in our quest to be fully FOSS-compatible.
View the changelog for a list of 2.4's new features and content.
Working progress to remove non free resources.
New city2 map
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3 (night version)
Official webpage address change
Finally UFO: Alien Invasion got a own domain.
We migrated the project web page to http://ufoai.org
There is no need to change the old links you posted in our forum and on other web pages, old address are still working and are redirected to correct site.
We hope the new address will be easiest to remember.
Cheers
Monthly update for February, 2012
- UI
- updated the UFOPedia
- updated alien containment window
- updated research window
- implement baseattack team setup
- battlescape Inventory now shows rank and name of the selected soldier (campaign mode only)
- Shaders
- AMD card issue fixes
- new low quality world shader
- closer to OpenGL 3.0 compliance
- Maps
- new map +beach RMA
- new map neighbourhood
- updated +harbour2 RMA
- updated +forest RMA
- updated +mansion RMA
- two new tiles for +ufocrash RMA
- fixed +country RMA #3484719
- Mapeditor
- added "skip-common" feature for replacing textures
- kitchen prefab
- fixed missing font problems
- fixed compilation for more recent versions of GTK+2.0
- fixed #3476940 (UFORadiant Clipper-tool feature)
- added cut option
- General
- updated some translations
- more realistic walk animations for the bloodspider
- added save support to static campaign save game support
- reaction fire fixes and tweaks
- tuned needlers gun
- fixed forgotten team after skirmish retry
- replaced unknown licensed media - now only a few models are left
- prevent story related missions to be done via automission
- reduced memory usage
- applied patch #3485108 (Add a power ability training formula)
- applied patch #3485779 (add bunch of western european and nordic names)
- new map models
- Bugfixes
+beach
neighbourhood
+harbour2
In total, 266 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in February.
Monthly update for January, 2012
- Campaign
- Right-clicking on alien in containment will now open UFOpaedia entry when alien is not yet researched
- Tweaked the amount of UFOs in a campaign
- Fixed bug #3285423 - ESC key on victory screen results in no UFO recovery
- Make missiles miss when aircraft landed
- Unified geoscape camera control (keys and mouse now both move the camera, not the globe)
- Prevent installing base defence weapons before buildings fully built up
- Updated overall base window
- Renderer
- Fixed bug #3420462 - fixed animation issues
- Fixed bug #3288569 - model animation flickers between deadX and deathX animation
- Updated OpenGL lighting code
- Updated rescue zone rendering
- Disable shaders on Intel graphics hardware
- Updated textures and normalmaps
- Replaced MAX_GL_TEXTURES limit with dynamically-allocated r_images array
- UFORadiant
- Maps
- mansion
- Fixed RMA problems with forest large
- Code
- Added static campaign
- Make several maps available in skirmish mode
- Touchscreen drag&drop-like scroll for optiontrees, optionlists, text fields and text lists
- Artwork
- Fixed the scaling on the pilot helmet
- Replacements for bullet-pistol, bullet-pistol2 and bullet-sniper weapon soundfx
- Recompressed all textures
- Updated MiniHud
- Translations
- Updated some translations
In total, 251 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in January.
Monthly update for December, 2011
- Artwork
- replaced last unlicensed textures
- some new textures and normalmaps
- Battlescape
- start developing a new Reaction-Fire system
- new Rescue Zone marker
- Campaign
- added Transferlist popup window
- fixed Speed ability experience gain
- HUD
- discontinued HHUD was removed
- more work on miniHUD
- some updates other (default, alt) HUDs
- new callbacks to cycle through soldiers and enemy backwards (only used on miniHUD yet)
- Maps
- added missing rescue zones
- fixed several assemblies
- other minor fixes
- Translations
- show Languages with native names
- list every language the game supports
- allow using languages not detected to be supported by the system
In total, 202 commits were made in UFO:AI repository in December.