Thread: Open source X-Com?

A friend sent me this link earlier. It's an open-source remake of X-Com with enhanced graphics, and a lot of extras. Each of your soldiers have stats and there's a multitude of weapon types (sniper rifles, flame throwers, shotguns, grenade launchers, you name it).

http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/News

There's also a multi-player X-com remake at:

http://ufotts.ninex.info/

I haven't tried that one out yet.

I had 2 Issues with this when I was tracking its development for the past few years:

1. It's built on the Quake 2 engine, so that means no destructible environment (I'm not talking about Frost either). The original X-Com was completely tilebased, with layers of tiles and so forth. Each tile was destructable. Which meant you could do things like breach a wall for insertion, shoot the gas station for giant explosions, cause fire damage to aliens, etc. UFO:AI does not have this and most likely never will. The closest clone to replicate this kind of destruction was the Russian-made UFO: Extraterrestrials.

2. It's a fairly debatable point, but at some point the developers of UFO:AI felt that it was too much "cheating" by being able to save and reload from the start of your turn in battlescape, so they nixed that feature. You can only save outside of Battlescape now. Which to me was a stupid decision to make, since the whole original point of being able to do that was, well, if you wanted to "cheat" you had to spend a lot more time to keep making the coputer "reroll the dice" during a hard battle, or just take the casualties and move on. It was totally up to the player. UFO:AI should have instead made it an option via a difficulty setting (like starting at 2-3 battlescape save slots at easy, and 0 at hard).