OpenXCom: From the Ashes 
This is a fork of OpenXcom project - an open-source clone of the popular "UFO: Enemy Unknown" ("X-COM: UFO Defense" in the USA release) and "X-COM: Terror From the Deep" videogames by Microprose, that requires the original files to run, licensed under the GPL and written in C++ / SDL. It was founded by Finnik in June 2019.
Current fork of the game engine inherits all features from OXC and OXCE ongoing development and provides several exclusive game mechanics. See project's wiki for more details.
Table of Contents
Copyright
All rights for the original game and its resources belong to their respective owners. We do not encourage and do not support any form of illegal usage of the original game. We strongly advise to purchase the original game on GOG or other platforms. Pirate ISOs are not supported and will cause issues such as crashes and map problems with OpenXcom FTA.
Overview and Features
The X-Com initiative failed, with alien agents infiltrating the ranks of the governments of most major powers. The agency's base is in poor condition due to lack of funding. Most of the personnel were dismissed or killed. To win, the player will have to revive X-Com literally from the ashes ...
The mod adding new content, missions and mechanics. Its expand the gaming experience while maintaining the original setting and spirit of the game. Here some features:
- The game has an alternative start.
- Loyalty system of your troops and stuff.For instance, mission results, events, and research affect it every time, but the alien activity count only it was detected.
- Custom Geoscape dialogue system that will spawn events depending on the player's choice.
- Faction Diplomacy. It represents dynamic factions for the player to interact that replace the Council of Funding Nations and its Countries.
- Factions live their own life with custom geoscape AI system - they have resources, like funds, power and vigilance, as well as stash of items a personnel, and they manage those resources to keep growing and balance things.
- Geoscape Events and Covert Operations can affect reputation scores directly.
- There can be hidden factions and can be discovered for diplomacy.
- Negotiations system with full dialogue to interact with faction.
- Interfaction relations. When the player rises reputation score with one faction, another goes down.
- ...
- A covert operations system. The operation can be launched from each base and can involve soldiers, scientists, and engineers.
- Once operation launched, some events can occur in its process, and once finished operation the game would decide its results.
- All covert operations can end with success, failure, or critical failure.
- Each covert operation can have its own geoscape entities to be added to the game on success or failure - score, funds, research, faction reputation, items, spawn events, and alien missions.
- It can even push the battlescape game with defined alien deployment!
- BattleScripts a special command that is processing in the battlescape layer after the end of each player's turn.
- New handy animated cutscene system.
- The game now process ongoing researchers not every day, but every hour.
- Hide alien base from every vanilla way to discover alien bases, but not for special ways introduced in FtA
- ...
FAQ
Q: At what stage is the development of the game?
the mod is in pre-alpha stage.
Q: Where can I join the community and chat or participate in development?
join to our Discord channel where you can find more then 180 fans. (Its can be opened in browser and does not require registration)
Q: How and where can I translate the game into my language?
we must achieve the implementation of most ideas and mechanics after which it will be possible to start translating into languages
Q: I am an artist, how can I help the project?
join to our Discord channel and we will discuss specifically your case
Q: I can help the development if I test the game, where can I post bug reports?
You can post bugreports here
Q: I have some great ideas where can I share them?
join to our Discord channel (Its can be opened in browser and does not require registration)
Installation
OpenXcom requires a vanilla copy of the X-COM resources -- from either or both of the original games. If you own the games on Steam, the Windows installer will automatically detect it and copy the resources over for you.
If you want to copy things over manually, you can find the Steam game folders at:
UFO: "Steam\SteamApps\common\XCom UFO Defense\XCOM"
TFTD: "Steam\SteamApps\common\X-COM Terror from the Deep\TFD"Do not use modded versions (e.g. with XcomUtil) as they may cause bugs and crashes. Copy the UFO subfolders to the UFO subdirectory in OpenXcom's data or user folder and/or the TFTD subfolders to the TFTD subdirectory in OpenXcom's data or user folder (see below for folder locations).
Mods
Current engine version is designed to be used together with X-COM: From the Ashes
mod. Still, currently it is fully compatible
with all OXC an OXCE mods, and does not have any game breaking changes. If you
face any bug with mod, please, let us know with created issue in this repository.
All major changes in this code, compared to OpenXcom or OpenXcom Extended are
locked behind ftaGame property (see project's wiki for more info.)
Directory Locations
OpenXcom has three directory locations that it searches for user and game files:
| Folder Type | Folder Contents |
|---|---|
| user | mods, savegames, screenshots |
| config | game configuration |
| data | UFO and TFTD data files, standard mods, common resources |
Each of these default to different paths on different operating systems (shown below). For the user and config directories, OpenXcom will search a list of directories and use the first one that already exists. If none exist, it will create a directory and use that. When searching for files in the data directory, OpenXcom will search through all of the named directories, so some files can be installed in one directory and others in another. This gives you some flexibility in case you can't copy UFO or TFTD resource files to some system locations. You can also specify your own path for each of these by passing a commandline argument when running OpenXcom. For example:
openxcom -data "$HOME/bin/OpenXcom/usr/share/openxcom"or, if you have a fully self-contained installation:
openxcom -data "$HOME/games/openxcom/data" -user "$HOME/games/openxcom/user" -config "$HOME/games/openxcom/config"Windows
User and Config folder:
- C:\Documents and Settings\\<user>\My Documents\OpenXcom (Windows 2000/XP)
- C:\Users\\<user>\Documents\OpenXcom (Windows Vista/7)
- \<game directory>\user
- .\user
Data folders:
- C:\Documents and Settings\\<user>\My Documents\OpenXcom\data (Windows 2000/XP)
- C:\Users\\<user>\Documents\OpenXcom\data (Windows Vista/7/8)
- \<game directory>
- . (the current directory)
Mac OS X
User and Config folder:
- $XDG_DATA_HOME/openxcom (if $XDG_DATA_HOME is defined)
- $HOME/Library/Application Support/OpenXcom
- $HOME/.openxcom
- ./user
Data folders:
- $XDG_DATA_HOME/openxcom (if $XDG_DATA_HOME is defined)
- $HOME/Library/Application Support/OpenXcom (if $XDG_DATA_HOME is not defined)
- $XDG_DATA_DIRS/openxcom (for each directory in $XDG_DATA_DIRS if $XDG_DATA_DIRS is defined)
- /Users/Shared/OpenXcom
- . (the current directory)
Linux
User folder:
- $XDG_DATA_HOME/openxcom (if $XDG_DATA_HOME is defined)
- $HOME/.local/share/openxcom (if $XDG_DATA_HOME is not defined)
- $HOME/.openxcom
- ./user
Config folder:
- $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/openxcom (if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined)
- $HOME/.config/openxcom (if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not defined)
Data folders:
- $XDG_DATA_HOME/openxcom (if $XDG_DATA_HOME is defined)
- $HOME/.local/share/openxcom (if $XDG_DATA_HOME is not defined)
- $XDG_DATA_DIRS/openxcom (for each directory in $XDG_DATA_DIRS if $XDG_DATA_DIRS is defined)
- /usr/local/share/openxcom
- /usr/share/openxcom
- . (the current directory)
Configuration
OpenXcom has a variety of game settings and extras that can be customized, both in-game and out-game. These options are global and affect any old or new savegame.
For more details please check the wiki.
Development
OpenXcom requires the following developer libraries:
- SDL (libsdl1.2)
- SDL_mixer (libsdl-mixer1.2)
- SDL_gfx (libsdl-gfx1.2), version 2.0.22 or later
- SDL_image (libsdl-image1.2)
- yaml-cpp, version 0.5.3 or later
The source code includes files for the following build tools:
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 or newer
- Xcode
- Make (see Makefile.simple)
- CMake
It's also been tested on a variety of other tools on Windows/Mac/Linux. More detailed compiling instructions are available at the wiki, along with pre-compiled dependency packages.