X@COM

Here are some screenshots , as promised. Not much in the way of a complete map, but putting just this together was already slow going without an editor (I'll make one eventually, so long as this game starts to look promising).

There's an Avenger dropship in the SE corner, some streetlights along a road, a two-story house, and beyond that a raised grassy area topped with trees. A small UFO lies in the NW corner. These shots show the map entirely revealed.

This is the bottom level:

Here is the map viewed from the second level. Areas below the current view height have a very slight blue tint to them, and appear a little darker. (This will be adjusted later as necessary.) You can now see the Avenger's hull, the house's second floor, the raised area in the NE corner, the UFO roof, and tree branches for the bottom level trees:

This is the third level, which only has the tops of the streetlights (from where their light is emitted), Avenger and house roofs, and NE trees branches:

No reason to show the empty fourth level, instead here's the same map at midnight (bottom level):
These brave (stupid?) soldiers have now split up--one's searching the house while the other heads for the UFO alone...

...Hopefully not to be followed by baby steps.

I'm starting development with the battlescape, primarily because its design is potentially problematic so it's the best place to start in order to determine the feasibility of this project. (By comparison, the geoscape should be relatively easy to represent in ASCII.)

Progress during the first week of development:

• Expanded personal game library (which has only been used for basic 2D applications in the past) to include 3D LOS/FOV functions, a 3D pathfinding class, more 3D matrix methods, a handle manager template, and a generic logging system.
• Defined all major game flow handling classes/modules
• Defined all major data classes (Cell/Prop/Entity/Item)
• All data objects loaded from files
• Can load a rudimentary static battlescape map, with objects, from a text file
• Map props can be static light sources; entities/items can be dynamic light sources
• Visibility, and map shading, dependent on time of day setting
• Can control members of a test faction, walking or flying around the map, which is revealed as per FOV rules
• Can activate side-view map to see a vertical cross section of a unit's LOS
• Implemented randomized unit stats, and TU costs of moving/changing facing 
• Moving units will correctly climb/descend sloped terrain/stairs (fortunately they no longer leap off buildings unless capable of flying) and open doors
• The entire game state can be saved/loaded at any time

Next up: Firing your gun at stuff. This could take a while longer, because I'll be trying out some new methods I haven't used before...

Screenshots will come soon, after I make the tiny test level a bit prettier--right now it's pretty random...

I just recently began work on a new project, an X-COM-based Roguelike, and decided to create a blog to post updates and seek comments/advice.

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