gbadev.org

[ethoscapade]

looks like you'll have to tighten up the UI a tiny tiny bit.

[DrDerekDoctors]

I suppose you have two options, but both of them will mean making the buttons a smidge small and compromising certain bits a tad.

http://www.drderekdoctors.com/xcom_shrunk.png

There's a couple of mocks above the original one.

[blue_knight]

I already solved it on my end, I left the buttons alone, shifted the whole thing to the left. Then I resized the weapon window slightly - the original weapon art should still fit. At the bottom there will be 2 small buttons: L/R for either hand so you can select which weapon hand you are looking at. I'll just default it to the hand with the primary weapon - alot of weapons are two handed and even when they are not the primary weapon is used most of the time. So you'll rarely have to switch to use grenades or other off-hand equipment. The resizing of the weapon window is done in the program after loading it so the original data is still used.

Thanks for the suggestions and mockups though, I appreciate the effort :)

I'll post a screenshot later.

[blue_knight]

Here are some screenshots of the tweaked UI. I'm still working on getting the agents/aliens working so I haven't quite finished it yet - I'm still going to add the L/R buttons at the bottom of the weapon window and of course all the agent stats once they're done.

[Images not permitted - Click here to view it][Images not permitted - Click here to view it]

[Mrshlee]

Excellent work.. I've been watching this project for awhile but sadly couldn't be much help.
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[needlesmcgirk]

Holy crap this is so amazing! Good freaking work on this! I can't wait to play X-com on my DS. Keep the updates coming and again excellent work!

[Reppa]

Blue Knight you do a really great job, i'm so excitting by testing a version when you release it :D

[LoTekK]

This certainly puts a smile on my face. :D X-Com proper on the DS would be fantastic, especially since the interface would transfer over quite nicely for the most part.

I'm working on an XCom-style game myself, though I'll be going the FF Tactics route and using 3D for the terrain and environment, and sprites for the characters. Though to be fair, I haven't really started looking for a programmer yet, mainly focusing on the art assets and game mechanics design for now.

Definitely looking forward to seeing this project progress. :)

Shtroodle, Reppa's right, XCom works in dosbox, and there's also a win95 version that runs in XP with a patch (get it from Home of the Underdogs).

[thebawp]

Love, love, love X-Com, it is probably one of my all time favourite games. To see and play it on the DS would be amazing. If you need anyone to beta test, sign me up, my programming knowledge is zilch, but I'd love to help in whatever way possible.

[blue_knight]

Another Update:
I just recently finished the entity rendering system. The problem I ran into is that many entities in XCom (all the agents and many of the aliens) are made up of many individual sprites including individual arms, legs, several torso varieties, etc. Then there is a version of each of these for each of 8 directions and for many frames of animation for each of those directions. Obviously this can yield 100's of individual sprites just for xcom agents (for one set of armor) not couting having to store multiple types of aliens, civilians, etc. Now in the original RLE-like format this is only a couple of kilobytes of data but stored as individual sprites it takes up considerably more [even using my current atlasing system]...

So I wrote another system where the RLE-like image data is stored in memory and when entities need to be updated they are rasterized (by the CPU) into a VRAM cache (part of an atlas texture) which is used to render the sprites as single quads in the proper rendering order. Since I store enough space in the cache for all the sprites in the level, I only need to rasterize the current moving sprite and update that small part of the texture on any frame which has very little effect on the framerate.

At any rate this system will handle all the entities: agents, aliens, civilians, etc. So now that is out of the way and I've started working on the gameplay: selecting agents, turning them, crouching, etc. Soon I should have them running around fighting aliens :)

[Images not permitted - Click here to view it][Images not permitted - Click here to view it][Images not permitted - Click here to view it]

[needlesmcgirk]

I'm getting very excited about this. I can't wait to play this game again! I would love to help beta test this when you're ready to release this.

[tepples]

Wasn't X.com a net-bank that got bought out by PayPal (which in turn got bought out by eBay)?
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[blue_knight]

Lately I've been working on tasks such as fonts, strings and other UI stuff. In addition the quad renderer now supports color tinting (used already to change font color) which will be used for fog of war and lighting. In addition all the agents have their proper stats and names in the mission. When you select an agent you get most of the UI readout as shown in the screenshots. Now I'm working on movement (agents, aliens and civilians). You can already crouch and change facing, I'm working on the actual movement across the map.

[Images not permitted - Click here to view it][Images not permitted - Click here to view it]

[Reppa]

Latest screenshoot are really good, gfx are terrible :D

[jester]

Xcom what type of game is this? e.g. Sport
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