floors and falling

Well, I've successfully coded some routines so that every time a unit moves forward, a check is made to see if the ground it's standing on is strong enough to support it. If they step onto a weak tile, (for example, say something has been damaged by an explosion, or the unit is a 4-ton tank and it's driving inside of a house) it will break through the floor and fall down. It will keep falling until it hits something that can support it, (or until it reaches the bottom z-level) No damage is currently done, but it does keep track of the distance that the unit fell. I'll likely institute falling damage, based on some preset 'free' bit of cushion based on whatever a unit's species/training may be, how much weight they're carrying, how far they've fallen, and perhaps how many spare TUs they have when they've hit the ground.

Next I'll need to write some sort of recursive function, perhaps, to check if every floor tile is being supported by something strong enough. I'd like to incorporate the aspects of X-Com Apocalypse that I found nice; and one of those was a destructible city. I want a high-explosive round to be able to topple a 3 story house. (though, the residents wouldn't like it that much and would likely demand compensation)

I'd like to make this game a bit more dynamic than X-Com was. Things I plan to include:

being able to jump various distances.
being able to climb over various things.

I've returned

I'm back! I'd hoped to have remained active during the last semester, but I turned out to be more busy that I expected.

Anyway, I've been coding a bit over the last few days and I've now got working stairs. It took me a while to write the framework for ascending/descending stairs, because I wanted it to be robust. How it is now, I can later add ladders, ropes, fences, and even tree climbing; with little extra code.

The skyranger now has two levels and you have to go down the stairs to exit. Next I need to make it so that if your agent walks into 'air', he/she will fall until hitting something solid.

summer class

I promise that I'm still around. I'm taking two classes right now during a condensed 7 week session, and I've currently been working on some ML 97 homework for almost the last 24 hours straight. I haven't abandoned my rogue-like at all, I've just been busy.

Musings about wounds/health/damage

So, after reading a thread on r.g.r.d in which people were talking about hit points, regeneration and healing spells, I've made a tentative decision. in X-Com, before you get the best armor, the game tends to be very brutal in that many agents will be killed with a single shot. I want the game to be gritty and brutal, but this is relatively unacceptable.
I think what I'll do is make weapons do less direct-to-HP damage, while doing more 'fatal wound' damage. Also, units will have a certain amount of regeneration, something relatively small, like 2 or 3 HP per turn (not move, but 'end-of-turn,' which would be counteracted by their fatal wounds... so, 10 fatal wounds would be -10 hp each turn, while the regen would be +3, so they would lose 7 HP each round. Healing via medi-kits would take 'longer', costing more TUs; though I'll allow for agents to (if they are reasonably conscious) use medi-kits on themselves. Basically, in X-com, early in the game, you either have to play it incredibly cautious, get lucky, save-scum, or just buy new agents to replace the dead.
I really want the game to remain dangerous, but at a level that fits better in the rogue-like world. I want for units to get injured, have it be scary, have to be dragged out of the line-of-fire, and I want for other units to haver to come to their rescue. I don't want them to be expendable. But, this is just me.

Also, before I go to be tonight, I hope to have the bugs ironed out of loading weapons; then I'll be able to move on to non-inventory stuff.

UPDATE: It looks like I have a working 'load', which is just an extension of 'move', where if you're moving ammo and it matches a wielded weapon that isn't already loaded, it gives you that option (in addition to others) as a place to put it. I'm sure that as I progress, I'll find more glitches as I just found and eliminated a few move glitches that I previously overlooked. For example, a particularly nasty one that only happened if you were moving things from certain compartments to others; an errant 'break' command was causing a for loop to remove everything in the linked list. Not very fun. I'm not even sure why I used break. I guess that's what happens when I code at 6am. Now, I might eventually combing move, drop, and get into one command, but for now I won't worry about it.

End of the semester inventory

Well, my semester is over and I've got about a week and a half until I start my next one. I've been coding a bit today and managed to iron out the bugs associated with unloading a weapon. The only other inventory bit that I need to tackle right now, other than some various visual things, is loading weapons. But, it's 6am and I should go to sleep, so I'll have to fuss with this later today.

Inventory!

Well, my semester is almost over. I've turned in all of my projects and all that's left is exams. As far as this project goes, I've been fussing with inventory commands and such. Agents can now properly move items from one spot on their person to another, which properly costs TUs and such.They can pick things up off of the ground, drop them to the ground. The only thing missing is the ability to load/unload ammo from a weapon. It won't take me long to include this, just saying where I'm at.
The inventory screen functions are kind of neat, because depending on which command you're using, and which item you've selected, it actually shows you where you can and can't put the item, related to how much space is free and how many TUs you have. You can still try to put it in invalid spots, but it will just say that it can't. I'm doing this, partly, because it's not graphical, so you can't see at-a-glance where things will fit. It's also very modular, with the names of the compartments and ordering of the compartments being defined by the species.
This means that an alien soldier could have the same amount of personal spots to carry things as an X-Com soldier, while an alien engineer might only have its hands and pockets, or an 8-armed alien could theoretically weild 8 weapons. I think the only bit I need to change for loading/unloading, is to have something that defines which 'compartments' are effectively hands. Because it doesn't make sense to unload a weapon that's in a backpack, when your hands are full.
As I was doing this stuff, I realized that I've been lax about having functions declare what is happening, such as, "Unable to move: Not enough TUs" So I'll try to do as much of that as I can. I also had an idea, such that opening and closing doors would open every '+' that is adjacent to the one you opened, which would allow for those double-doors and even wider ones, like what you'd find on a garage/carport. (perhaps doors wider than 2 '+' would take longer to open/cost more TU)
I've started poking around with recursive ways to generate levels. One I'm working with right now should break it down into smaller and smaller rectangles of various sizes, which will be expanded to allow for non-rectangular shapes. I've also got a few articles about recursive level generation to read.

Quick question to anyone that deals with Java. Is there any sort of built-in way to sort a linked list? I know that you can sort a 'plain' List object, but I can't seem to figure out how to do it with a LL. I might just do a manual sort that runs every time something is added to the LL, but I was hoping for there to already be a framework for it. Oh well.

We have Doors; we also have scrolling!

Ahh, so I slogged through some more code last night. The first thing I did was, using enumerators, allowed for the methods that get game objects' symbols to vary. For example, in this screen shot, the X symbol is the currently selected unit. (The 'R' is a stack of weapons with R (rifle) being the largest in the stack. The X is being returned in this way because I've chosen "getRepChar(AnAgent.RepEnum.SELECTED) or something. This might not seem all fancy and stuff, but it will only take a few lines of code to implement different toggles. For example, a toggle that would switch the terrain display from its normal symbols to perhaps, # or . , depending on whether it blocks walking, etc. Or perhaps, I want to toggle so that each unit is represented by a single digit number corresponding to their health. Basically, this should make it easier to take in large amounts of important data all at once.

Also, we have doors. They open. They close. They cost TUs!!!

And, I was dreading it, but I knew it had to be done. I finally wrote the code that allows for a view-port to scroll around the environment. In the demo picture, the view-port is maybe 10 rows by 20 columns; where the world is 50 *50. The scrolling works perfectly and without bugs, at least as far as I can tell. Also, I wrote a nice little method that attempts to center the view-port on any location, and if you give it a location that would cause it to run off the screen, it fixes that location. This means that when you cycle through your agents now, the screen tries to center on them; and when your guy walks around, the screen follows.

I'll do some more coding today, but I won't be able to code any more until I finish an assembly project that's due on monday for my operating systems class. We're modifying the boot sector of a floppy disk to (at the very least) write a "hello world." bootable OS. Though, most things beyond 'Hello world' will actually score us some extra credit.

Here is a list of things I would like to accomplish before I release my first super-shitty alpha version.

*Stairs!! We need them!
*reformat the HUD so it's actually usable
*allow for easy adjustment of the font size
*Finish implementing the equipment screen
*we need to be able to shoot at things!
*example soldiers should probably (for now) be created already-equipped
*finish random ship placement (basically, I just need to write a method that randomly checks for an arbitrary size/shape of empty tiles to place a ship/house/sidewalk, whatever
*make sure that '?' shows which commands can be used.
*Something to shoot at!! (and something that shoots back?)