[DancingWithNinjas]

First of all, hiya, this is my first post!

Now to get on to some more serious business, I've had this game concept in my head for a while, and was wondering if MZX would be the ideal platform for it.
Essentially, I would like to create a roguelike X-COM clone, with a few minor twists here and there,
and at first glance, MZX seems like a pretty good environment to do it in,
or at least prototype a game if not anything else.

Now, there's a few thing I'd like to know:
Does MZX have support for, or already implemented LOS?
Is it possible to superimpose a Board on top of another board, to simulate height, a-la Dwarf Fortress?
The possibility for randomization in board layout?
Embed game logic inside robots?
Some examples of the above in a game, so i could take a look at them?

I've only taken a glance at MZX, although i played a lot of ZZT in my days (And still can't believe there isn't a "Burglar!" clone), and I'm currently looking up if any of those features is able to be recreated, so sorry if i missed something completely obvious
I'd also be thankful if any of you could point me in the right direction for some tutorials, if there are any availible.

[Dr Lancer-X]

You can do all those things in MZX, although with varying levels of difficulty.

I've worked on things with line-of-sight engines although I can't think of anything in a game immediately.

Ruin Diver 3 (it's in the Vault) has random levels and there's other things with that too.

Don't know what you mean by 'Embed game logic inside robots?'. That will need clarification.

There's some tutorials and things on the wiki.

EDIT: Actually, I thought of something that uses line of sight (well, field of view) - my Ultima 4 rendition has one of those. Probably isn't the sort of thing that's exactly useful to you, but anyway.


The thing is that pretty much anything that MZX's display can represent can be implemented; it's just a matter of coding it and figuring out a way to do so efficiently. I advise playing a lot of MZX games just to get an understanding of what MZX is capable of.

[Lachesis]

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Does MZX have support for, or already implemented LOS?

What Lancer said, and also this could probably be used for something like that

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Is it possible to superimpose a Board on top of another board, to simulate height, a-la Dwarf Fortress?

You can limit scrolling (lockscroll, and then manually scrollview position when you need to) and store other height levels on self-imposed subdivisions of the board, or store height levels on the vlayer and copy them to the board as needed, if char and color are the only things that your game cares about (if you're using the default player, this likely won't work).

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The possibility for randomization in board layout?

See: Ruin Diver 3; the game that won the Summer 2010 Day of Zeux (oh wait, you can't, it's not in the archive :|); Wervyn's entry in the Winter 2010 Day of Zeux; uhhhh I'm sure there were some others

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Embed game logic inside robots?

You can program just about anything you want in MZX robots, so while I'm not sure what you mean here, I'm sure it can be done or emulated in Robotic.

[CJA]

Castaway has everything you're asking about-- LOS, randomly generated terrain, but it's hella complicated. Unfortunately, MZX has very few tutorials that anyone has been shown to pay attention to.

By "embed game logic in robots," that's sort of mandatory. You have to have code either in a Robot on the same board, or in the invisible omnipresent global Robot. There is no builtin support for layering Boards; but you can have many areas and just put them in sprites and put the sprites on top of each other, I guess.

[Risu2112]

Here's another short game with some procedurally generated content, as well as some other nice touches that might be useful for some one developing an x-com TBS or RTS style game.

http://www.digitalmz...showtopic=14777

In answer to your board superimposing question, no. However you could easily simulate this by dividing your active board into different levels and moving between them for example.

[DancingWithNinjas]

All right, I'll get back to you guys about how this will turn out, after looking at the stuff you've provided me.

My main concept will be to try to make this somewhat hotseat multiplayer-ish, where two (or more) players will be pitted against each other, x-com style.
LOS will be additionally tricky, since I'm going to have atleast two teams, with team-members sharing LOS information, and not having the other teams LOS showing while the first team is active and vice-versa.

I'll get back to ya guys in a few days