level generation progress, finally!

I've been putting off the level generator for a long time. Every now and then I'd pick it up, get discouraged and push it aside for awhile. But it's been constantly bothering me because if I never get it done, I'll never be able to release anything and I know that I'm a bit overdue for a release now. It's still quite a way off, but now it's one step closer as I think I've almost got something I might be satisfied with.

I started off generating a few intersecting rectangles and creating a grid based on that:

 

After some more splitting, I started to combine rooms. Hallways will always combine as long as they are connected on a short side. Larger rooms combine if they can form a room under a certain size. I came up with something like this:

Still not good enough, so I added some more random variation...

It was starting to look pretty good, so I added doors!

It's still not complete. I need to work on the door placement and then I need to integrate it with the actual game map, but I think I'm done with the hard part at least.

I know I haven't released anything in a very long time (that's what rewrites do, sorry), but don't give up hope. I am constantly working, and tons of other stuff has been worked on that I haven't posted about. I'm just trying to do things right this time around and school is also getting in the way.

vision modes

I just spent a little while implementing some visual effects for night vision and thermal vision. Right now they only affect coloring and sight radius, but obviously I'll need to give them some in-game advantages and disadvantages. I'm thinking the thermal will allow you to see any hidden enemies within LOS, but at a reduced distance. Conversely, nightvision will increase your sight range, while only giving a small bonus to spotting hidden enemies. Those are just my thoughts. If you have a better idea, let me hear it.

dual wielding, interface improvements

Today and yesterday I worked on adding dual weapon wielding. Now you can hold any weapon in either hand, but weapons in the left hand get penalties. Also, two-handed weapons that don't have another free hand get penalties. So you could dual wield heavy machine guns if you really wanted to, but without some crazy bionics and high skill levels, you won't really be hitting much.

In addition to that, I made some interface improvements. I gave it some color and made the message window smaller.

equipment

I told myself I'd work on map generation this weekend, but I'm still stuck on that so I decided to give it a break and work on other stuff. I started working on the equipment stuff and pretty much got it mostly done in an hour or two.

Don't worry. The item names are only temporary. If you've got any cool sounding item names, feel free to suggest them by the way. As you can see, each body part can have its own piece of equipment and an additional item, like a weapon. I will make the equipment screen ignore items that can't have actual equipment (like internal organs).

Progress in the level generation department isn't going so well. Coming up with a good, interesting building layout generator is very hard, so I may just resort to using pre-built templates. But I'll still give procedural generation a shot. It's not pretty, but here's what I've got so far.

It constructs the building from several random rectangles and then subdivides it into a number of smaller sectors. Each of those sectors will not be an individual room. Instead I'm hoping to come up with a way to combine them in an interesting manner. I'll also throw in some random divisions to break up large spaces. The final result may not be the best looking building in the world, but I think it will be better than what you've seen in previous releases.

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.