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[ufonef]

Hello,
it's a small project, yet I hope someone will find it interesting .
In short, it's a remake of the original x-com defence/ufo enemy unknown, with the original graphics, featuring multiplayer with both tactical and geoscape action.
http://nefurii.my-place.us  - its a free webhosting site, if you can't see the proper page, wait some time and try again.
cheers.

[Alex May]

It looks very faithful. Are you guys going to put in your own graphics for the tactical view?

(also, please post in the introductions thread)

[Aquin]

The screenies look pretty blurry.  Are you using some kinda in-game filter, or is just the pics?

[ufonef]

Tactical view will use original graphics as well. Its however a set of simple bmps that are easy to change if someone was willing to produce new graphics. Also, this is a one man project, and i'm doing only the programming part.
The screens are blurry because they were originally in higher res and were resized down. Also they are of poor quality to save some space and bandwitdth. The real game does not use any kind of smoothing filters, I like it more pixelated.

[Alex May]

Aren't you worried that you will get smacked down for redistributing the original artwork?

[ufonef]

I won't be doing that. The game itself will come only with the free/legal graphics. Everything else will have to be extracted from the original game with the proper tools (which are at the moment a third party tools and require some manual work).

[TheHelmet]

Your site is full of annoying random popups.

[ufonef]

Yeah, its a free webhosting...
when I set it up it wasn't so bad, it appears they intensified those popups lately.
I'll start looking for a new one perhaps. Anyone got something good to recomend?

[Afinostux]

The screenies look pretty blurry.  Are you using some kinda in-game filter, or is just the pics?

X-com had a resolution of something like 320x240 or something else insanely small. pixels so big you could eat off them.

The demo videos look impressive. I'm sure you could taunt and goad some artist into making new art for this. What I remember of the X-com mod tools is that extracting the resources and such was a huge pain in the ass, so that might put people off. It certainly looks like you have enough gameplay done to attract an artist.

Try here for collab fishing and also post one of these if you have regular updates. Good luck with this, seems like a massive undertaking for one person.

[J.G. Martins]

X-com

Best of luck, and keep us posted!!!

[Melignus]

I don't suppose you could put in a "Brawl" or "Melee" mode akin to StarControl II. Customizable teams based on a point value chosen for the fight. XCom vs XCom, Alien vs Alien, and of course XCom vs Alien. Most of the hard stuff is already built into the game.

As for original artwork for the game, I met this artist at a convention. She would really like to work on games when she's done with school, so you might drop her a line and see if she'd be willing to help with anything. Any exposure is good exposure when you're trying to get into game development, portfolio padding is portfolio padding either way.

http://lonewingy.blogspot.com/

I'm going to guess that the game only has support for raw .bmp, but if there was a way to get vector support the possibilities would be awesome.

Great job anyhow with a game that used to scare the crap out of me when I was little, I hated fighting the Terror fights. All those creepy noises with the lights off, sudden screen switches to a bullet tracer, or the horrifying one-guy-off-by-him/herself-gets-mind-controlled scenario. Good times. That game did a lot of stuff right and is still a great play in DosBox.

[ufonef]

Thanks everyone for response and help.
Indeed, extracting files from the original game manually is pain in the ...
What I hoped for was to make an additional program that would automate that process, but even that is quite a lot of work. I'm almost certaint that I won't have the time/resolve to do it even after finishing the game itself. Custom made free graphics is a good solution, but it has two downsides. First is an extremly large ammount of work required for it. I'm not sure if one person can do that in a reasonable time. I mean to rework the entire graphics. Because I also need a couple of graphics that i'm missing for new air combat screen, for ufo base view, and a couple of other small stuff. Anyways, redoing it all would require either insane amount of dedication or a large number of artists. I think both is hard to come by without paying. I'll try to ask people around. However, I do not want someone's work to go for nothing in case this game doesn't go as I planned. I'll try to release some playable version next week and see if it has future ahead or not.
If the game is fun, I can be sure that if I ask someone, that person's work will indeed become useful.
Second downside is the talent required for it and mainly this kind of artistic taste that is hard for me to express. But what i mean is that a lot of x-com remakes turned out not to be as good as were expected to be mainly because they lost all of the original's feeling. And much of that was because of graphics. I'm not really paying much attention to the quality of graphics, like...crysis style high res glowing thingy. I do like pixelated graphics, I have no taste as to user interface, but I just feel that original ufo graphcis is hard to replace.
Also, this artist you met, I assume you do not know if she knows the game? Would be quite rare I suppose, but also quite important. I had a friend that tried to help me, good artist, but he didnt know the game, and it could be felt from his graphics.
EDIT:
Regarding Xcom vs Xcom fights, etc. There is a game called ufo2000 which covers tactical multiplayer combat of squads chosen with points. Although I haven't played much and can't say much more. But making the same for my game would be redundant I think. So im sticking only with full campaing mode and only xcom vs alien.

[Afinostux]

Regarding Xcom vs Xcom fights, etc. There is a game called ufo2000 which covers tactical multiplayer combat of squads chosen with points. Although I haven't played much and can't say much more. But making the same for my game would be redundant I think. So im sticking only with full campaing mode and only xcom vs alien.

That's probably a safer project anyways, and doesn't diminish the concept at all.

I've played ufo2k quite a lot at lan parties, and it isn't X-com exactly, since it has a lot of weapon mod packs (missile launcher minigun lololol). It's more of a SWAT tactics game, since the aliens are not significantly different from the humans in the same ways they were in the game. IE chrysallid + melee != zombeh tiem, but the floater and etherial can still fly.

Also they overhauled the armor system a little. I think it allows for spam to eventually overwhelm armor, but don't quote me on that.

[ufonef]

I never played it. Only downloaded to see how it looks. But according to what I've read, indeed you're right about the armour. It just counts like additional heatlh points that go down before the real health does. But the tactical combat in my version will differ from the original one as well. I did not like some of the randomness we could see there. For example the fact that weapons do a random damage between 0 and 200% of their power is now changed so that it depands on range the show was fired from. The further away, the smaller it gets. I have no idea how it works in ufo2000 though.

[ufonef]

just to refresh the topic..for a couple of days there is a downloadable beta that can be played (with some patience) in multiplayer.