Wow... you must be really old. Any 3D modeling program can do what you ask, and the "hidden line removal" techniquie is no longer used... since ages. Now, you can use "backface culling" for that.

Elite on the BBC Model B micro and other computers in the 80s did backface culling. It only works for convex shapes. You need to use a Z buffer as well for non-convex shapes. (You don't need to use a Z buffer for hidden line removal, but it's supported by hardware and other solutions are much more complicated).

As you can see, you can't see the back faces there but you can see the starfield through the space station. Note that the space station is convex (it's a cuboctahedron.

I LOVE BATTLEZONE, I would dedicate years to making a new Battlezone like game if I could find other people willing to as well! I can code.

Drawing in wire frame mode with openGL is very easy you simply set a state in openGL

to switch on,

glPolygonMode( GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_LINE );

to go back to normal.

glPolygonMode( GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_FILL );

Also I think you can just call draw like this

glDrawArrays( GL_LINES, .... )

glDrawElements( GL_LINES, .... )

You can render any geometry as wireframe in openGL this way. Also if you turn off zbuffer and culling then you'll get see through as well I think.

What format you choose is up to you. That said, I would suggest using AssImp since its a library that supports lots of different formats. That will load your models in to a AssImp data structures, then you can read from it uniformly in your code. If you really want to write your own file loader go with something easy like .obj files, to start with.

http://assimp.sourceforge.net/

Supported file formats for assimp importing ( loading )

An asterisk indicates limited support. For a list of planned formats, see the wishlist.

COMMON INTERCHANGE FORMATS

Wow... you must be really old. Any 3D modeling program can do what you ask, and the "hidden line removal" techniquie is no longer used... since ages. Now, you can use "backface culling" for that.

40 in Jan.. I am one of the wise ones. Now what was I saying? My Ram fails me..

I guess the reason you can do blackface culling is because you would draw the faces as polygons
.. Same as you would if filled polygons only they are non filled (outlined) polygons yes?

I guess it checked the polygons for facing (via sign of cross product component which points into the screen of the vertices in screen space) and built an edge visibility table from that. As I said it only works for convex shape (but in Elite, everything was convex). An easy way to do it these days would be to draw a black polygon and then draw the edges of the polygon as lines over the top, which would mean shapes occlude each other as well (as long as you write to the z buffer as well), unless you are gong for a true retro look (i.e. can see through objects even if they have backface culling), in which case you wouldn't draw the black polygon, just the edges. If you have non triangular faces you also need to store data about whether an edge is an exterior edge (i.e. on the boundary of the polygon) or not.