I think there are some good ideas being presented here.  The "re-loading" stations are an interesting idea, though I think you could play around with tweaking how much ammunition is given, rates of refill, etc.

My biggest concern for this style of game is your ships' speed (it's far too slow) and the inertia.  Take inertia out, it rarely works well in a shmup.  Let me repeat this... take it out   That will allow you to speed up the ship without any repercussions.

Bill

This is great, simple yet you do have to think about resource allocation

Bill

It would be very interesting to mess around with.  Make it happen

Bill

In theory you should have more people to help with coding, but then again it's harder to manage the team

Don't worry about releasing early, though.  It's the best way to get feedback on game play.

Bill

Ran it on my Sony Ericsson S710a and it works fine.  Pretty good game

Bill

Pretty fundamental to change the genre of the game.

Bill

Very cool, I'll be watching this one too... and I've a ton of DC games to play on it for testing purposes

Bill

The enthusiasm level is certainly higher than usual with these types of projects 

Bill

Welcome back.  Looking forward to the new demo.

Bill

Using Java 1.5 on Vista here.

Bill

Seems to me there's some misunderstanding here between copyright and trademark issues.  Mix in privacy issues such as using a photograph (of me, for example) without permission.

In before the lock

edit:  Shoot... didn't realize just how old this topic was, despite the red-letter warning

Bill

Very nice looking demo, quite impressive 

Bill

Crashed pretty hardcore here today... do you have any logfiles I can send?  I died in the area with all the pacman type creatures, and a soundeffect started looping.  I had a rather slow mouse, but no keyboard.  Had to reboot.

Bill

Perhaps enough shots (5 or so?) destroy a crate, which re-spawns in its original position.  Anyway, you'll figure out the gameplay, there are lots of possibilities here.  I'm enjoying the read.

Bill

Yes, I figured that was the case... and it didn't work.  Game was locked up then.

Bill

Great stuff so far Cas, lots of fun.  No exit key? 

Bill

Glad to see this diary going.  I always enjoyed the Alien Flux one and I still anticipate learning alot from you!

Bill

Thanks for the nice words.  Nothing against your suggestions, I actually like the idea of your ship speeding up the longer you don't shoot.  It's just that this was a so-called "rapic prototyping" experiment for me.  I've put it to bed as far as gameplay, though I might add hiscores and the like later if I ever build a library for that.  I'm working on other simple games, and rest assured that DS5 will have no such crippling of your ship, and will explore a different idea altogether with lots of shooting.

Bill

Thanks for the kind words.

If by "particle engine" you mean "extremeley naive array of objects" then yes, you are correct

Cas had a nice particle engine system in his original Alien Flux code, which might be floating around still.  Essentially my code consists of an object, Shard, that maintains a static array of instances.  When a ship explodes I obtain a bunch of articles out of the array (they have an ACTIVE/INACTIVE flag).  I give them a random ticks_to_live, length, rotation and velocity.  Most of my objects work as such, as parts of a static array pre-created.  This works pretty well, as ticking and rendering traverses the array and seems very fast.  In order to make this into more of a "particle engine" I'd at least move more control statically into the Shard object.  Then, when a render is called the whole set of active shards could be packaged up into a vertex array.  Essentially you'd be organizing the object before shuttling all the data to the GPU.

If you're serious about the code, I'd be happy to pass it on to you.  It's a bit disorganized as usual, and uses a SPGL library that I think *must* be a bit customized by me, but you're welcome to it.  PM me and I'll fix something up to send.

Bill

Hmmm... I haven't been able to test the Linux one's properly, so it's certainly possible I missed something.  I'll take a look, and thanks for trying it out.

Bill

A small update to this, fixed a couple nagging little bugs and the screen clears of enemies now upon your death.  Makes it a bit easier to recover from getting killed.

Bill

That's actually kind of fun, nice game.

Bill

Yes, very nice.  How are the new games coming along?

Bill

And?  How was it?

Bill

Is there any more information printed out when you run ds4.bat from an already open console?  There's some initial error that triggers a shutdown, then I'm guilty of not checking for a null in the cleanup.  But the stack trace you posted is a result of some different error.

Thanks,

Bill

That appears to be an error when exiting due to something else.  Have you run LWJGL or other OpenGL games before?

Bill

Yeah, I kind of liked that about the original... the whole "just wait a bit more" thing, especially if things were out of control and the screen was full of enemies.  Perhaps a smaller curve like you suggest.


The speed of the aliens never changes, but the rate at which they spawn increases as does the rate at which they fire.  I really should add hiscores as well so we don't have to remember our best

Thanks for continuing to try this out.

Bill

Updated with some of the suggestions from here.  Biggest change is how missiles lockon.  You need to trigger this by holding down 'X', and you can move while doing it.

Thanks nva225 for your help.

Bill

What I meant to say was I didn't make the music either... it's by Lupin (you can check out his post at shmup-dev.com) .  I used Audacity to convert to .ogg format.

Bill

Well, I didn't create the sounds of course.  Simply using OpenAL through the LWJGL library to play .ogg files.

Bill