DS4: Experimental Shooter (Updated to v0.3)

[wrswaney]

@SluX

Just to let u know, that it works perfectly on my desktop. Maybe there is some issue with my laptop. I ll check again and repost.

NICE work!

Btw, are those explosions particle engine effects or something else? Could u share code perhaps?

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

[blahblahblahh]

Nice little game.

I have a radical suggestion: make the ship move faster the longer you don’t shoot for, and allow people to shoot whilst locking on.

At the moment, although you can move a little, you can’t move enough for it to be much fun - there’s not much challenge to “holding out” on a lockon, because your ship is so crippled you can’t do much any more as a player, other than choose a moment to let go.

[wrswaney]

@blahblahblahh

Nice little game.

I have a radical suggestion: make the ship move faster the longer you don’t shoot for, and allow people to shoot whilst locking on.

At the moment, although you can move a little, you can’t move enough for it to be much fun - there’s not much challenge to “holding out” on a lockon, because your ship is so crippled you can’t do much any more as a player, other than choose a moment to let go.

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