SharpShooter16k

Showcase
#1

This started from some technology demo’s to learn openGL for the forthcoming LWJGL context. However I appear to have largely finished it so here it is.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alan.d.waddington/images/camp.png

It’s set in the American Civil War of 1861-65. You are a Confederate SharpShooter sent out to pick off the scouts of the approaching union army.

SharpShooter16k

If pressing SPACE does not start the game, try clicking on it. Occasionally webstart fails to give it the focus.

So far it has been tested on Java 1.4.2 & 1.5 on:
Windows XP, Pentium 4 2.8GHz, Radeon Mobility 9200
Windows XP, Pentium 4 2.4GHz, Radeon 9600XT
Mac OS X 10.4.1 PowerPC 1.67GHz Radeon 9700 (Powerbook G4)

There is a glaring lack of Linux testing.
The framerate is about 50fps on the 2.8GHz machine (except on the menu, where all that text slows it to a crawl for some reason). Is it playable at lower clockspeeds?

Alan

#2

excellent entry!!!
Worked like a charm on Windows XP, XP300

Seriously need to invert mouse :wink:
No errors what so ever.

#3

Nice. =)
Ran very smooth.

Some flavor-related suggestions:

Fix the mouse look. Inverted mouselook is evil. :wink:
Add WASD movement
Increase the FOV. 50 degrees fov is way too little.

Also, I couldn’t find any enemies. =/

#4

Thanks for the comments chaps.

I’ll see if there’s room to squeeze in a mouselook invertion toggle. There’s probably not room for WASD as well, because it’s already very close to 16k, having been obfusticated & rezipped with 7zip. I’ll take a look at the FoV.

Alan

#5

Cool! ran smooth here too (XP / 512MB / AMD 3200+ / 2.2GHz) . That is some peppy music for a war lol ;D

I agree with the FOV and mouse comments :stuck_out_tongue:

#6

[quote] That is some peppy music for a war lol ;D
[/quote]
The music “He11 broke loose in Georgia” is from the period.
http://hetzler.homestead.com/NBSherman.html

Click the link near the top for hetzler’s midi arrangement.

There’s another arrangement here (scroll down a bit)
http://members.accessbee.com/jkwasnik/midfiles.html

I did a new (much simpler) arrangement for the game, and have used a software synthesizer, to avoid the need for midi altogether.

#7

Wow. Good work! :slight_smile:

I agree that the fov is pretty strange… strafing feels very fast (but it isn’t). Most FPS games use a fov of 90°. One thing you could maybe do is giving those two weapons a different fov.

edit: Like 90° for the gun and 45° for the rifle.

#8

Nice game Alan. I’m in the 6th level now (ALT-TAB) and about to give up. the inverted mouse is driving me nuts.

Especially when a scout is shooting at me (nice AI :p) I can’t hit it in such an hurry: have to run away, make a turn, take some time to aim, and shoot :slight_smile:

I’m only used to inverted Y in flight-sims ;D

#9

Version with wider FoV and Normal/Inverted Y on the way ;D

  • Done *

Normal Y axis is now the default.

  • Normal: N Key
  • Inverted: I Key

Field of View is doubled. Still a bit on the small side, but better. This changed the look considerably & I also had to change a number of other parameters.

Alan

#10

Very nice! And how did you do the character animations? Keyframed meshes or skeletal animation? Did you use the utility library mesh animation classes?

#11

The animation technique is a bit 1980’s retro. The objects are all based on data in the wavefront .obj format. As such each face can belong in one or more groups. These are assumed to be hierarchical. My convertor program generates a model encapsulating a number of vertices, a number of triangles based on those vertices & a number of sub-models. Each sub-model is in itself a full model. Rotations and translations can be applied to the model as a whole (in which case any sub-models also are affected) or to any sub-model. This is closest to a skeleton form of animation, but this specific implementation does not allow vertices of a mesh to belong to different groups; a sad restriction, but it simplifies things quite a bit. The rendering code is ludicrously simple. Animation is limited to i) turning (by the shortest route) to a commanded angle, at a given angular rate; ii) Oscillating between two angles at a given rate.

I looked at the library classes, but felt that the advanced features they offered required too much setup for a 16k program. Hopefully someone will prove me wrong.

#12

Anyone tried this on Linux yet? I’d really like to know if it works.

Still a few problems with the cheap and nasty integrated sound on one of my PCs. Seems the frame rate slowdown during the display of the initial menu is causing the audio buffer to run out before a refill occurs. I’ve kludged this on a non-posted version, by adding an extra yield() at the start of the menu code (which seems to help) but was waiting to see if anyone else had noticed any issues here.

After making the field of view wider, the subjective speed is faster. I slowed it a touch, but it is still fast because I find the gameplay better that way. Is that Ok with you?

The ‘Raid Supplies’ objective only appears at levels 5 & 8. I was wondering whether to make it valid for every level from 5 onwards. Any views either way?

Any thoughts/feedback on the above gratefully received.
Cheers
Alan

#13

I love it!
I am unable to test on linux, coz I only have software drivers - and something weird happens when you enter fullscreen - I would need a non-fullscreen switch to test (I think)
I played to level 6 or so, and its really great - however the games seems kinda easy?

#14

I’m loving it! Oh but man, please give me a scope :wink: Sharpshooter without a scope? And how about progress bars to show how long until you can fire your weapon again?

#15

I played more today, and played further. All I’ve got to say is: woooaahhh man. Gatling gun rocks :slight_smile: The level I got that, not a tree was left standing before I had cleared the level.

I think once you go past having 6 of each kind of baddy on each level, start drawing a number then the icon so you can have large numbers of bad guys. So it’d be like, 7[icon] instead of [icon][icon][icon][icon][icon][icon][icon], because once you get that gatling gun there’s just never enough enemies to be found ;D Then you can uncap the level #'s and just make it keep going up and up each level. Perhaps it even could get harder faster, so after you have 6 of each type, have 8 of each type next level, and 12 of each type after that, then 20, etc.

Maybe you could even consider adding more enemies than you’re required to kill. That way you wouldn’t spend so much time searching for that last guy.

#16

According to my webserver, in June there has been:
106 windows dowloads (GET lwjgl-windows.jar)
12 linux downloads (GET lwjgl-linux.jar)

Any of you linux guys got the code to work? I’m assuming Yes in the absence of complaints :wink:

I’ve spotted a lighting bug in the code. The sun rotates with the player, rather than staying oriented with the land. Since it’s minor, I’ll hold off fixing it on the published version, since it looks like the 16k contest might actually start soon, which will mean a recompile with a newer set of libraries.

Malohkan: I see you got the Gatling Gun. I was keeping quiet on that to see if anyone would play up to level 10. I agree with your comments about the difficulty not increasing above level 10 and the icon suggestions, but reckon that 10 levels is enough given the limited variety of gameplay. The Gatling Gun was intended as a fun reward for sticking it out. Besides the jar’s packed right up to the 16k limit, so adding new features would mean taking something else out.

On that subject, at the moment the font is a hardcoded raster font, which consumes a huge 800 bytes compressed. An alternative would be to use awt to render text into ImageBuffers & then obtain the bytes & blit to the screen. The code would be more complex, so I wouldn’t gain 800 bytes though. Maybe I’d gain 400, but the fonts would now be system dependent (which I don’t really like, since I’m currently using a slightly customised courier based font - I know what it’s going to look like on all platforms). So it might be possible to squeeze in more features that way, but I really don’t want to use AWT fonts, particularly with ‘working on all platforms’ a prerequiste. So I think it’ll stay ‘as is’ except for bug-fixes.

Alan

#17

Update:

  • WASD control added
  • Game Options moved to Function Keys
  • Lighting Bug fixed
  • Font system changed to use glBitmap as glDrawPixels interrupts graphics pipeline
  • Now uses LWJGL 0.98-1
  • Source Available

Alan :slight_smile:

Edit: Toned down diffuse brightness a touch as well.

Edit: Broken on the Mac at the moment

#18

Update:

  • Added Controller support (USB Gamepads)
  • Removed Y-axis inversion option
  • Now works on the Mac*
  • Provided you stir the Gamepad sticks 360 degrees at the start screen for calibration. If you don’t, you get uncontrolled movement on startup.
#19

I’m having a problem starting this. Unfortunately I can’t describe what it is, because it won’t let me see anything.

I click “yes” to the security question, then the whole thing just goes away and the JWS stops (I watched the “processes” under the ctrl-alt-delete menu).

Any ideas what that could mean? I was having an error earlier, so I updated my LWJGL to the most recent, but now it won’t even give me an error.

Oh and…
Windows XP Professional
640 mb ram
2 ghz Pentium 4
Geforce 4 Ti-4200

Don’t know if that will help, but thought I might give some basic info.

Edit: Nevermind I guess. The link in this thread still doesn’t work, but the game in
http://www.circuitswamp.org/projects/sharpshooterarena.html
works ok (found it in the FPS forum).

Edit2: Right, seems as though SharpShooterArena is a completely different game based off the same thing. So I still have a problem, as the original SharpShooter16k.jnlp doesn’t work.

#20

@nva225

The ‘original’ SharpShooter16k, did get an update to add game controller support. I didn’t add this to SharpShooterArena. The gamepad support is a touch flakey which might be the issue. Another possibility is that there is an old file in your webstart cache. Try clearing the cache & then try again.

If these don’t work, I might back out the gamepad support & post a version without it.

Alan