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Attack of the Ufos

Posted: 2005-09-30 03:28pm
by Dooey Jo
Dooey presents:

Attack of the Ufos (sixth installment)
- Hunters vs. Ufos

It's a 2D space shooter, running in OpenGL (so you'll need drivers, duh).

Get it here
(3.8 MB. Some clicking and waiting, because it's a free service)

Your goal is to kill the Ufos and... well that is all. It is a shooter, after all. You play as a Hunter who is hired to rid the galaxy from the Ufo threat.
Use left and right arrows to steer left and right, and up arrow to accelerate.
Powerups:
  • Normal laser (little damage, but rapid fire)
  • Power laser (more damage, and a cool charging up thingy)
  • Nova Beam (even more damage. Goes through enemies too! Yay!)
  • Shield booster (increases your shield strength to a non-existant upper limit if you can grab many)
  • Super dephasorising shield (becomes intangible)
  • Intelligently Designed Bomb (total damage to all enemies! One time use only)

"Ufos" (as opposed to UFOs) is not a typo. That's the way it's supposed to be. It's pronounced U-foes, and not U-F-Os. It's because the ships are infact indentified and thus cannot be UFOs. It's what the aliens call themselves. Hunters are a humanoid species of... hunters...


So yeah, beta-test the game now, and say what you think. There are some known "bugs", and they are:
  • Will slow down on slower computers when there are many particles on screen at the same time.
  • Will require some form of Windows.
The frame-rate problem is now hopefully fixed. Although it runs at 65ish on my least crappy computer now, and 55ish on my second least crappy one and 60ish on my most crappy computer. Grr... Well at least it should be playable now.


Here're two screenies

Image
Image


And here's a little background on the game:

In my university programming course, we have an assignment that's due November or something, in which we are supposed to do a game, in C++. Or more specifically, a space shooter. I started some preparations for my game, a week or so ago, and thought I wouldn't have to do so much, because it wasn't due until November, but then I got into the mood, and accidentally finished it...

We're actually supposed to use the teachers own little graphic library based on SDL, but it seems that the most powerful feature in that one is normal per-pixel alpha blending, and well, that's just boring. It couldn't do rotations either. So I used OpenGL instead and built my own object structure around it. We could do it if we felt experienced, but it wasn't recommended. But now I have an awesome particle engine to play around with :twisted: I also used FMOD for sound and shit, although I'm not sure we were supposed to have sound... But you can't have a game without sound, and you definately can't have a game with dying aliens that does not shout in strange alien languages! :mrgreen: I also added a little music from Castlevania 64, though I'll have to change it eventually, because it's not mine... But it sounds so cool during the Get Ready screen (though if you want some other music to play, you can replace "music.ogg" in the sounds folder with a different .ogg file with the same name)...

Anyway, we got a checklist for features that had to be in the game, to achieve maximum points. If you're feeling like it, you can check to see if I have everything:
  • Player can move around on the screen in his ship
  • Enemy ships comes flying towards the player
  • Enemy ships shall fire shots with the intent of shooting down the player
  • Remaining lives plus shield level shall be written on the screen
  • Player shall be able to use three (3) or more weapons
  • Player shall be able to collect weapon bonuses
  • The weapons shall behave in ways which are unique to that weapon
  • The weapons shall impart different amount of damage on the enemies
  • The enemies shall be flying in at least three different formations
That list feature sure is neat


So that's that. Post your hiscores too, if you want to. My best is 121 000, and if you don't want to see it every time you're game overed, you can delete the file hiscore.ufo (or do better yourself).

Posted: 2005-09-30 03:52pm
by Faram
D/L it and run the exe.

It took about 0.02sec and game over, no way that I could do anything!

Is my comp way to fast or somthing?

Posted: 2005-09-30 03:55pm
by Ace Pace
Wait, how do I shoot? And it finshs here in 5 seconds, WAY too fast.

Posted: 2005-09-30 04:47pm
by Bounty
Frame rate limiter seems to not work properly on some systems.
No kidding. The whole thing was over in less then ten seconds - that's on a P4, 2.66 GHz.
Wait, how do I shoot?
Spacebar, duh :)

Posted: 2005-09-30 05:02pm
by Praxis
If you really want to impress the teacher port it to GBA and demo it running on that :)

Posted: 2005-09-30 05:14pm
by Bounty
Praxis wrote:If you really want to impress the teacher port it to GBA and demo it running on that :)
Are you honestly suggesting porting the whole thing over to assembly and making it run on hardware it was never designed to run on :?

Posted: 2005-09-30 06:16pm
by Dooey Jo
Hmm... So it seems the frame rate limiter did in fact only work on my best computer and no-one else's... damn non-standard behaviour... Oh well, this is what's testing is for! I'll write a version tomorrow that also uses the windows timer, even though it's pretty slow (and I can out of personal experience say that it doesn't work on all systems either. Like my old school's system, for instance. Damn that other program ran fast there!)...

Does it run well for anyone? If you have something less than a 1.4 GHz Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM and a GeForce 2, it should be playable (that's my middle system).

Praxis wrote:If you really want to impress the teacher port it to GBA and demo it running on that :)
Well... maybe to the GameCube. There's an FMOD version for that... For GBA, I'd have to re-write... actually, since I use that whole object-oriented thing, I might only have to change the rendering functions...

Faram wrote:D/L it and run the exe.

It took about 0.02sec and game over, no way that I could do anything!

Is my comp way to fast or somthing?
Wait, are you serious that you were game overed in less than a second? Because if so, you running at over 1 500 fps!! Holy shit :shock:

Posted: 2005-10-01 12:28am
by Faram
Dooey Jo wrote:Wait, are you serious that you were game overed in less than a second? Because if so, you running at over 1 500 fps!! Holy shit :shock:
Not really, more like 1-1.5 sec

Posted: 2005-10-01 09:15am
by Dooey Jo
Faram wrote:
Dooey Jo wrote:Wait, are you serious that you were game overed in less than a second? Because if so, you running at over 1 500 fps!! Holy shit :shock:
Not really, more like 1-1.5 sec
Oh good, only around 600 fps, then :P

Well, I've updated the damn thing now, so please try again. Now I'm having nice frame rates on all my computers, except for my middle computer, where it's running somewhat slow, but it's at least playable. Seems to sometimes be jumping a few frames though...

Grrr... damn those timers and their different resolutions on different systems...

Posted: 2005-10-01 09:30am
by Ace Pace
Got 88K, this is HARD.

Posted: 2005-10-01 09:46am
by Dooey Jo
Ace Pace wrote:Got 88K, this is HARD.
Of course it is :twisted:

So I take it it's working now?

Posted: 2005-10-01 09:48am
by Ace Pace
Yes, good speed, very hard, hard to maneuver the craft.

Posted: 2005-10-01 09:51am
by Bounty
Works fine here. The only thing I found odd is that your powerups don't reset after you die, but I take it this is deliberate ?

Posted: 2005-10-01 10:01am
by Faram
Much better, now it works!

Posted: 2005-10-01 10:19am
by Dooey Jo
Yes! I beat my own hiscore by 900 :mrgreen:
Bounty wrote:Works fine here. The only thing I found odd is that your powerups don't reset after you die, but I take it this is deliberate ?
Yes it is. I always hated it when I lost my powerups in those other games, so I got rid of that feature. Plus, it be way too hard otherwise. I could never have gotten those 121 900 if I had lost my precious green lasers every time I died 8)

Posted: 2005-10-01 02:19pm
by Praxis
Bounty wrote:
Praxis wrote:If you really want to impress the teacher port it to GBA and demo it running on that :)
Are you honestly suggesting porting the whole thing over to assembly and making it run on hardware it was never designed to run on :?
Right, assembly. Go with DS then.
I recall someone creating an API for the DS...
And there's DSLinux...

Posted: 2005-10-01 06:43pm
by Dangermouse
Pretty nifty but really hard. My best is 53k. Are the things floating away from exploded ships the alien pilots?

Posted: 2005-10-02 05:45pm
by Dooey Jo
Praxis wrote:Right, assembly. Go with DS then.
I recall someone creating an API for the DS...
And there's DSLinux...
Nah, I did a little research and it turns out programming the GBA is really easy. No (excessive) assembly required! I expect the port to be finished within the week :mrgreen:
Sprite engine should be finished tomorrow...
The odd thing (which actually is quite natural when you think about it) about the GBA though, is that it has no file system so you have to compile all your bitmaps and everything together with the main file. I'm not used to that, although it does have a really kick-ass hardware blitter and non-existant loading times... Though it might be difficult to port my particle engine, because it can only blit a maximum of 1024 4-bit 8x8 sprites per frame, and at least 30 of those have to lasers which I'll have 8x32, and another 15 for Ufos and the player which I planned to have 8-bit...
Dangermouse wrote:Pretty nifty but really hard. My best is 53k. Are the things floating away from exploded ships the alien pilots?
Hehe, yes indeed :twisted: If you listen closely you can hear them scream! And if you're fluent in Swedish you might understand half of it...

Posted: 2005-10-02 07:51pm
by Praxis
Sweet! Make sure you post the link to that, I'll run it in an emulator, and when the SD card version of the M3 comes out in 2-3 weeks I'll run it on the GBA :D

Posted: 2005-10-03 06:27am
by NoXion
Nice game, although my one complaint is that the ship you control is too slow.