The long-awaited Space Shooterz DX!

Hey guys, it's finally done! Long time ago, I said I was making a DirectDraw version of my mega blockbuster hit ( ) Space Shooterz, right? Heh ok, been a while... so maybe nobody remembers But anyways, it's finally done.

List of changes:
-Umm, no more menu at the top. All the stuff from the menu can be reached by pressing Esc (quit), F1 (help), F2 (highscores).
-No more "New Game" command If you wanna start over, die and restart, or else quit and restart. K?
-Tweaked the weapons - repeater is now useful, and linked lasers are marginally more powerful now, to encourage its use.
-Rockets don't do the annoying ring-around-the-alien thing as much anymore. And, I think that's it for now (other than a few bug fixes).

So everyone take a look and tell me what you think, hey? If anyone finds bugs, please PLEASE tell me, so I can figure out what's wrong So anyways, I've attached the exe/code to this post, or you can get it from my downloads site (in my signature), although that one seems to be down for now. Have fun!

What's the fire button?

Edit:
More standard controls (arrow keys + CTRL for fire) would be nice.

>What's the fire button?
Huh? Didn't you read the help or anything?

>More standard controls (arrow keys + CTRL for fire) would be nice.
Heh, I've gotten that comment so many times. O.K., I'll see what I can do about it.

>>Huh? Didn't you read the help or anything?
Hmm... the controls weren't showing up before... Oh well. I figured it out when I looked through your code.

Originally posted by XSquared

More standard controls (arrow keys + CTRL for fire) would be nice.

i agree.

but all in all its very well done. gets a little old after a minute or two though, you should have different skins for bad guys as the game progresses. also you should progressively grant access to weapons rather than starting off with all 4. this would make the game more exciting. (you know like, "Woohoo, i got missiles!")

good job.

Nice

But I agree with the comment about controls being slightly non-standard - make them editable in the config or something

oh, and please put some visual feedback in when the enemies die - on my setup at least, they just dissapear (spawning powerups occasionally).

But otherwise it's pretty cool - good job

Nice, but add sound would be 'much' nicer

>Hmm... the controls weren't showing up before...
You mean pressing f1 showed a blank screen or something? That's funny... I'll have to take a look at my help code.

>gets a little old after a minute or two though, you should have different skins for bad guys as the game progresses
Heh, I know, but I didn't feel like making a lot of skins. Oh well, I guess players won't make it past lvl 20, so if I have a new skin every 4 lvls, I only need to make 5 skins. Does anybody have any other ideas for this?

>also you should progressively grant access to weapons rather than starting off with all 4.
I was going to do that, but I forgot, then was too lazy. Maybe I could make the original 4 weapons as upgrades or something? What do you guys think?

>More standard controls (arrow keys + CTRL for fire)
I'm trying to do that right now, but I can't figure out how to use the ALT key, as VK_ALT doesn't seem to work. Does anybody know what virtual key code it uses?

>oh, and please put some visual feedback in when the enemies die - on my setup at least, they just dissapear (spawning powerups occasionally).
Yes, I'm planning on doing that, but up till now I was just trying to figure out DirectDraw (and, of course, trying to kill some of the bugs).

>Nice, but add sound would be 'much' nicer
Hehe, I'm also planning to do that too. Except, for the moment I don't feel like using PlaySound (I'm trying to get away from Windows built-in stuff), and DirectSound is still some ways away on my to-learn list Also, I want to get the explosions in first. But I have some *neat* ideas for using Starcraft sounds, when I get around to it

Also, does anybody have any comments on the limitbreaks? I'm planning on changing them later, but are there any concerns about them right now?

Here is a list of Virtual Key codes. Alt is VK_MENU.

Text from activation of limitbreak when using power repeater goes off the screen.

XSquared:
Heh thanks, I was searching the list on my version of MSDN (the one that came with MSVC++), and it had VK_ALT as the alt key. Then I found out it was the list for Java

Blackrat364:
That's strange. Is the text really big or something? Because it shouldn't even come close to going off the screen... Or maybe is the default font different for everybody's computer or something? Oh well, I'll do something about the font size anyways.

Ok everyone, I've updated it. Changes list:

-Both sets of controls work now (3D-game-player config and standard config)
-Cleaned up the help, looks a bit nicer now
-Made the font size fixed, although now the font looks different

More should come soon, within the next week or so, but for the time being try this one out and tell me what you think

nice, but the game slows down to an unplayable state when you request reinforcements.

What are your specs? It doesn't slow down on mine (P3@1GHz, GF3Ti500 /w64MB DDR).

Strange, it doesn't slow down at all on mine. Does it slow down on every "LimitBreak", or just the ones with the lasers? And how much RAM do you have (well, and CPU speed)?