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 ( :rolleyes: ) Space Shooterz, right? Heh ok, been a while... so maybe nobody remembers :D 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 :p 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? :confused:

>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.

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Originally posted by XSquared

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

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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 :cool:

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 :rolleyes:

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 :cool:

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)?

You should have some sound.

I'm working on it (or at least, will be very soon) :(

OK, cumulative update :p:

-The ship and the aliens explode when they die. Much more satisfying ;)
-The repeater limitbreak is more useful, since before it was annoyingly long and didn't do much damage.
-Upgrades are harder to get (free LimitBreaks in particular)
-Combos that have already been picked up will no longer appear
->Yay! Homing missiles now have explosions and splash damage!
->The lasers and missiles are now UPGRADES - you no longer start with them! (i.e. now you go "Yay I got missiles!" :D)
-Not sure if I added anything else, maybe but probably not.

So yeah, that's where it's at right now, everyone try the new one out and do me a big favour by pointing out any bugs please!

**EDIT**
Sorry for anyone who wanted the code (lol as if!), but it wouldn't fit with the code :(

As soon as I try to fire a missile, it crashes, and, for some reason, the only part of the HUD that shows up is the limitbreak bar. No text is showing.

Edit: After a crash and a reboot of the PC, the text is showing up, but the missile bug is still there.

Ahh shoot, oops! I forgot to do a whole bunch of stuff before posting it :( Umm, about the status bar not showing up, I think that's probably because the thing couldn't find a suitable font. But the missiles should work, I don't understand what's wrong, unless I forgot to include a bitmap in the zip :(

**EDIT**
Haaha I was right :D Forgot to include the explosion bitmap! I'll re-post the thing in a second

Ahh it's too big with the picture :( I'll attach it in 2 posts or something.

And the exe to go with it:

After you die and restart, all of the enemy bullets from the last round are still there.

If you have missiles selected, and get a LB, the LB uses the sand-blaster thingies. (1st weapon)

When there are 10+ aliens on the screen and they fire at the same time, the game slows down A LOT. It becomes almost unplayable.

My computer:
1.7 GHz
GeForce 4 Ti200 64 MB
512 MB RAM
380 GB HD

I also noticed a thing in your source code:

Code:

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//From Alien::attack()
shots.push_back(new AlienShot(gfx, x, y));

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Code:

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//From AlienShot::AlienShot()
if(numShots++ == 0)
{
  image = gfx.loadBmp("ashot.bmp");
  ...
}

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Code:

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//From AlienShot::~AlienShot()
if(--numShots == 0)
  SAFE_RELEASE(image);

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Does this mean that every time the number of shots on the screen reaches zero, the image has to be reloaded? The same goes for the rockets, etc. This is not the cause of the lag, though.

BTW, the game crashes for me too when a bitmap isn't found.

My score: 2585

I had fun playing it actually :)

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After you die and restart, all of the enemy bullets from the last round are still there.

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Ahh! lol I noticed that too, I fixed it before but I changed something and it came back!

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If you have missiles selected, and get a LB, the LB uses the sand-blaster thingies.

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Hmm, weird - it works perfectly fine on my computer :( Are you sure you didn't accidentally hit cycle weapons right before the limitbreak button?

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When there are 10+ aliens on the screen and they fire at the same time, the game slows down A LOT. It becomes almost unplayable.

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Gee, that's strange too :( Mine doesn't slow down till about level 30, while my comp has 1.3ghz/geforce2 GTS/256 mb ram/30gb harddrive! Very very strange :eek:

And about the shots/rockets/etc., yes it does mean that everything has to be reloaded when the number of shots goes down to 0. I guess that's bad, but I did that for the first one (repeater I think), and I just kept doing it the same way for the rest of them. I guess I should change that though, maybe make a static init() function for all the classes.
>This is not the cause of the lag, though.
Do you know what is? :confused:
>BTW, the game crashes for me too when a bitmap isn't found.
Same here ;) I guess I should have some error message pop up if a bitmap isn't found or something.

Quote:

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My score: 2585

I had fun playing it actually :)

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Thanks! I tried (and am trying) ;)

Awesome game! When I did the LB though, I found it hard to see the enemy bullets and usually got shot up pretty bad while it was going on... Is there anyway to make their bullets more visable during a LB?

>Awesome game!
Thanks :)

>I found it hard to see the enemy bullets
lol I noticed that too, but I can't think of any quick solution unless I change the repeater sprite (which I guess I COULD do).

air cover rox!

nice game very fun.

well I think we need to tell hunter to keep working. He's obviously got talent, and there were some misnomers but otherwise its a cool game. f00|z!

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well I think we need to tell hunter to keep working.

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Wow, what amazing timing :D Just when I decided I was about done with the game! :rolleyes: Alright, let me see: I'll make a list of the updates I'm going to make, and I probably won't be adding to the list anytime soon.

-Make the alien shots not blend in with repeater shots
-Add sound
-Add diff. skins for the aliens. Artwork contributions very much welcome! I need about 7 skins, and I don't feel like drawing :( Also, if possible, the pics should be as similar in size as possible to the original.
-Fix the help, and do bug fixes

Sorry, but after this I wanna go on and do something else, since I'm tired of looking at the same code over and over :o

No no no, not working on this game, I just mean like you have talent so you should keep working on games in general. I personally would continue onto something more advanced (3d!) if I were you.

Ok, lol in that case I guess I can skip the skins/repeater shots (I was originally thinking of porting this to Direct3D for alpha and stuff but I guess I'll try something 3D), but I feel the need to get the bugs sorted out and the sound put in before I move on.

I love the game. The coolest part is when all the ships come in and shoot lazers. My high score after about 10 mins of playing it was 2343.

Okay, I've fixed the help and stamped out the bugs that I've heard reported (other than the screwy bug I noticed with the helpfile, although it doesn't affect anything).

List of bug fixes:
-Aliens now stagger their shooting like they were meant to originally - makes game much harder :)
-Updated help section
-Font is now "draft quality", so the text in the help should be big enough to read, i.e. font size can be synthesized now (a bug my friend reported)
-Alien shots no longer remain after you die
-Not really a bug, but bitmaps no longer need to be reloaded every time the reference count for them goes down to 0.

I am now working on getting sound in, although I'm afraid that might be a while in coming. In the meantime, I'll post the updated version, and you guys can try it out again :rolleyes:

**EDIT**
Also, you can get the required bitmaps from an earlier post I made, although in that zip I included "alienb.bmp", which is useless unless you wish to switch the alien's skin with that one.

Wanna see a nice score?!?!? Here it is
http://www.geocities.com/yodoblec/index/score.JPG

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"Must of been high on something"

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:p There's no pic there! BTW, did you try the new version?

My bad I don't know what's wrong. But it's up in the 7000 range!

Teach me how to right video games.

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Teach me how to right video games.

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Umm.... http://www.gametutorials.com

BTW, nice score :)

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Originally posted by yodoblec
My bad I don't know what's wrong. But it's up in the 7000 range!

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you cant link directly to an image on geocities. if you copy and paste the link into a browser it will work.

Oh, I see. My bad after all :D But how did you take the screenshot? Everytime I try using PrintScreen it just captures a black screen.

**EDIT**
lol nvm about the black screen. I tried to beat your score, and after about 20 minutes this is what I came up with
http://www.geocities.com/hunterguy_2/score.jpg

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Originally posted by Hunter2
>This is not the cause of the lag, though.
Do you know what is? :confused:

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No, I don't, and I'm afraid I don't have the time to dig deeper into your source code; I try to spend the little programming time I have on the weekends on my own game :).
You should certainly not stop here and decide the game is finished, the game really needs sound.

Heh no worries, I understand about not wanting to dig deeper into the code. I wouldn't either, if I were you and I took a glance at it ;) But have no fear of me quitting on it just yet, I'm still working on getting sound in, although I'm afraid music might slow it down too much (and I don't have too much fitting music for it anyways), and I don't know what I would use for music (directshow? directsound? directmusic? directmovie? directmidi? direct____?).

No, I actually found your source code understandable -- despite the almost total absence of comments! :)

One thing that could be useful in a future update of a new game is to make one of more baseclasses that handles some common tasks -- you currently have similar code in many of your objects' constructors.

Then each object can be stored in a std::list<Object*>, and the kernel just traverses the list and processes the objects.

Code:

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for (std::list<Object*>::iterator obj = objectList.begin();
                obj != objectList.end();
                ++obj)
            {
                //Process each object
                (*obj)->Process();

                //Is this object scheduled for deletion?

                    if (!(*obj)->isAlive())
                    {
                        [snip]
                    }

            }

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When I add new objects to the game, enemies and bullets and bonuses, I never have to recompile the kernel!

Just a tip...

Hmm, sounds interesting. I'll have to try doing that for my next game (after I'm done with sound).

I've actually never used a list before, though. I've heard people talk about them much in the same way as vectors (in terms of functionality, i.e. you can add and remove objects at will), but I've never really seen the need to use a list. Are there specific performance, readability, or ease-of-use reasons to use lists instead of vectors in different places?

Vectors are efficient for random-access, ie when you want to access item number 13 specifically. They are slow when they need to grow of shrink in size.
Lists are very easy to grow and shrink in size, but they don't have random access.
I decided lists was better to use because objects are added and removed all the time.

Ohh, I see. Are you saying that you cannot access objects in a list just with "objectlist[index]"?

Also, then in my case, a list would be more efficient for all the shots (both ship and alien)?

Yes to both questions! :)

OKAY! YEAH! Heh, I thought this was gonna take like another year or something, but I've managed to finish this slightly ahead of schedule, and now Space Shooterz DX has sound and music! I'm sorry I couldn't attach it to this post, but the filesize was slightly too large (i.e. over 3X the max size lol). But it's on my website, so everyone go and try it out and tell me what you think! (Sang-drax, the sound is for you *nudge nudge* :p)

Oh yes, and please everybody take a look at the very poorly commented code (but still "understandable" lol), and please give me some suggestions on improvement other than using linked lists which is already on my to-do list :)

http://www.geocities.com/hunterguy_2/downloads.html

Oh nevermind sounds alrdy oke.
Oh and btw i just listened to the music it Rox:D... , although that upg.wav sounds familiar -> think i alrdy heard it in some game somewhere....

Very cool! Ship rotation would be good but I guess that adds to the challenge. High score list is only available while in-game (not like thats a big problem or anything). And do my ears decieve me, or is that some Final Fantasy music I hear playing? (ah the good ole days of nothing to do but sit and play FF7 for hours...ahhhh)

//napKIN

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And do my ears decieve me, or is that some Final Fantasy music I hear playing?

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:D Yep, that's right. I was looking through my library of midis and the only one that wasn't too happy, too sad, or too fruity, was the FF7 battle theme. And did you recognize the intro? Lol I guess not, well it's a remix of the FF3 prelude :p

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that upg.wav sounds familiar

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Heh, it's a Starcraft sound that plays when you rescue some stray Terran units. Actually, all the sounds are from Starcraft even though the repeater/laser shots I've never actually heard in the game itself. Starcraft is a great source of sounds, IMO :)

Ahem ahem, high score 12312 :D

Yeah i had a highscore of 15755. I tried to take a screeny but too bad that the screen was all black when i pasted it into paint :(...
But it was really fun i had so much luck with the shield thingies you can get so at the end i had around 24 shields left and then there came a new wave of aliens, and then i was pretty much dead...

Im wondering what the maximum of those aliens is in one wave...
My strategy: when there are too much aliens fly around the outer edges of the screen and constantly fire homing missiles, when you get this whats the name , well when you get backup you select the linked laser wich is more effective with backup this way almost the whole wave is instantly dead. + when using backup with linked lasers the game will slow down thus its easiier to avoid incoming shots ( bevause youve got more time to react)

::edit::
Broke my own score with 19845, my strategy is god-like:D

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the game will slow down thus its easiier to avoid incoming shots

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:( Actually, it's not supposed to! If it slows down, then more lasers end up being shot, and more aliens die than were supposed to ;)

Also, if anybody has DirectX 9 running on their comp, could you try the game and see if it runs slow? A lot of people are complaining that it's slow and they have fast comps, and I'm trying to figure out why...

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Actually, it's not supposed to! If it slows down, then more lasers end up being shot, and more aliens die than were supposed to

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Damn just when ive found a great strategy your about to make sure this wont happen again...
Well i guess thats called progress :D

Well, I'm not really going to fix it or anything, but what I'm saying is that people with really old computers are going to have a big advantage in my game when they get laser limitbreaks ;)

Well, it's a lot better with sound. :)

I have severe problems with it though: The power repeater limit break takes me below 1 fps.

Apart from that:

*When I press F1 to go to the help screen, I am transported to the second page immediately about 80% of the times.

*If you minimize the program, it won't let you maximize it again (quite difficult to fix)


Also remember that GetAsyncKeyState doesn't return a boolean. To check if a key is down, use this:

Code:

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inline bool keyDown( WORD vkCode )
{
  //0x8000 is the most significant bit
  return GetAsyncKeyState( vkCode ) & 0x8000;
}

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Heh oops, it's 0x8000 huh? I tried 0x80 and I was wondering why it wasn't working :D But for my purposes, I only need to check if the key was pressed since the last call, so... w/e i guess :p

Umm, yes. About the help thing, I took a look at it but I couldn't figure out why until about 2 seconds ago. I think I fixed it now by removing all the WM_KEYDOWN messages from the queue when you hit F1, so re-download it and see if it works now :) It should be SPS_DX_v5d.zip now.

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Although the least significant bit of the return value indicates whether the key has been pressed since the last query, due to the pre-emptive multitasking nature of Windows, another application can call GetAsyncKeyState and receive the "recently pressed" bit instead of your application. The behavior of the least significant bit of the return value is retained strictly for compatibility with 16-bit Windows applications (which are non-preemptive) and should not be relied upon.

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It's best to use "& 0x8000", and it lets you get rid of the bare GetAsyncKeystate(); in your code (which puzzled me at first).

This is not important at all, though. Just a thought.

Edit: 0x8000

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It's best to use "& 0x800",

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Huh? Wait a minute, didn't you say 0x8000? :eek: Also, would it work to use LOWORD() and HIWORD() to check instead?

Never trust me, trust the Win API documentation. :)

HIWORD and LOWORD won't work, but perhaps HIBYTE and LOBYTE will.

*smacks head* Right, it's only GOT 2 bytes :rolleyes: