Some of you may remember Dodger, my entry for the TINS 72 hour competition earlier this year. As simple as it may be (you dodge enemies for as long as possible which is usually less than 20 seconds), it so far seems to be one of the most successful games I've ever made, judging by the number of entries in the online highscore database.

So I decided to add some finish to it. I fixed some bugs and added two new features: multiple language support and themes. Here's where I need your help. I need translations for as many languages as possible and I need new better looking themes, because right now there's only one (the original TINS dodger theme) and it's ugly.

Translating is very easy, takes no more than 10 minutes. Just copy english.lng to glarbongian.lng and change all English texts to Glarbongian. Replace Glarbongian with the name of your language.

Themes are a little more involved but if anyone here feels artistic, I would appreciate all contributions. You need to draw a few sprites, make a couple of fonts (or not), three or four sounds, define a colour scheme and if you have musical skill, compose a 10 second loop in your favourite tracker. Details are in readme.txt.

Here's a screenshot with the ugly old theme:

{"name":"590442","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/9\/d99c0d877fcf81917d4d831e935d9092.jpg","w":640,"h":480,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/9\/d99c0d877fcf81917d4d831e935d9092"}

And here is the game. The Windows binary package is about 1.3 MB and the Linux compatible source is around 400k. The source version includes all the data as well.

EDIT: Just uploaded v1.16 which adds support for Unicode characters in the language files!

EDIT: A couple of bugfixes later the version number is v1.18.

Oh, that's sweet, right now I'm going to download it again and translate it to Glarbongian er Czech, well ok at least if I'll resist to play it.

Oh by the way, I liked that theme.

I have a draft for a Swedish version attached to this message.

Question/Problem:

• Will you be able to display the Swedish characters å, ä and ö?

• The GAME_PAUSED text doesn't correspond to Q and A. I solved it this way: GAME_PAUSED=Spelet pausat! Tryck Q = Avsluta, C = Fortsätt spela

[edit]: Changed into a "completed" message.

Thanks! )

I thought this would be a problem for some languages. At first I thought you could just replace the problematic chars with the closes match from the english alphabet, but I'm not in the process of making it possible to have any character.

Yeah, that's a problem too. The key bindings are hardcoded, so in a translation that doesn't make much sense...

Ok got it - I resisted to play and I have translated it into Czech - though I must admit that I let myself inspired by "slovenski.lng" . Language file is attached. - search later.

Italian version up
I had a hard time fitting things in so little space, Italian is quite verbose...

P.S. Marco don't kill me (Marco and me try to maintain the Italian version of the allegro site... but i've been very lazy lately)

How odd, I just started playing this again a few days ago...

Wow, thanks people! Keep'em coming!

Btw, I just uploaded v1.16 which now supports Unicode in language files and doesn't use bitmap fonts anymore (just TTF). It doesn't include the new languages yet though. To be able to use Unicode you must encode your language file in UTF8. Also because of a small mistake I made and didn't notice until just now, the first line of the language file must be empty (or a comment or something).

Out of curiosity, how many would that be?

I might make a theme. I need to practice doing this for my own personal study anyway. I see the music is in .it format, I wonder if ACID (my current music-making software) can make those...

Oops, the game crashes anytime I try to run a new game or play a replay. Also the intro doesn't play properly - only the first frame. Plus that font in highscores table doesn't seem to support unicode.

French lng file attached. Keep up the good work !

EDIT: Changed first line to a comment, encoding in utf8, and cr-lf by lf only.

Oops, where Gull?

Attached is unicode version of Czech translation with punctuation. The odd thing is that when I change first line into a comment it only shows default message on the scrollbar.

quote OICW Oops, where Gull? /quote What ?
EDITED

Damn, I uploaded a broken build. It's fixed now, I think, but I didn't change the version number. It gets a bit slow when there's a lot of text on screen though. Rendering all those true type fonts isn't very fast...

A couple hundred unique ones, otherwise thousands. Not that much really, but I'd say more people played this game than any other I've made. Not that I've made many.

Updated Italian lng

I reintroduced è and ù (i had used e' and u' instead) but they are not rendered correctly.

[edit]

You might consider switching to Open Layer... this type of game could be easily ported in little time

Yeah, the text that is printed with the small font doesn't show those characters because they're not in the font. But the big font does have most of them, I think...

Nah, just some clever caching of rendered bitmaps will do...

That's better, but it overrides user settings, plus that help font doesn't support unicode. So czech help screen is screwed up.

Nope, it doesn't render è... should i switch back to e'?

The Italian translation of Highscores (Migliori punteggi) doesn't really fit in the main menu and i don't see how to make it shorter, could you add a little more pixels of width?

Hier, weil ich so nett bin!

However, I couldn't test it because I was too lazy to compile the game.
Is it a problem to use -> " <- in a translation?

FMC: Could you have some normal language No just kidding. In Czech we say: "Nejlepší výsledky" but I used only the latter for translation and inside I say "Skóre" which is czech word originated in score.

When changing the CPU usage, we must go back and in before seeing any change ( I mean it is not automatically refreshed )
At the presentation screen, when cliquing on the exit cross (on top right windows), I got a crash.

Yeah and I think I'll leave it like that. Too much work to get all those characters in...

Strange, most accented characters are there in that particular font...

Yeah, sure, there's plenty of room there.

The French translation though has some very long words. There's not even enough room on the screen for some...

Danke schön!

I think it's OK.

I know, I'll fix that.

Yeah, it's mentioned in the readme. Sometimes the game crashes on exit for some reason. Happens every now and then...

Ok, I'll return back to non punctuation version then. By the way, you remind me myself with that attitude.

EDIT: Attached new & tested language file.

I am currently working on changing the suspected sentences ;-)

As I am a badass, I will launch it by gdb everytime !

EDIT: got it each time I quit. Here is the GDB log

EDIT2:

BugList:
Options:
Grafics:when switching from full to windowed, problem : the windows size is not adjusted (the windowed new one is taking my full desktop)

All items in option menu: no one is refreshing automatically.

The exiting bug seem to only appear when hitting the cross. Nothing happens when selecting exit from the menu.

The keyboard detection (if any) is not working properly, I got an azery (not qwaerty) and Q is not A ;-)

Very nice game, but it runs terribly slow on my even slower PC. Anyway I enjoyed playing DODGER.

BUG? I ran it in the 16 bpp mode (via allegro.cfg), but the game sprites weren't rendered, only black boxes shown on screen. Game was playable this way, but I think, that you need to fix something with your color conversion code.

I attached a full POLISH translation. I've made a mixed version: with unicode characters and without them, as one of the fonts doesn't display them. I hope, that you will use it

I could look into if not using åäöÅÄÖ (that's all special characters we use in Sweden) is possible with some clever writing style. Would you like that or should I leave it as it is?

Kent: "SETTINGS_CPU=Minska CPU belastning" should be "SETTINGS_CPU=Minska CPU-belastning".

And finally the very awaited(!?) Spanish version.
BTW, I don't like that big font at all, it doesn't allow words wider than 5 or 6 characters!
I'll see if I can make some ships later.

I downloaded this and will check it out, and if I get time maybe I'll make some stuff for it...mainly I'm downloading as much linux stuff as I can to get everything completely setup since I just switched to linux for my main development platform

Thanks, I'll have to compile in debug mode for that to be useful though...

That's weird. Could be a driver problem, I don't know...

Maybe you don't have the latest version. I uploaded the game with the same version number a couple of times. One of the old ones had this problem...

I'll look into it. I sometimes (rarely) get the freeze on exit bug. Maybe I'll just not clean up on exit or something...

Thanks. Yeah, it's slow as hell, especially now that I use true type fonts for almost everything. I need to optimize that.

Yeah, I use alpha transparency which only works in 32bpp. Or is it possible to get it to work in 16bpp as well? I'll RTFM.

Thanks!

Well, the strings that are printed with the small font definately shouldn't have accented characters. For the rest I think it's OK, but as I said, in this particular font most special characters are there, but not all. I think one of the a's is missing...

Thanks!

You mean the biggest font? That's only used for the title. The medium one can put quite a good number of chars in one line.

That'd be great.

It'd be nice to know how much trouble you have compiling this. Because you need lots of semi non standard libs to compile (MASkinG, AllegroFont, DUMB) and a few more standard ones (Allegro, cURL, pthreads). Maybe I should just make a Linux binary?

Btw, yesterday I noticed a few more bugs that were introduced with using only true type fonts. I'll fix them today when I get off work.

If you manage to upload a debug binary, I will happily give you the trace. I can not compile it as I do not have & want that bunch of library on my system ;-)

I do not search for it in your source, but I manage the close button as this in my projects ( just an example ) :

EDIT: I searched and not founded it. If someone click on the cross when windowed, no clean exit.

EDIT: Whoops ! It seems that you already have corrected the exit bug (now when I hit the cross, it goes trought the menu instead of quitting in a ugly way). The menu are OK with the version I have now. I still have the resizing from fullscreen to windowed bug tought.

yeh I realized how many other libraries I'm going to need to compile this and groaned...but it's good practice I guess. I'm still looking into setting up a cross-compiler for my other project and trying to update and clear out linux packages I don't need or want and stuff like that. I finally got my internet working decently for a dialup situation anyways. I'm wanting to use makefiles that can be used on windows and linux and macosx so that people can just download my sourcefiles from now on, but I've never really messed with doing my makefiles by hand before...

anyways, I will try to get masking and the others working too, and i already have ncurses and pthreads installed...

will let you know

Yeah you are right. I might have missed something more.

You could just replace that å or ä with an a then. Swedish people will understand anyway I guess. You could insert the - as well which I missed above.

I just uploaded a new version: Dodger v1.17.

Changes:

• fixed a problem with the intro screen (it wouldn't play at all in the previous version )

• optimized text rendering somewhat; The game is still slow but at least I get consistant framerates in the game. In-game I get around 125 FPS all the time (before it would drop to 50 FPS when there was a lot of text on screen) and in the menus around 150-200, depending on how much there is to draw.

• added Czech, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Swedish translations; Thanks guys!

• made the lists of languages and themes sort alphabetically for easier navigation

• fixed logic framerate to 100 Hz for no apparent reason

Ah yes, I'll fix it in the next version.

Thanks again everyone. But there are still a few languages missing, like Dutch and Finnish...

Oops you make me worry. I hope you've packed there the non unicode version. Otherwise it will be all screewed up in the help etc.

Attached is final version.

Woohoo, the infection is spreading through the class Mission Accomplished!

Yeah, I edited your last version as necessary.

EDIT: Who is Tomas? He's getting close.

Ok now the language file attached above is up-to-date. As friend pointed me.

Edit:
Tomas is a friend of mine, who's just playing...
Oh I just saw that language file included and that's exaclty what I just uploaded. Good job.

I've uploaded a fixed version of the polish translation. Now it's almost perfect BTW, a practical question for the future: do we should use the English names for a language?

Another bug? I've played with the allegro.cfg file a little more, and I've discovered, that setting the config value of useVideoMemory to 1 makes DODGER crash everytime, when I switch beetwen fullscreen and windowed mode.

And one more thing: this game is addicting!

Just uploaded new version: v1.18 which fixes a nasty bug (thanks to OICW) and includes some improvements to the language files (including the latest polish translation).

Thanks. It was almost perfect before too. Thanks for noticing the © sign can be used.

Personally I prefer native names, but I kept the filenames as people submitted them. I mean it's not like I even know how to say Swedish in Swedish. I know Sweden is Sverige or something like that though...

Yeah, that's a generic MASkinG setting which isn't even fully implemented in MASkinG itself. I don't even remember if it does make the program use video memory or not. It certainly doesn't use video memory for everything. Anyway, it's an unfinished unsupported feature.

Thanks, I know. I can't stop playing. Must beat top score.

Btw, speaking of top scores, I'm tempted to delete the best two from the database. They look a little suspicious to me...

Yeah. I am really interested by knowing the speed of the bot & laser at second 50. At 17 second they are quite quick to move. I can not imagine that a human eye can see them at second 50.

As for a known bug: Do you assume everybody to have a qwerty keyboard , do you ? :-p

I think it is more a question of allegro initialisation than a question of code because you are already checking for KEY_Q. The main problem is that on my azerty keyboard Dodger still want me to hit A for Quit.

Give me your feedback. I need to have this key Quit correctly working ! C.a.n. .n.o.t. .s.t.o.p. .p.l.a.y.i.n.g. .!.!.

_

Actually they stop accelerating after about 20 seconds. So in theory if you can survive 30 seconds, you can survive forever.

I'm not sure I understand. Do the KEY_* constants not match the actual keys on the keyboard or am I using them the wrong way? I'm sorry, I've never even seen a keyboard other than QWERTZ/QWERTY so I don't know...

EDIT: What about when you enter your name? Does that work?

yes that's an issue with KEY_*, I think it relates to the key physical position from an US keyboard, it's not related to the ASCII value.

I've never used other methods to read keyboard's entries so I don't know it Allegro is capable of handling different keyboards mapping.

Can you please compile this program, run it, press a few keys and describe the output?

My AZERTY keyboard is at home.

But anyway just change your keyboard layout to French and see what happens when you press "Q" (wich should be "A" with the new mapping)

OK, I did that, I change the keyboard layout to FR in my OS and both the above test program and the game behave as expected. When I press 'q' on my keyboard, 'a' is printed and vice versa. And in the game, when I press my 'a' (which is 'q' on an actual french keyboard) at the "paused" message, I'm sent back to the main menu, as expected. Maybe I need to distribute keyboard.dat with game as well? If so, copy the attached file to the dame directory as dodger.exe and see if it makes a difference. If not, add this to allegro.cfg:

[system]
keyboard = FR

...and try again.

It says :
You pressed A KEY_Q Detected !!!

Keyboard = FR does nothing

But when I type my name at the end of a game, keyboard 'A' is displayed 'A' and 'Q' is 'Q'

So basically what you're saying is that scancode_to_name(KEY_Q) returns 'a'? Is this normal, a bug in Allegro or a problem on your side? Does putting keyboard.dat in the same directory as the test exe make any difference?

By the way, I get

You pressed: 'q' KEY_Q detected!!!

when I press the left most key in the middle row of letter keys (right of the caps lock) when I use the French keyboard layout in my OS.

On an AZERTY keyboard KEY_Q is the "A" key, as KEY_W is "Z" (more keys also differs ofc).

So as you have no problem with the French keyboard mapping it really looks like KEY_* use the physical placement (as I've said before) of the key on the keyboard, instead of the ASCII value.

I consider that as an Allegro bug. (back in the DOS days, we had this problem with a lot of games, for example to activate the "DNCASHMAN" cheat of Duke Nukem 3D we had to type "DNCQSH,QN")

When I press Q it only says You pressed Q , so I second EPSI

Allegro bug it is then. Not my problem anymore.

Sure it is. When I introduced it for a first time to my friend I had problems to get him out of my laptop Yesterday I brought the translated version (well it was not necessary) and the infection spreaded. Then came another friend and said: "I'd not definately play that..." We all replied: "Just try it" Well as you can predict he stayed with Dodger till the end of the lesson

After seeing what I reported I became suspicious too

Actually the thing that made the suspicious was that they were posted within three minutes of each other. No one is that good.

I really like this game. A little weird, but still good.

I hope you have some way how to check the older versions.

I had absolutely no problems compiling this in linux....worked good except for a segfault when I chose to quit (oh and I had to edit the cfg file and change fullscreen to 0 instead of 1)

Of course, I downloaded this from your site when you first posted this, so I don't have the updated src code, so I can try later to recompile it...and if you want I can send you the binary or make a tar.gz package out of it

It is funny though because I was going to use Masking a long time ago, but couldn't get it to compile under windows...(the main problem was with the alfont src for some reason)

Now if I could just get my sound working for allegro games....I have tried about everything and just keep getting "no supported synth found" when installing sound... something to do with the ALSA MIDI...dunno

EDIT

Miran, it would be nice you could put your version number in the name of the source package on the site...I had to run the game to see if I had version 1.16 or 1.18

That's good to hear. Of course you should get the latest version and recompile. Now it doesn't crash at exit anymore, at leas not that often if it does...

That's OK, I can make Linux binaries myself (Linux is my primary platform). The thing is that an Allegro program must be statically linked to be really portable because many distributions don't carry Allegro...

Yeah, I get that a lot. Alfont is a really screwed up library...

I say don't bother with MIDI, just pass 0 for the MIDI device. It is possible to get MIDI working on Linux, either through a software synth (Timidity) or if you have a sound blaster card through awesfx and a nice soundfont, but IMHO it's just not worth it. Just go with ogg or one of the tracker formats for music...

Yeah, that's a good idea, I'll do it from now on. Although you could just open readme.txt. The version number is right at the top of the file...
And I see I forgot to update the first post...

Wow, this game is amazing. My best score is 14 sec. I like this.