Not from my point of view. I'm good at general thinking but poor at specifics. For example, with a tilemap I would

Besides which, you're missing a large part of the point - this is the demo game! The physics code runs from line 38 to line 303 of game.c. Comments are still sparse but the code is not particularly 'compact', and the special case bits for dealing with movement from one quadtree node to the next occupy more than 40 lines on their own doing almost identical things for high and low bounds of x and y.

Whatever level the designer wants to implement with whatever combination of shapes, that remains all that needs to be understood and all that needs to be documented. Plus the game gives a good mix of sprite and vector graphics, demonstrating one of the advantages of Allegro over e.g. SDL (which doesn't include vector primitives in its software renderer).

Furthermore, if I can quote Elias's demo game page:

Vector levels simply give more bang for your kilobyte! At the minute the two dat files associated with the game total about 285kb. The hilly level level is pure ASCII and 50kb (packfile support remains unimplemented because I've used ungetc but I can probably just seek backwards instead). I personally feel that this is a much more diverse demo game in terms of onscreen display, yet the total data size is reduced by around 13% and that's without it all being compressed.

Ah, my habit of hopping about while drafting my posts has backfired due to poor proof reading! Ditto for attributing Evert's webpage to you. If it makes you feel any better, people sometimes call me Thomas Fjellstrom! Allow me to fix my sentence at least:

"Not from my point of view. I'm good at general thinking but poor at specifics. For example, with a tilemap I would..." probably have to do some very hacky stuff with pixel testing and probably attributing normals to pixels 'near' edges in all of my tiles. Given that I personally can't do art I would have to do the appeals for art I always get so stuck with followed by manually going over the submitted pieces with a specialised editor I'd written to insert this information. Total work is greater even if sitting back and thinking "oh, I just copy the bitmaps to the screen" seems prima facie easier than "now how can I use the dot product to get vector collisions" but ends up harder for this sort of game.

But alas it doesn't use either of those. Possibly only rotate_scale_sprite (or whatever that one is called) and stretch_blit make up the ingame stuff due to the way objects move and the resolution independence.

I'm amazed you guys can do development like this. I can't even find where to download the latest version.

Sourceforge has a CVS server...

I was suggesting opening a new project... and as regards to waiting times, the three projects I have registered on sourceforge all got approved in about a day; the last of these projects, however, was registered at least two years ago, so it may no longer be as fast as it used to be.

What 'alternatives' have SVN?

[EDIT] It seems like a good system... out of curiosity, is it easy to use from different operating systems? With TortoiseCVS on Windows, I can do a CVS commit and update from Windows Explorer with a pair of clicks from the mouse

I had too look up "deluge" in the dictionary to find out what the exams actually did to me, according to TH. It proved to be a word very descriptive of my situation back then . My creativity got a bit dampened...

But now, the exams are over, and my grades turned out to be quite satisfactory (4.84 on scale 2 to 5), so I had a nice boost and could get back to work, both on my own projects and on this one (does it have a name apart from Allegro Demo yet?).

Attached are the frames for the skater. The first four are - small speed, more speed, great speed/falling/braking, standing still. The other three are there to illustrate how big my problems are when I try to get the "pushing off" animation right. That's my second stab at it, and he still looks like a victim of a mischievous chiropractor. I can't find any image or movie reference to base my pixelling on. I even tried installing THPS4 just to take a peek at the animation, and to my great surprise, I found that the skater is never pushing off - he just crouches a little, and the skateboard magically starts rolling. Maybe we could do this too, that would save me some trial&error?

I'm also not entirely happy with the end-level door, but at least you can tell what it is...

Hope you weren't too annoyed by the delay.

Also, I would suggest changing the color of the sky. The one you chose is pretty dark, and while it suits the rain theme well, it just doesn't look too good, and the sprites were made to appear better on light backgrounds.

Okay, I'll change that.

I see what you mean. While he is pushing, he should be just as capable at pushing and with rolling resistance drag isn't quite as I've implemented it.

I was going to have one mediumly sized level. It's only meant to be the demo game after all - and how long have you ever spent with the demo game?

No better name, and if it acquires one then we'll either have to ask Miran nicely to fill in more of the font used to display the name (and 'Allegro 4.2.0' in the intro) or else draw a title screen logo!

Oh, yeah, it was chosen based on the colour at the back end of the water. So I'm not really sure what to do about all of that.

While I'm here, can anyone help with any wave sort of noises?

Attached is the full font with all ASCII characters. In the "release version" I removed the unused ones because of size reasons...

You're welcome to replace it with something better. Same goes for all data I put in. It was all supposed to be temporary until I would come up with something better. The main font is just some random free TTF converted to PCX with my font editor...

My suggestion: Make it easy for people to make their own levels and plug them in the game, and see how many add-ons popup over time...

Personally I think most people would like to have it so that you have to repress it. If you want to jump right away, repress while in air.

Please at least have it as an option. I can guarantee that a lot of people will comment on it otherwise. It's one of those things you never hear the end of it. (I mean look at me go. :p )

Otherwise, keep up the good work!

Just played the latest one. GCC complains about "no newline at end of file" in Animation.h. Also, all the controls for the game are "none" by default. Maybe preselecting left, right, space would be a better choice?

One issue with level design. There simply has to be more fruit! Put like five, ten in a group, and not only after jumps, also along the ground... It'll be more fun that way, at least I think so.

What about the exit door that I attached together with the skater? Is it alright, or wrong in some way?

Also, if I could convince you to change the sky to some less ugly (:P) color, I could redraw the clouds to look more, well, cloudlike. I suggest RGB(110, 212, 255), that's what I use for background .

No need for exclamation marks, just try the new textures (attached) and tell me what you think . And this time, if something needs improving, please say so .

EDIT:
When doing the first texture, I didn't have any idea how it will be used by the game. Hence, I included perspective myself (which was totally unnecessary, as it turned out), and shaded the colours as if it was to be used as a 2d tile. Due to perspective (and the fact that you flipped the image vertically ), some features were distorted or lost, so the the texture looked a bit crappy. The new one also has issues (griddiness), I'll try to iron them out later this evening.

You forgot to include thanks._tx in the last package (crashes).

I think the clouds don't look that bad. We could benefit from including more varieties of them (though that could hurt the size of the package, I guess).

The new level is fantastic compared to the previous one. I actually had fun playing this one, and took some time to finish it. I think that Allegro will benefit from a demo game that is actually fun to beat . And now that the guy actually has a skateboard, his movement actually makes sense.

About the animation - maybe adding some sort of delay when changing from one state to another would solve the flickering problem? As in the guy has to be airborne for at least 0.1 sec to have his frame changed to "mid-air" and so on... As for the pushing-off, I need to force myself to work on that frames more. The way it is now, he doesn't seem to put any effort into it...