I'll just throw in a small comment.

Global variables are guaranteed to be 0. Everything else( locals, class variables, etc ) are not.

Glad you got it to work!

Oooooooh yeah. The player 'lighting' thing was no problem, but with the bullets and the enemies, it was rough... Each of the background's 'pixels'(not really) has to find its red/green value based its the average distance to every enemy/bullet(respectively)... I never really got it to work quite right, but it's tolerable most of the time.

Yeah...I really do need to get around to putting in a restart button... Soon!

Actually, I like it the way it is... I wasn't driven to these graphics by lack of artistic skill (though believe me, I'm plenty lacking), I just like the semi-retro look, with the basic squares and circles, pixelated explosions and the RGB-dancefloor thing... (plus the circular enemies and player made collision detection a breeze)

If I was going to add more 'graphics'(enemies, power-ups, whatever...) I would probably make a blank bitmap in-code, draw primitives to it with some function for drawing each thing, and display that as...whatever it was. But I'm kinda avoiding that until I can figure out the whole polygon-on-polygon collision thing (for checking rotated bounding-boxes). It'd be great if someone could help me out with that.

Yeah, the health thing is a good idea, but I think the gun powerup would require a more...'intrusive' way of displaying the gun power to the player. And the only reason I haven't added that health power-up is because I was thinking of this as the sorta game you sit and play over and over, trying to beat your old score. (I'm pretty sure I'm going to replace the score at the top with a timer...make it into a 'survive as long as possible' thing. Any tips on displaying properly formatted time, as accurately as possible? )

New version! I've made enough changes now that I'm bumping this project from version 1.0.beta to 1.0.1!

New version has a classy 'You died. Restart?' screen, and uses a timer rather than a point system. It also keeps track of the best time. Yeah!

Added new w1nd0z3 binary and the new source.

Yeah...but just cause it's not so much of a 'bug' as it is... 'something I don't know how to do better', so I just hacked something together that works most of the time. I'm thinking it might be worse in Linux than in Windows, because it doesn't really visibly glitch very often for me...maybe once (for a half-second or so) every two or three dozen times I play.

I'm certainly open to suggestions here.

[edit] Oh wait...did you mean the bug with colors, or the bools? (bools fixed now...ehehe...)

I am using linux on a p3 863mhz, 128meg ram, GeForce FX 5700LE, just before running it 43meg is free, and 90% of the cpu is idle. (to give an idea of resources available, will check in a moment without firefox running, if there is much difference in game performance I will edit my post)

I get 3fps, then 0fps, well nothing happens for a few seconds when there are lots of shrapnel on the screen, basically every time an enemy dies.

Specifying the GFX_FBCON driver, I got 16fps out of the game and no pauses, I could actually play it, I like the game, I have no idea what the driver it defaults to though.

I use a debian base install, then used aptitude for xorg and fluxbox, then various other programs as I needed them (http://www.go2linux.org/installing-a-light-linux-operating-system-debian-fluxbox I sort of followed this, but went with my favorite programs, rather than their suggestions.)

Its a window manager as opposed as a desktop, I can run the program without any windows manager.

Just to see, I replaced the contents of .xinitrc with "~/yeah/yeah" and started x. I got exactly the same fps and everything.

As for how many people use it, I don't have a clue, but at a guess I would say quite a few.

http://popcon.debian.org/main/x11/by_inst here is the current results for debians popularity contest of x11 packages.

It came in at 170, there is a couple windows managers that are above it, from my understanding 3349 have installed it on debian in the last month and 1205 use it regularly. I don't know how many people have the popularity contest stuff turned on, I don't, its just another thing that would slow this poor machine down and its mainly used on low end machines (IMHO or people that want a desktop to slow their "super" computers down), so lots of people might have thought the same way and skewed the results.

Game run fines

needs:

Fonts

as i mover faster it becomes harder to see the mouse pointer. i guess that is some thing that can be trained but, you could give small breaks so you can get your self back focused for earlier levels.

you need text to say press 'R' to reset.

also i like to use arrows keys to move for this type of game because it is already programed in my brain how the arrow keys work and where that are.

It is not to cramped because the trick is timing.
Notice there are time points of homeing and actcelaration for the bad dots.

they home what then enter 1 and the home on attack 2 once you get the timing its easy to doge them but, its a good thing the don't bounce off the walls or you would be in deep dodo then.

EDIT: you could make a radar for those that think it to much for them

You are assuming things instead of being sure of them. Don't assume, give them all a value at init !

I'm left handed and I don't skew to use WASD.
Then again, I use the mouse with my right hand

I was dubious too (hence my "huh?" smiley) but since then I've searched for the info, and the C99 standard specifies that all uninitialized static data is zeroed at program startup:
http://c0x.coding-guidelines.com/6.7.8.html
section 1653 onwards

The reason is that globals are stored in the .bss section of the executable which the OS will zero out when it loads the program. Globals that are initialized with a value are stored in the .data section.