Wuh!?

Original idea from this thread

OK, the tank idea was cool but it eventually turned into a a turret game. The tank moving/aiming controls didn't work so well in a single player, a little slow, so I turned the tanks into turrets and did a turret-defense type game.

The game is bare-bones. It's for testing the "robustness" of my little framework thing I'm working on. Technically, the game came together quickly! If I feel like it, I might add damage to the turrets, shields (shields are drawn but they serve no purpose), power-ups, etc.

Screenshot

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Download

Basic Turret Defense Game V1

Instructions

1. shoot with the left turret using mouse b1

2. shoot with the right using mouse b2

3. there can only be 4 bullets on the screen at a time.

4. have fun watching in debug mode (F1)

5. starts slow, speeds up for difficulty

6. enemy bombs are positioned randomly, so you may experience an even distribution in one game only to have massive waves of bombs in another.

7. no sound

8. press ESC to quit, or use the close button in your window. (I recommend ESC, the close button can still get backed up from events)

9. only one "level"

10. if you lose, close and start again.

11. on the top left is the number of enemies left

Questions

1. How many tries does it take you to win?

2. Do you experience any slow-downs or serious time stutters?

3. Does it run? need dlls?

1. First attempt, with not even one that manged to get by my furious burst of fire.

2. None (2ghz laptop)
3. It does run, I would even say smooth.

So you expect me to boot into windows just to see your game?
NSND; No Source No Download.

1) I never winned. I tried twice. I suck at double coordination games.
2) Nope. Athlon X2 2.7 GHZ
3) Yes, pretty smoothly.

I like the idea of your framework(I red your other post). Maybe I'll start a fresh one after CH. It'd be so much cleaner than the mess I have actually

Slart: There's been a screenshot there since he started the thread

Is the sourcecode in the screenshot?

Oh, the meaning of NSND changed? I didn't get the memo.

It changed for this topic at least.

It changed for the scope of my posts in this thread.

What's the Einstein image in the data folder used for?

Holy shit, when did Allegro become bloated with 10+ dlls?

Anyway, I didn't win, only tried a few times though. Ran smoothly, ran fine. The bursts were weird, and the game was difficult at spots where you'd have a bunch of dots bunched together but can only shoot 4 bullets (also, the bullets slowing down near their destination seemed really weird at first).

1) only tried once, was pretty hard with a trackpad (especially since it only has one button!)
2) Nice and smooth
3) Probably too many dlls

You haven't been paying attention to Allegro 5's development, have you?

Either that or buy a copy if Windows if you don't have it.

No download then. My source code is still top secret. Not to say that I don't support Linux, just not for this purpose. If I were to make a real game then I'd look into providing some kind of support for the other platforms.

Apart from the framework code, here's the code I wrote for the actual game:

I agree. Game balance is pretty much non-existent in this demo. If anyone can beat it, I don't believe them, unless they can post a screenshot of the win screen

Yea, I think half of them don't even get used. I wish I could dump them in a folder or something so the EXE is the only file in the root of the folder.

So from what I hear, no technical problems? Awesome! While making it, I noticed some slowdown when I went to about 80 enemies and 4 bullets on the screen. That's 320 separating-axis tests, so I limited the collisions tests to on-screen objects and it fixed it.

Ah, just forgot to take it out.

The more I play it, the more I grow to hate your bullet acceleration/deceleration. It throws me off shooting thingies that are further away.

I Won!
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Here you go Baf, an EXE with linear bullet trajectory.

Nice dario. I haven't even beat it, yet.

Is the game for "Now Folks," or is it a direct address?

both.

I don't believe him. But how can he prove it? He could easily copy my screenshot.

The game runs without any problem for me. I couldn't win the game though.

Sorry Oates, but your lack for OOP makes me want to cry

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I won too!

I beat it twice in a row!!

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You'll be OK. All the OOP is under the hood in this example.

Matthew, your kerning is a mess.

Hey everybody, try the version with linear bullet trajectories. It's easier. I find the trick is to aim with the cursor and shoot below the bullets.

The game is pretty easy once I realized that there is no penalty for shooting, so I just kept clicking as fast as I could.

Anyway the fonts are pretty smooth, nice job.

So even when your framework will be complete you do not intend to release it? Do you plan on making money with it?
Anyway, looking at the code it seem like your framework is nice and interesting though I didn't see anything about image animations (your objects only changed in place/size/opacity but seem not to change their image), and while I can't really think of a better way (partly because I haven't given it any thought ) it seems pretty likely that in the future you will end up extending your framework to support more animation types when the currently defined constant ones just won't do for some complex animation that you will need.

Perhaps. I'd need to write a manual.

Cool, that's your decision, I'm just curious.
If I ever wrote something worthwhile I'd probably release it publicly (unless of course I was paid for it under an agreement that does not allow me to release it), in the worst case scenario it would be poorly documented.
Partly for the bragging rights, partly to be helpful to other people.

1) I beat it on the first try, although I was down to one energy. But I got a really even distribution with no heavy waves, so it was kind of easy.

2) No big slowdowns, but like I said it was a very even distribution, so I didn't have more than eight or nine bombs on screen at any one time. Maybe an even dozen near the end.

3) It ran great on my computer, didn't complain about any dlls at all (and right now the only dll I know for sure is on my computer is the allegro 4.2 dll).

As for the game itself, it's well done in my opinion. The graphics were neat and the gameplay flowed smoothly. Add a little more variety and I might have to play again... and again and again.

Man that game was so easy I didn't even download it and I beat it.

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Okay I'll probably try it.

Edit:
The game takes awhile to init, and then I see some images, but it takes ~3-4 seconds to render each frame. Unplayable for me. Sounded fun though. Are you doing something with the large background each frame? Something takes a very long time for each frame.

EditEdit:
Even after adding 2GB of RAM, it doesn't improve. I don't know what it is.
On a somewhat irrelevant note can someone tell me if 2 sticks of DDR1 RAM of equal size is redundant.

Do you have a graphics card? It sounds like you don't have a graphics card.
Or need drivers?

The only thing I can think of that could be causing a major slowdown, more so for software rendering, would be the vignette image. It requires a full screen of blending.

try taking "vignette2.png" and "sheild.png" out of the images folder and run it again. Or, replace them with something small like a 1x1 pixel image.

Do you have any problems running other games?

Do you force OpenGL upon the user?

What? There are modern video chipsets with the most recent drivers use the default MS software OpenGL implementation?

No.

Felix, what does your memory and processor usage look like when the program is running?

Then he could try switching to OpenGL via the config file. Although it's unlikely that it runs better than D3D, which I think is default.

D3D is something I use for PSX emulating. It runs fine for me. OpenGL2 does not No graphics card, no pixel-shader.

I'll try the given advice though.

Also, I run other games just fine. Some Allegro games too. Except for the ones that need XNA Framework...haven't gotten that to work yet. My own programs run too, (4.2/4.4) But Allegro Programs use all my CPU. My "prettiest" program uses all my CPU, but barely any slow-down. This program uses a bunch of CPU too. I added 2GB of RAM and it didn't help any, I'm guessing the absence of a graphics card is a problem, but dang 4-5 seconds for each frame.

Edit: Enabling OpenGL pwns the program during initialization. No speed up for D3D.
Shrinking the images did nothing for speed, and neither did deleting them.
Does Allegro 5 have the Five Finger Salute option? I keep having to use Windows Task Manager to close the program. I guess the close button only checks once a loop, and well I don't get many loops.

I don't really know what happened. Maybe Allegro 5 hates me.

EditEdit:

Uh, I'll get to that screenshot, but I can say the CPU spikes on start-up.

EditEditEdit: Cool. I didn't know the quote tag works without a specified name.

The close button is handled as an event. Unless events are piling up somehow (which might be what's happening) it wouldn't be getting skipped.

Since I had some problems with your Haku game I decided to download this one and test it. Game refreshes at one frame per second at best, needles to say unplayable, are there some configurations available in order to increase game performance? My hardware is a P4 2400MHz, 1GB ram, FX5700le.

He could try setting ALLEGRO_NO_PRESERVE_TEXTURE and provide an option to disable all fonts.

What sort of events? From the screenshots its a relatively simple game? Do you have any other Allegro 5 programs so I can see if my computer can't handle them?

Edit: Okay for real I'll get those specs. Also I forgot to say you spelled shield wrong in the files, and why is there a vignette2 and not a vignette1?

EditEdit:
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The mountain shapes are from just moving the windows around. The plateau looking thing is the program running. I guess my computer has a bad CPU.

That doesn't help solve the issue.

Your post doesn't help either. Perhaps your mom can help solve the issue.
All informalities aside, I was just addressing this post:

Some information regarding this extreme slowdown on Paul and Felix. I tried myself in my game setting the ALLEGRO_MEMORY_BITMAP flag, and it worked like crap, pretty much how they say it works, 3 or 4 FPS, totally unplayable. My guess, A5 falling back to these memory bitmaps?