Level 2, the aliens start shooting back!

Well...it has been a huge learning curve, but I switched to C++ and rebuilt from the ground up. There is no question the new version is better. I chose SDL, which I have never touched before but I'm glad I went that direction.

80% of my time was spent figuring out how to do simple things. For example, getting text on screen took a full day of trying to figure out SDL_TTF. Once I figured it out no problem. I admit I'm not nearly as comfortable in C++ as QBasic/QB64, but the upward mobility of C++ is nice.

Just so you know...the aliens do shoot back now. And there is a high score system. It's a lot more fun now. I think I am actually going to start building a phyical arcade cabinet for it.

Welcome crane550!

I tried playing the game for a short time and it worked well. I found the response to arrow key presses interesting, kind of "floaty", nice feel except when it dwells on edge of screen when trying to reverse direction. (I have not examined code to see if anything special was used to achieve that effect.)

First thing I would do is take advantage of _MOUSEHIDE command.

Thanks!

Here is my logic for the edges...tell me if I'm right or wrong. I wanted this to be a velocity game. Each key press add velocity to the ship, and it maintains that velocity. You don't actually get to change the ships position, the computer does that. I did add a decay to the velocity, so contrary to strict Newton physics it does slow down...slowly. When you hit the edge your velocity remains the same in that direction, but the position is limited. So you have to overcome your velocity in the other direction before you turn around. That means when you stop on the edge it isn't just a quick key press to return back towards the center of the screen. The idea was to encourage the player to not simply scrub the walls.

I also wanted to encourage the player to hang out 1/3 from the bottom of the screen, but not the very very bottom so there is also a "nudge" that kicks the player towards Y = 290, or something around there.

Feel free to suggest otherwise (I may or may not do it. :) ) There are pros and cons to this.

Any recommendations on the overall structure of the program?

Do not hate me, but I might port it over to C++ and continue development from there, although the barrier just to get pixels on the screen in C++ is quite high.

Alex

Hello,

I am brand spankin new here. This is my very first post.

A little background first.

I started this game when I was 8 years old, when I was playing around with Qbasic on my IBM PS/2 386. I don't have the original code I started with, but I remember printing it out on a dot matrix pinter and the code totaled something like 12 pages. It was probably quite the mess, as I didn't understand the concept of functions at that point. IIRC the whole thing was just one massive loop from start to end.

Not that my code is probably much better at this point. I am still using a lot of global variables.

I tried running it on my old 386 just for fun inside of vanilla Qbasic 4.5....and it's slow. Extremely slow. I think it's safe to say this will only be a modern computer game now. Back then I only had 2 enemy ships, now I can go up to 500 (or more, there is a point where practicality wise it doesn't make sense, though the code seems to handle it just fine.)

My goal is to port it to the Raspberry pi and make an arcade cabinet...while continuing to improve on the game of course!

My code is is 100% from scratch. I will have some questions about getting QB64 to work on the Raspberry pi. I would really like to compile it for that.

As for that feel free to comment or critique my code. I'm here to learn!

Alex