Hack away :-) Love to see people make my code better for their purposes.
@TerryRitchieYour game is truly awesome! The visuals are gorgeous, the sounds are rich and immersive, and the movement & controls are fluid and responsive. It _feels_ like classic Asteroids, just better.
Do you document the vector format or otherwise have a utility program to draw or edit the game objects?
Also, there are a couple of mods that I always wanted to see in an Asteroids game. I'm not sure if any of these are within my skill (& free time!) range or would interest anyone else to take it up, but here goes.
I. ASTEROIDS COLLIDE WITH EACH OTHER
Maybe they smash each other apart or maybe they just bounce off each other.
But I always thought it kind of unrealistic that they just fly through each other.
II. GREATER VARIETY OF ASTEROID SIZES
Including really really big ones and really small ones.
How hard would it be to add asteroids of sizes
- almost as small as the player's shots
- 1/4 of the screen
- 1/3 of the screen
- 1/2 of the screen
- 1x size of the screen (would completely fill the screen)
- upto 2x or 3x the size of the screen
?
And the bigger ones wouldn't break up when the player shoots them.
Instead shooting at them digs a "tunnel" into them.
The player can fire into the asteroid and eventually fly through it.
In this way, the player can "cut" the asteroid in two.
These bigger asteroids wouldn't rotate very fast (maybe at harder levels) so the player doesn't have to worry about it moving rotationally as they fly through it.
III. 4-player Spacewar! variant where players battle (or cooperate) in the asteroids field. Atari sort of tried this with Space Duel but they left out some elements that made Asteroids so great (actual asteroids, the intense sounds like the deep rumbling of the ship's engines). Also a local multiplayer game for 4+ players makes it fun at a party!
I have a ton of other ideas stored up over the years for a game like this, but those are a couple of the less complicated ones.