Slick Forums

I've been working on this for some time now. It's a top-down space-based game which is a sort of hybrid of Lunar Lander, Asteroids, and Geometry Wars.

So far, I have implemented collisions, gravitational simulation, projectiles, lasers, missiles, a buy system, mining, a limited GUI, a simple tutorial, independent camera control, simple AI agents,and my own 2D physics engine involving simple forces, fields and impulses.

Unfortunately, its a bit too buggy for now to release, and I haven't quite figured out how to compile a JAR.

Here is a rather old video outlining the game (I should note that the framerate in the video is much slower than the game):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Zj7xXo5tk

And here are some screenies:

Orbiting a planet:


Shooting the chaingun:


Docking with a station:


Buy menu at the station:


Fighting a pirate with a laser:


Testing the missile class:

Whoa, awesome

When can we play?

Kev

cool

really nice the missles' screen !


are you using pedegree for effects too?

As soon as I fix this dang OpenAL exception and figure out how to make a jnlp.

Thanks, there generally aren't that many missiles on the screen (it slows down to about 2 FPS), but I was testing how many I could have on the screen at once there.

The effects are a mix of pedigree and my own sprite system.

i see the low fps on you screens, have you vsync on?

in general i see a slowdown when number of particles of an effect are really high.

nice go on

I have the target framerate at 60 FPS, and adjusted the update rate so that it stays fairly consistent at 60-62 FPS. Without the limiter, the game can run on my system anywhere between 80-150 FPS.

with:



or thread.sleep() ?

With setTargetFrameRate. I'm not having much of an issue with the frame rate. It only slows down when I have many entities on the screen at once, or too many particle systems, which is to be expected. The game runs at a smooth 60-62 FPS until I start causing asteroids to explode, and it will dip down to 40 FPS, because it is having to draw the dust particle system and many images associated with the gold in the asteroid. It also slows down to about 53 FPS whenever I come into contact with a pirate, mainly due to the fact that the pirate has four particle systems associated with it, and is performing messy AI routines.

oh i forgot, dust particle system is really nice too

i suppose you have a timer to make the fading effect.. ?

i use pedegree particles with length=on
(and i hope kevglass add a reset for these type effects )

Alright, vastly improved missile targeting system and fixed a bug which made enemies mostly invincible (it turns out, due to a bracketing error, they would only die when outside of their "pirate zones" I fixed this, and they die with ease).

I still haven't fixed the openAL exception, but I think I'm ready to distribute a very early demo.

Unfortunately I need to learn how to do java webstart.

Version 0.002A Changelog:
*ADDED: Ally class, in charge of ships which are helpful to the player

*ADDED: Sentries. These are allies using any weapon which sit in one place and defend against pirates. Added four of these around the planet. Two missile sentries, and two heavy cannon sentries.

*ADDED: "heavy cannon" weapon. This weapon deals a stunning 50 damage, is slow to fire, and cannot be accessed by the player (yet). The idea is to eventually make huge capital ships that have multiple heavy cannons.

*ADDED: Random enemy encounters. Random pirates will appear whenever the player has money and is far away from the planet.

*ADDED: Alerts. These pop up whenever something important has happened.

*ADDED: Targeting system. Whenever the player has missiles, he/she will target asteroids and enemies by placing the mouse over them. There will then be an indicator of which item is targeted. Missiles track the target regardless of where the player is. Eventually, the player will be able to buy a targeting computer, which will allow him to view info about specific objects whenever he/she places the mouse cursor over it.

*ADDED: New graphics and sounds

*FIXED: Crashing bug with enemies

*FIXED: enemies possessing the same turret

*FIXED: Inconsistent fire-rates

*FIXED: Upside-down image bug

/////

*STILL NEEDS FIXING:
-OpenAL 4096 Exception
-Weird fire-rate problems with the player
-Infinite loop under certain conditions when player dies
-Particle systems not being cleaned up on restart
-Alert for pirates turns on and off continually when the player leaves the pirates Ambush Zone.


*TO BE ADDED:
-New sounds for the heavy cannon and lasers
-New enemies
-New allies
-Neutrals, who will attack nobody but might be attacked by pirates
-A way to scroll the minimap, and thus make the world bigger
-A way to automatically get asteroids and sentries to orbit the planet
-Better UI
-More things to pick up, such as bonuses whenever a pirate is destroyed
-Executable .JNLP that actually works

This looks great man! Get that JNLP sorted!

can i suggest that when player are buying at station there is a sort of transparency in the buy-menu ?

Buy menu is extremely preliminary right now, but the way the buymenu looks there is actually a bug. The menu is supposed to have 50 percent transparency, but I accidentally created two instances of it, so overlayed it has 100 percent transparency. I am eventually going to flesh it out into a much more complex, tree-based menu system, and will put a rotating planet and star field in the background.