'Galaxy Renegade' - recovered unfinished game

[Victragic]

Hi all,

I thought I'd lost all traces of this game as I don't seem to have the source files any more. Thought I'd share it anyway.

It's a space shooter game I'd written to teach myself about vector graphics. It's like a simple Time Pilot and Asteroids.



It will run on a Vic with 24k memory - PAL and NTSC. The screen is a double-buffered bitmap, and there were plenty of precalc tables to get it to run at a decent speed, which is why it takes so much memory.

Download
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BypQg ... authuser=0

[darkatx]

That was insanely fun! Amazing fluid arcade action. Well done!

[joshuadenmark]

Smooth action - rename file to .prg and run it

Thanks for this share Victragic.

[Misfit]

Wow, amazing

[tokra]

Great fun! And very fluid gameplay. Just missing some sound-effects

[pixel]

WOW! *tossing eyes back into their sockets*

The VIC community seems to have hit an era where it shows the other platforms what action gaming is about. Could put a couple of VIC releases on a Raspberry PI, put the PI into an arcade case and then place the case in a pub …and I already know what will happen...

I SO hope you still got the source code…

Too easy, though.

[beamrider]

Wow. Spectacular!

Really fast and smooth. Doesn't look like a Vic game at all.

[Victragic]

Thanks for the comments and I'm glad it still provided some fun even though it was still quite a way from finished.

[orion70]

Incredible vector graphics! Smooth and everything. I'm not into that kind of games normally, but well, in this case I'm making an exception . Really good looking also on a green phosphor monitor.
Congrats on this game. Please, finish it (sound?), and it will be a great 2015 release.

[Mike]

Really cool! I'm looking forward trying this out on real hardware in the next days.

The screen is a double-buffered bitmap

Here you are cheating a bit, aren't you?

It's more like a 'sparse' bitmap, with a single character used for empty 8x16 tiles *), and two text screens working on different (dynamically allocated?) ranges of the remaining available character set in RAM. Obviously, the extra overhead of allocating the chars for the line plots nicely weighs in against the reduced time for clearing the screen and near-zero overhead for flipping the pages.

I would have expected, that the co-ordinates of most rotated objects are explicitly stored, as well as the title caption. But what really blew me away was the rotating 'LEVEL UP' caption. Is that one rotated on the fly?

Even without sound, it would have been nice to see as technology demo on this year's Revision.

Please complete this game, with sound, and more aggressive enemies, and show up with this on Revision next year!

Cheers,

Michael

*) much the same way how the type-in HYPER GRAPHICS works - with 208x256 resolution -, which served as incentive for tokra and me to think of new ways of doing bitmapped graphics on the VIC-20.

[majikeyric]

WOW! very nice and smooth !

Too bad you lost the sources.

[Victragic]

Mike, you are correct - the screen is redrawn from a full bitmap - there is time used to account for which screen locations need to be displayed, but the time saved by not copying blank locations makes up for this . It allows a larger screen than otherwise would be possible.

However, all the objects are calculated and drawn every frame, with the exception of the score lines . Each triangle is made up of a centre point, with distance and angle of the corners of the triangle calculated on the fly, relative to the centrAl coordinate.

The centre points of the enemies are absolute, this is true - originally they were relative to the centre of the screen and the whole screen would rotate while the player ship stayed still - but this was rather distracting to play.

I also had the title rotating, but I recall my 9 year old saying it was just 'showing off' so we changed it to static.