ZERO9 PROTOTYPE 1
This is the first working and fairly stable release of the battle system I was working at for the last months.
It works in a simple way:
IT USES 1366x78x32 of resolution. No way to change it in-game by now, but I believe everyone can run this res actually - and in higher resolutions it will be scaled up to fit the whole screen, so, don't worry.
Plugins used:
IanM's Matrix1Utils & WickedX's port of Create Sound
What you'll need:
I believe you'll need DX9 and Visual C++ runtime libraries.
Choose how many spaceships Team 1 and Team 2 will use (from 1 to 10, but I strongly recommend less than 6).
Then, you'll be brought to my Ship Select screen where you can choose any of the spacecrafts my game can generate by now, full with their stats and weapon systems.
In the select screen the controls are the following (there wasn't enough space onscreen to write them down):
UP and DOWN arrow keys: change ship.
LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys: select between the color schemes (quite lame yet).
M key: memorizes current ship for further reference
C key: retrieve the memorized ship (you need to press it twice for the screen to properly show the memorized ship, sorry for that)
RETURN: selects your ship.
1 and 2: current ship is set for controller 1 or 2
' : sets up the ship to be controlled by AI (it is not a real AI, in fact it is dumber than a bag of hammers).
3: the 3rd set of controller enables pattern-based movement. In this setting, the ship will move and shoot following its own set of directivers - how many degrees to turn, how long to move straight, when to shoot or change guns. It works kind like SHMUP's enemies.
IMPORTANT & INTERESTING:
You can set up the same controller for more than one ship.
You can, for example, set up all the ships of one team to the 1st controller and all the ships will fly together. You can set up 1 and 2 controllers for ships in the same team for a coop or whatever setup your imagination can come up with.
CONTROLS in BATTLE:
Player 1 uses LEFT and RIGHT arrowkeys to turn, UP key to shoot and DOWN key to change weapon. Remember that weapons have a cooldown time and you can't shoot or change weapon if it isn't cooled down yet.
Player 2 uses A and S to turn, W to shoot and D to change weapons, and it is subject to the same cooldown rules the player 1 is.
ABOUT SOME SUBTLE FEATURES OF THE SYSTEM:
Every ship has 10 element slots. They represent how effective is the protection against that element or the damage that can be caused by using a weapon of that element.
It varies from 0.1 (terribly weak) to 2.0 (ultimately strong).
Guns can also vary their damage randomly, and each gun has a range of power it can vary - from 10% of the total damage to 90%.
Ships can level up, but in this demo Level is always 100 - but it can be changed up to 1.000.000!
IMPORTANT!!!
Do not delete the 2 text files in the .rar file! They are used by the program to generate names!
You can edit them, but you'll need to use dots "." to separate syllables in a way the program can break the names up to build new ones. By default, the engine only supports 3 chunks by name - but you can use only 2 and it's OK.
Hope you enjoy. Source code isn't present in here - it is a mess and uses 4 different files.. If you find it important, just ask and I'll attach another .rar file with the sources. By now I just want to share my small piece of game with you and - hopefully - find out if someone can run it.
EDIT:
I forgot to tell about the HUD during the battles. It shows the ships by name and team - team 1 to the left, team 2 to the right. It is translucent - I couldn't yet bake the "perfect" HUD for the game - but if you hold CTRL it becomes opaque. There is a small issue with the HUD. It was configured initually to show up to 5 ships per team. When I set the maximum to 10 per team, the HUD does not show the names from the 6th up properly. It is easy to fix, but I procrastinated it to focus on other important features. Sorry for the inconvenience.
God is real - except if declared as integer.