Tick Tock Car Race and source code – Windows

So here is what I put together for the SDLTutorials.com car contest. Its pre compiled for windows but includes the sorce code so you should be able to get it going on any other platform with SDL support. Its a bit of a mess but its functional and complete. Its looking like the deadline will likely be extended so I might go back and fix it up and add some better commenting.

Either way I’ll port it to Wii sooner or later. Probably later rather then sooner though. I want to do a quick port/remake of Don’t Get Crushed for PS3, then I want to get the demo for The Prophecy complete which I have been repeatedly intending to do and then delaying, finally I really want to finish some things in Cubicle Shooter and by the time I finally finish those three things I’ll probably have seen something shiny to spend a decade chasing. Yay procrastination.

The music used in the game is Tarmac by et_.

Download the Windows version and source code
Alternate links

dot TOIF (that other image format)

I was having some trouble with image loading on PS3 so I wrote a simple program using SDL to convert PNG files into something easier to work with.

To use it just place the file you want to convert into the same folder as PNGtoTOIF.exe, rename the file to image.png, then run PNGtoTOIF.exe and it should generate a image.toif file based on it.

The first line in the resulting file is the image width, second is image height, next is the red then green then blue then alpha values for each pixel. Each variable is stored as human readable text. The files are incredibly bloated (it makes uncompressed BMPs seem tiny) but its a functional solution and was easy to make.

Its worth noting that Cubicle Shooter v0.3 (which is what this was primarily made for) is hard coded to only load a 64×64 image to use as its texture for the cubicle dwelling NPCs. So you will probably run into problems if you try to just replace that texture with a differently sized one. I’ve already fixed up the toif texture loading function though and it will be part of the games next update.

Download the Windows version
Alternate links

Download the Source Code
Alternate links

To compete or not to compete– that is the question

Just prior to turning my focus to PS3 homebrew I was working on, among other things, a 2D racing game made with SDL. I was making it for the latest contest going on at sdltutorials.com.

It has some kinda cool stuff in it. There are destructible walls, a camera that rotates and zooms in real time (keep in mind that its a truly 2D game and doesn’t use OpenGL or in any way involve mapping things onto hardware accelerated polygons), sprite based text that isn’t mono space (a super simple thing but still something that I’ve never done before) and some old school style motion blur.

But now the contest is reaching its conclusion and I don’t know what I should do. I can definitely get the game done in time. Perhaps not with AI controller cars to compete against but definitely as a time trial style racing game. Except I’m having doubts about whether or not I should submit it.

The Pros:
I could potentially receive $20 USD in a pay pal account.
Once the game is finished I could easily and quickly port it over to Wii which I’ve been feeling bad about abandoning for PS3.

The Cons
Feeling like a jerk. I still consider myself to be a noob and I did even learn some things that I didn’t know yet from their recent post about Alpha-blending in SDL. But I have actually been making games for a while now (one person on psx-scene referred to me as being prolific in the Wii homebrew community which I found amusing largely because the term prolific doesn’t actually imply anything about quality) and I havent actually been following the tutorials at sdltutorials.com (most of what I’ve learned has been from trial and error and random pages found on google and only viewed once). It never actually says in the rules that you need to have learned this much from this site or that this must be one of if not the first game you’ve developed. But its implied or at the least I perceived it to be.

UFO Racer – Wii

I started working on a racing game. I’m borrowing graphics for it from an older game I made for PC over 9000 years ago but I’m programing it again from scratch and this time its going to be 2D with a top down perspective and made for Wii.

The steering is controlled by tilting the wiimote (just like you do for Excite Truck or Mario Kart). I’ve never done anything using the accelerometer before but it was actually really easy to implement and already works fairly well although I’ll probable tweak to turning speed later. You hold down the 2 button to move forward.

Another thing that’s somewhat new to me are the rotating sprites. The rotation of the ship is pre rendered but the track is actually rotated in real time. SDL (my primary game development library of choice) sadly doesn’t actually have any built in support for rotating surfaces but luckily there is nothing that cant be accomplished with a few get/put pixel functions and a little bit of math. It will never be as fast as it would be if it was done with GRRLIB but it is already running at a tolerable frame rate in the high thirties and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to get a bit more speed out of it.

Its just a test demo and I don’t really recommend you bother with downloading it yet but I figured I would share what I’ve been doing.

Download Links for Wii version

TheyDoNotDie R15

You can shoot again. If you shoot a zombie they die. If a zombie gets too far away they are repositioned closer by. The darkness around the border of the screen and the cloud shadows or whatever you want to call is back.When you get too close to a zombie the borders of the screen turn red and the camera zooms in. When you or a zombie is injured blood is dropped. I’ve worked back in on screen text but unlike with the older releases this time text is textured onto polygons so it scales perfectly with the resolution of the screen. I think that is pretty much everything that has changed. Still not as complete as the twelfth release but its getting there.

Download Links for Windows PC version