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GRAVITON

What it is:

• A space shooter arcade game for two players to share on the same computer.
• Simple but fun

What it is not:

• Finished. Sorry guys, but I'm starting to reach the limit of what I can do on my own. I need help. Yes I'm guessing you were probably thinking that already, but I'm not a terribly good programmer, and I need some guidance on how to do some things.

This is strictly an alpha release - a playable demo, really.

REQUIREMENTS

Hmm, I don't honestly know, as of yet. You'll need a good 3D performance from whatever graphics card you have. The binary is linked against a fairly recent version of glibc, but recompiling the source will fix that. LibSDL is also required.
At the moment the code isn't very efficient, so if your computer doesn't appear to be running it at over 30 FPS, then contact me, so I know what the specs required ARE, and keep an eye out for new releases, as I want this game to be speedy.

USAGE

Run the game. There are no arguments, yet. NEW: There is now a configuration file, that is created when the game first runs. Modify this to change the default screen resolution. Key configurations and more will also appear here. Eventually this will all be done in-game. The configuration file is saved when the game is quit. For the next release there will be a cmdline option to specify manually where the configuration file lives.

KEYS

ESC, or q,      quits the game.  As there's no respawning yet, you'll want to use this a lot.
f       Fullscreen (toggle)

Red ship:
Left Shift Thrust
Left Ctrl Fire

Z       Rotate left
X       Rotate right

Blue ship:
Right Shift Thrust
Right Ctrl Fire

,       Rotate left
.       Rotate right

HOW TO PLAY

There are two ships in this particularly simple world. You should shoot each other, or at the very least, push each other into things. The two green bars on screen represent the life of the ships. Big and green is good, small and red is bad.

NEW: Respawning code has been added. Both ships have three lives. There's no indication of how many lives each person has. Yet.

CALL FOR OPINIONS

If you have any opinions on e.g. whether I am wasting my time writing this game, or things that the game could do differently, please let me know. At the moment, concentrate on small things though - network play will not be coming soon, as I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to implement it.

CALL FOR DOCUMENTS

If anybody can recommend any sources of information on how to do things such as network play, please let me know. I know how to write code for clients and servers over UDP and TCP, but what I don't know is how to write code that can deal with latency, and other problems.

Hopefully the physics engine will allow a minimal amount of data being sent to and from a server, but if I'm going to do something like this, it would need to be good.

CALL FOR DEVELOPERS

If you have some good programming ability, and would like to help with some of the big issues in the TODO file, or think you could do what I've done so far better, then email me or Jabber (widget@jabber.org) and help make this game great.

CALL FOR ARTISTS

I don't want to make a game that has better graphics than gameplay, but also I don't want graphics so bad they put people off. The game engine has been written to move arbitrary models around - all that's needed is a different constructor to draw a different ship. The game has no texture mapping yet either, although perhaps one day it will gain such abilities. Background art, and GUI art would be nice.