09-22-2025, 07:04 PM (This post was last modified: 10-23-2025, 08:08 PM by NakedApe.)
3D-ish Space Blaster. One-Handed Play Option. Heart Pounding Action!
I’ve worked on this baby for nine months - now it’s time to deliver. Since posting it as a WIP in May, I’ve added a final stand-off, 20% more bells and whistles, fixed bugs, killed a memory leak, included a tutorial and even pandered to @SMcNeill and gave him the spaceship-pulling-a-banner-with-his-name-on-it that he’s always wanted. https://qb64phoenix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3706 #2 (The banner is on the intro page in the game.)
I realize the instructions page looks like a lot to deal with, but it's not too bad: spin the ship, line up the dots and shoot intermittently at first. When you blow up a ship and it spits out a prize, drop everything and try to grab it by moving the ship sideways fast.
The Sentinel is always on guard, rotating at his station and ready for those blood-sucking, bomb-hurling, orbiting circles. It’s his job to blast them all before they invade his star system. No pressure on you though, space cadet! Just line em up fast and laser the targets before they blow you up. Aggressiveness pays in this game.
The space-radar sweeper-line is yellow until the ship is locked on target then it turns green and lasers are activated. Capture the boxes of spare parts (prizes) from the blown-up targets as they tumble through space. The prizes are used to build a fusion generator to help power the ship’s systems. When the generator is complete, deflector shields will begin charging.
Have fun with this. Any feedback and bug reporting is way appreciated. Ted
**UPDATED 10/3/25, made changes to the high score board per SMcNeill's suggestions. 10/23/25, added joystick support
I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but the banner alone makes it sound brilliant! It might be the weekend before I find time, but I'm definitely going to give this a go. Bookmarked the post to remember!
I finally got booty!! I gots the booty! I gots the booty!
But I did find one glitch which is terrible, game ending, awful...
I got the high score! YAAAY!! Went to type in my name for the leaderboard as I WIN... as, obviously, I was first place and absolutely the winner!!
And the game crashed and shut down. NOOOOOOO!!!!
My win was stolen from me! I want my quarters back!
/CRYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
All goofing aside, it doesn't seem like a bad little game, once you start to get the hang of it. I tend to find the auto-dodge to be less competent to the manual dodging with the arrow keys (which is a plus because who would ever do the job themselves if the machine did it better auto-magically?)
I think this should definitely support joystick usage though. Take a look at my little routine here: https://qb64phoenix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3424
The above uses one little ReadJoyStick subroutine for you, and then you can just plug in the sticks you want for your WASD and ARROW keys. Joystick(1).Hort would be left/right movement for the left pad, Joystick(2).Very would be up/down movement for the right pad. You could map buttons to the lasers firing or whatnot.
Just something to consider, which I think might be minimal changes. Otherwise, except for that awful crash at the winner's circle, I think you've came up with something really rather nice here. It's more buttons and more things to track on the screen that what I'm normally used to and enjoy for my own gaming pleasure (I'm still stuck in the era of Nintendo with one D-pad and 4 buttons ), but I can appreciate the work and time you've put into this so far.
Hey, thanks for giving it a go, Steve! I'm surprised it crashed on you - I coulda sworn I had that all ironed out. Oh well, back to the Bat Cave (Ape Tree?) for another round of testing.
Re the joystick, I mostly use Macs these days and QBPE for MacOS doesn't support joysticks.
And you're right about AutoDodge. I intentionally made it work only about 70% of the time tho it works better in the higher rounds of play. I wanted harder core, two-handed players to have a little edge for their extra effort.
Thanks again for trying it.
After your crash report, @SMcNeill, I ran this on my Dell laptop, Windows 11, ver. 24H2, and QBPE 4.1 several times. I couldn't replicate the issue. The high score board caused no glitches. So it works fine on MacOS and Windows-most-of-the-time maybe? How would I pursue this further? What were the specs of your machine? It would be nice to have a version on the forum that actually works for everybody...
Maybe it was some key combo that I tried that you didn't?
I was doing much like I would on the forums; just having fun with it. I tried to type "I WIN!" as the user name and that's when it crashed and shut down.
Perhaps something with the SHIFT key? Or the SPACE? (I tried to hold Shift and do the I(space)WIN, and it was somewhere between the I and (space) where it shut down. I'll dig into the code myself when I get some time. The closer we get to Halloween the less free time I have thanks to selling Pumpkins and Halloween related events here on the farm, so don't expect an instant answer if I find one. We tend to do corn mazes and haunted houses (barns) and apple bobbing and make apple butter and sell/carve pumpkins and do hayrides and lots of other junk to draw people. It's a rather busy time which then begins to wrap around into Christmas Tree Time for us. From October till January, my free time isn't as free as it used to be.
As for the machine I tested this on, it's a brand new Area 51, 18 inch laptop from Alienware. Top of the line specs for just about everything and close to a $5,000 price tag. If things are on some sort of timing loop (again, I haven't really studied the code yet sufficient to know), then that might be a possible source. I tested Desius's game for him and the encounters there were normal on his PC and yet seemed to be occurring about every tenth of a second on mine. LOL!
Do me a favor and test the joystick code I linked to above one more time on your machine. Sam (a470g) mentioned that it worked for him, and he's normally our Mac dev/user. I was thinking _DEVICES worked with the joystick (last I heard), but not with the keyboard. It might be that one of our latest versions patched whatever issue was stopping it from working properly for you. I'm really not positive on that either, as I'm not a Mac guy and don't test/keep up with everything with regards to that OS like I try to do with Windows. I'm curious if we got it fixed, or if it's something still broken, and if it's broken, might it be something we can get fixed soon(tm).
10-03-2025, 12:42 AM (This post was last modified: 10-03-2025, 01:33 AM by SMcNeill.)
Steve, I tried the joystick code - nothing happened, but I don't think it's a QB issue. I think it's a MaOS problem. There are no joysticks for Mac and MacOS's settings for Controller Switches is lame and inadequate. I bought this lil, shitty, $20 joystick which is supposed to be for Macs and it didn't work. The OS recognized the buttons but not the x /y input from the stick. I'll sniff around the web a bit more, but it seems only modern bluetooth game pad thingies are recognized. Maybe I'm on the wrong platform...
P.S. I typed "I WIN!" into the high score input routine in the game and it worked fine. I can't see how you could've messed up my game so badly!
Only comment I found which might help you: If you do buy this joystick in order to use it with a Mac, I can recommend the USB Overdrive shareware driver, which made it possible for me to use this joystick for its intended purpose.
I hope it works for you. As I've said before, I don't have an actual Mac for any sort of testing. This year I bought the new Alienware laptop for an arm and a leg, so that's my computer purchase for a bit. Next year though, I might look for a cheap Mac mini or something, just for testing purposes. I'm still debating taking my old laptop and installing Linux on it, just for that reason, but it doesn't seem as necessary since you can run Linux in a Virtual Machine.
Wish there was some simple way to use a Mac in a VM, but every install process I've ever seen seems to be about a bazillion steps of insanity. Would be nice to just, "Download this, click install, emulate a Mac!" But something like that would probably break a bazillion copyright laws. LOL!
https://qb64phoenix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3706 #2 (The banner is on the intro page in the game.)
