Ghoscher's Blog

Introduction (a boring one maybe 😉 ?)

Good morning\evening or whatever suites your timezone :).
I’ve been waiting for this :D!, I’ve finished programming the alpha release of the game.
The reason I’m publishing it right now is because It might take me some time to have a full game, so by publishing an alpha release I can get opinions & suggestions from people which will encourage me to complete the game.

This release isn’t meant for end-users but rather for fellow programmers.

Unfortunately my laptop doesn’t have a graphics card so I was forced to work on the game using Reach Profile, that made developing the game more difficult, for instance, in Reach Profile:

• You cannot render to more than one render target using one draw call.
• Problems when rendering textures or using render targets that dimensions are not powers of two.
• Indices in any IndexBuffer must be 16 bits integers.

Anyway I compiled the game for both profiles Reach & HiDef, but couldn’t make much use of the features supported by HiDef, here are the differences of the two versions of the game:

This mini table almost reminds me of the tables “Free vs Preminum Account” in file sharing sites 🙂

How to play:

Controls:

• W\S – Moves forward\backward.
• A\D – Strafes left\right.
• Space – Jumps ( not actually jumping hahaha 😀 ).
• R – Reloads the active gun.
• Q – Switches active gun
• G – Replaces the current gun with the one on the ground.
• Move mouse to aim.
• Move mouse while holding the right mouse button to change robot direction.
• Left mouse button – Fires from the active gun.
• Holding the left mouse button will charge the weapon if it’s chargeable, to fire release the button.
• Tab – Shows score board.

Notes about game play:

• Each robot can hold two weapons, one on each arm, you can only use on weapon at a time.
• Get weapons and ammo from spawn points:

One bug that really bugs me is this : if the game is running slowly (low fps) the arms of the robot start to shake from left to right :(, I’m not sure yet about the reason, but I really must fix this in the next release.
Another issue is aiming when the screen resolution is wide: enemies at the left\right edge of the screen cannot be reached.

Download link

RobotWarz Alpha Release (Bin) (~22 MB)

please use the RobotWarz Launcher.exe to run the game.

Facts about the game

• This game was a graphics project for college, they demanded that projects should be done using OpenGL (I hate OpenGL 😦 ), so I decided to take my chances & use XNA, the interview went ok but only after a long argument 😀 .
• Terrain was completely programmed by my colleague Hashem Al-rifai, this terrain is infinite, and it uses a quad tree algorithm to render only the visible parts of the terrain.
• All the models in the game are mine :), They were simple enough for me to model them myself using 3DS Max.
• Most textures aren’t mine.
• The sound effects in the game aren’t mine & I intend to replace them in the next release, I was in a hurry before the project interview so I picked the sounds from free sound effects websites, most of them don’t fit :(.
• One dark secret about the floating robots is that right now I don’t know how the hell should I animate legs :(, I don’t want to use md2 model format. anyway, floating robots are cool :D.

Why isn’t network playing supported?

Right now I have no networking skills, also keep in mind that networking in games is different from desktop applications that use networking, you have to sync everything between the server & the clients, prevent cheating & more complicated stuff.

The game will be much more fun if networking is enabled.

Any way I’ll see what I can do.

When is the next release?

I’m not really sure about that, the current release needs some optimization & more testing, and I have many ideas for the game such as new weapons, gadgets that can be attached to the robot, new robots…

I guess I’ve talked too much.

I’ll try in the next days to explain some of the techniques used in the game, I maybe write some short tutorials on that.

Thank you for reading & happy playing 🙂

Feedback is always welcome :).