War Pong

[Konedima]

Maybe I can get an answer to this question: does anyone play the fast mode in War Pong? I'm considering not including it (at least initially) to save time and effort.

[Konedima]

War Pong HD!
http://warpong.sourceforge.net/blog/

[Fost]

Is the 'HD' part a hint that you've been contacted by Sony and Microsoft to make HD versions of the game for the console download services and soon you'll be rolling in money?

[ewerybody]

Heaps of Dollars huh?

[Konedima]

I wish.

If you know anyone from Sony or Microsoft, send them in my direction though .

Although... maybe War Pong would make a nice "Moonpod Arcade" game if you guys ever decide to get into casual gaming.

[Konedima]

I just updated the blog (again) with something that I think is quite interesting. I won't tell you here, you'll have to go there (you'll be as confused as I am, hopefully).
http://warpong.sourceforge.net/blog/

[Sorrow]

2235 downloads on the middle link .

[SethP]

Umm, I'm being particularly stupid tonight...

Where's can we download the new War Pong HD?

[Konedima]

[Konedima]

Alright, I retract my statement from yesterday.

War Pong HD is out!
You can find download links in the latest blog post.
http://warpong.sourceforge.net/blog/

[Rup]

That's pretty cool.

I've had a look through the source and I have got a few comments, but obviously most of these are just style, etc., so feel free to ignore me - what you've got works well!

- my biggest comment really is that you've hard-coded the screen dimensions all over the code, e.g. in the ball movement code, bat code, etc. That would make it hard to change resolution; you could instead use global constants or something to abstract this a bit.
- you don't ever remove the timers you add with install_int_ex. (But maybe Allegro handles this automatically, I don't know, or maybe they live happily between games and don't get duplicated on re-install so it doesn't matter anyway.)
- you can simplify the main menu code by using ?: conditionals, e.g.

Code:

if(selection==0)   textout_centre_ex(buffer,selfont,"SINGLE PLAYER",512,300,makecol(255,255,255),-1);   else   textout_centre_ex(buffer,wpfont,"SINGLE PLAYER",512,300,makecol(255,255,255),-1);

could become

Code:

textout_centre_ex(buffer,(selection == 0) ? selfont : wpfont,"SINGLE PLAYER",512,300,makecol(255,255,255),-1);

cutting down the duplicated string, position parameters, etc. On the other hand this does make the individual lines longer and is maybe less readable.
- it looks like there's no sleep or similar in the menu, pause menu and help code main loops so you're constantly refreshing the text on the screen even when it doesn't change. The danger is this may eat all the machine's CPU time when it doesn't need to. However Allegro might limit the refresh rate so this isn't a problem, I don't know Allegro.
- from an object-oriented programming point of view, a bullet object should know whether it's a player 1 bullet or a player 2 bullet. Then you'd only need a single draw and single move method for each one which does the right thing. However it's easy to go too far into pure OO and I can't think of a compelling reason to change this unless you wanted to implement a single bullet limit shared by both players rather than one limit per player. (which makes no sense.)
- you're not using the CVS repository you have on SourceForge. At the moment you probably don't need it but I'd encourage people to use source control in general; it helps when you've got several people collaborating on the same project, it's an easy place to track changes in your code, store the code for each version you release, etc. And I'd recommend SVN over CVS too.
- similarly you may want to start splitting this into more than one file, e.g. break out the bullet class definition and implementation into .h and .cpp files. But again you probably don't need this yet, the single file isn't unmanagebly big.
- I don't know if you need the use_mirror=osdn on the download links but that seems to work anyway, it redirected me to a UK mirror.
- there's a bool type in C++ that accepts true/false which you could maybe use for bullon rather than an int storing 0 and 1 - although that's pretty much how it would be implemented anyway so this doesn't matter at all.

Anyhow, good job!

[Konedima]

[SethP]

Very nicely done Kone -- it's even better than the first game. I'm happy to report that it's pretty easy to get it running natively under Linux thanks to allegro being a cross-platform library. A few simple changes I'd like to suggest, though:

• Gotos are bad. In the place you used it, it's not really such a big issue, but it's always possible to use some other control structure to accomplish the same effect and using gotos may get you punched in the face, or so I've heard. In your particular case, you could change the "newstarts:" line to "while(1) {" and the "goto newstarts" to "}".
  
  
• I would appreciate it if you packaged the .png files in the source zip, it's rather hard to compile from source and play the game without them.
  
  
• If you're interested in cross-platform support, the only aspect of your code that's holding that up is the naming of the pause() function as it conflicts with the standard unix pause(). Renaming it to something like pause_game() avoids the issue altogether.
  

The following items I can't really take credit for as gcc found them for me, but:

• On line 173, you're passing too many arguments for your format string to allegro_message(). I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but if 'allegro_error' is a string you should change the format string to "Unable to set graphics mode: %s". See this for more information about printf formatting.
  
  
• You declare mpchoice and aichoice on lines 202 and 203, but you never use them. Doesn't really make a difference (besides wasting a whopping 8 bytes of memory), but I'd recommend commenting those declarations out until you implement the feature that uses them.
  

[Konedima]

[Konedima]

Using some of your advice (thanks), I've updated War Pong HD to version 1.01. Grab it from the blog (I hope by now I don't need to remind you) or the webpage, the download links should be the same.