Physical Asteroids
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By Alec Rivers
alec.rivers@rl.af.mil until 8/13, mail@alecrivers.com afterward


Introduction & Physical: The Game Creation Engine
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        I am currently developing a 2D physics engine, designed to be used not just as an addition to games but as an entire development system. It has incorporated functions for window creation, keyboard handling, graphics, and game flow. It also streamlines the object creation and management aspects of game design. Furthermore, the presence of the physics engine makes collision detection and object destruction a matter of course, and vastly simplfies the creation of interactive elements. The bottom line is, this tool makes it -insanely- easy to write games.
        Physical Asteroids began as a demonstration of this engine. The demonstration version was completed some time ago, and now I am writing this partly for its own merits as a game, but mainly to see what it's like to actually create a game with this system. This is an early alpha and right now there is not much of a game, as all you can do is fly a ship around and grapple on to things, but the core framework is largely complete.
        I have also included the object editor, which you can use to open and edit the .pob files in the data directory. To create your own Physical Objects, you'll need to save images as .TGAs and auto-generate from within the object editor. I use Photoshop 7.0 to create the TGAs.


Controls
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                Player 1:

Accelerate      up arrow
Turn Left       left arrow
Turn Right      right arrow
Fire Cannon     L- or R-CTRL
Fire Grapple    L- or R-SHIFT

Quit            Q or ESC
Render Faster   PGUP
Render Smoother PGDOWN

The green arrow points to the nearest asteroid, the red arrow back to Bob's Junkyard, your home base. Go get the asteroids and drag them back to Bob's. If you get them near enough to the entrance, the friendly workers at Bob's will latch on to them with their tractor beam and bring them in. Watch out, though, greed may get the best of them if you're in the crusher when an asteroid is being brought in. Once crushed, the little asteroid bits get sucked into the main processing plant. Eventually this will make you money.

Note: Bob's Junkyard uses a new system in the physics engine for static objects. It is not physically simulated and is created straight from an image using the Tools -> Create Static Object option in the Physical Object Editor. (The image should be an RGBA TGA image, 0 alpha means not solid, anything else is solid.)


System Requirements
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A tolerbly fast CPU,  > 500 MHz
A 3D accelerator card with support for OpenGL (see below)


A Note on Graphics
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        Physical Asteroids uses OpenGL for graphics. Only high-end graphics cards support OpenGL. If the game is choppy on a machine faster than 500 MHz, this probably means that your video card does not support OpenGL. You can try to render less, decreasing the framerate but increasing the game speed, using PGUP, but you will never get a good frame rate. I may write a DirectX based graphics engine eventually (Phsyical is totally modular, so I can swap in new graphics routines without rewriting the game).


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Enjoy the game, such as it is, and please send me feedback!


