This is my Windows-based remake of the original ZX Spectrum game. It was intended to be a faithful play-alike version of the original, so don't expect smooth scrolling or gouraud-shaded volumetric depth-cued mip-map-interpolated trilinear-filtered fluffy-dice rendering.
This is something I worked on in the early 2000s as a get-the-hang-of-programming-in-C exercise, and I haven't touched it since 2006. But what there is of it is available to all free of charge. I was still using Windows XP at the time, so I can't guarantee that it will work on more recent versions. Honestly, I can't guarantee it'll work on anything, or that it won't eat your dog or set fire to your house, though the latter two are unlikely.
It was developed with the aid of MinGW and the Allegro game programming library.
It's been a couple of years since I did any work on this game. So it's high time I actually got off my arse and released something. So here's the version I showed off at a comp.sys.sinclair meet in Oxford a few months ago. There are still lots of rough edges and half-finished features that I've not bothered to do anything with, and the documentation is, er, somewhat lacking. But it's that or wait another decade or two for me to finish everything off properly.
Download the installer here: AntAttackPC-v0.02.exe (1.0 megabyte)
And here's a couple of piccies:
Steven Knock's editor now has water and pillars, so I've tweaked my import function to bring them in too.
Been busy. I'm nearly ready to release something. I know I've been saying that for the last four years or so, but this time I might even mean it...
Among other things, the map editor is just about usable, I've converted the little tunes from the original into rather bland and possibly off-key midi files, I've added an in-game F1 help page for people like me who don't bother reading the instructions and just want to know what buttons to press to blow shit up, and because Clare suggested it so long ago that she won't have the slightest idea what I'm on about, those who so desire may now choose to rescue same-sex friends.
On the down side, the game is frightfully unstable on one machine I tried - as in crashes within a second of startup - but it does have a rather... mature install of NT4 on it. I'd be more inclined to get to the bottom of it if I thought it was my fault.
Tweaked the graphics. Fixed more bugs (ants aren't supposed to bite grenades!). Found more bugs. Added mouse control to the menus, and, no doubt, more bugs.
Fiddled with the menus a bit. Found more bugs.
Yes, it's that time of year again when my enthusiasm for this project perks up for a couple of days. Currently I'm figuring out what the hell I've written so far and trying to get a couple of bugs out of it.
Wrote some (relatively) decent structured code to read all sorts of settings from a text file. Fixed a bug in the sound engine.
Still tidying up and debugging.
Doing some housekeeping and (late) spring cleaning on the program. There's too much that only sort-of-works.
Found a decent font. Came up with a slightly less hideous implementation of the in-game captions.
Wrote a menu system and added a bunch of game tweaks.
Fixed the keyboard reading again. Hopefully I've got it right now! Added some silly features. Next up, a decent main menu...
Fixed the keyboard reading. First it wasn't sensitive enough, then it was too sensitive, now it's just right.
Rewrote the sound engine. Now in stereo. Ooooooh.
Wrote a Visual Basic proglet to wrap bitmaps round isometric cubes, and tried it out.
Added facility to import maps made with Steven Knock's editor. Thought about doing my version in OpenGL. Thought not.
Tracked down the bug... just for a moment when you restored a saved game, the damned program would record one thing and do another. Fixed it.
Added an option to play back a recorded game, silently and invisibly, then hand control over to the user. Works very well as a save/restore game option. Or at least it will when I get the mysterious bug out of it...
Just to see if it would work, compiled a Windows version under MSVC++6. And lo, it worked. Obviously, I haven't quite gotten round to large fonts and decent graphics yet.
Upgraded to Allegro 4.0. Painless except for the keyboard stuff needing a wee tweak. Next up, rewriting the sound code.
Consolidated all the in-game keyboard reading to make user-defined controls doable and to allow demo recording/playback. Added demo recording/playback but forgot to restore the random number seed. Synchronisation-loss hilarity ensued!
I ate'nt dead! Refamiliarising myself with everything I learnt about C. Intermission text and friend's start coordinates now read from a text file. Lots of invisible tidying up of code to make later things easier. Temporary colour player graphics.
Earlier updates and Release Zero...
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