<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<channel>
<title><![CDATA[ C++ 2D Shooter project worklog on Boolean Soup ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewworklog&id=65 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ Build on C++ with SDL and KrasEngine! ]]></description>
<language>en-us</language>
<pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:23:35 GMT</pubDate>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ Dead ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=306 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ I now officially declare this project as dead. I currently don&#039;t even have the tools installed to build the damn thing, nor do I want to.

2dsupershoot was a nice project to get me started again into gamedev and was a nice introduction to C++, SDL and OpenGL. ]]></description>
<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:40:29 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=306 ]]></guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ Login! ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=287 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ Yay! I updated htbaa.com with my HtbaaNET API and finished the login screen for 2dsupershoot. Graphically it&#039;s not a state of the art but it&#039;ll do! All that&#039;s left to do now for milestone 5 is the creation of accounts. Which will be easy to do. I only have to take care of adding some special characters used in e-mail addresses. The same goes for the username and password.

When milestone 5 is done all there&#039;s left to do (spread of 5 other milestones) is creating the levels, improving sounds, fix small graphic errors, make a binary level format and add the submission and retrieval of highscores. I hope to finish it by the end of this year though :-). Here&#039;s a screenshot.

 ]]></description>
<pubDate>Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:36:24 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=287 ]]></guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ Text input ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=286 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ Small post for today because I need to go to bed. I added a KETextInput class which allows me, when the object is activated, to enter text. It needs a bit more work so I can specify what characters it can accept (captials, lower case, numbers, other symbols).

Now this is working nicely already I say it&#039;s time for me to finish the current milestone really soon. ]]></description>
<pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:30:42 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=286 ]]></guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ Splash screens *update* ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=284 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ UPDATE 18-10-2008:
I just added the splash screens. Yay! Still need to put my own credits in it though. But the fading screens work, together with music that&#039;ll fade out after it&#039;s done :-).
--------------------------------
ORIGINAL MESSAGE:
The thing that kept me away from working on 2dsupershoot was that I had to create new resources. But I gathered all my courage together and started doing some work again!

It has been over 2 months since I did some actual coding so the project has been on hold for a while. Besides I was also side tracked by a couple of other projects.

When I began the project I decided to stick as much as possible to my design document, and so far I haven&#039;t strayed too much from it. I originally intended to give credit to where credit is due. So I grabbed the credits screen from the original game and DIV2 had a nice Hammer Technologies splash screen as well.

I&#039;ve also made a simple Htbaa&#039;s Gaming Projects splash screen.

So any time soon I&#039;ll add the splash screens so I can cross off another point of the checklist that goes with the current milestone. If I finish this milestone then I&#039;m more or less done with composing all the graphical resources. Most stuff left to do after that is just coding. Which I really should pick up soon! ]]></description>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:47:22 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=284 ]]></guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ Not yet forgotten! ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=273 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ OK, it&#039;s been over a month now when I did some real work on 2dsupershoot. You could say the project has been halted for a month now.

What&#039;s going on? Well, first of all, I was away on a vacation. During that vacation I was reading a interesting book about AI Engines. So after I came back I was eager to put it into practice. The thing is, I decided to do it with BlitzMax. So all of my time has gone to that. I&#039;m getting more serious about BlitzMax as well since I bought a license for BLIde (a great BlitzMax IDE) and as well bought SpriteForge . The last one will allow me to generate spritesheets from my own hand-crafted models (Wings3D for the win!).

In a nutshell, my time went to experimenting with another language, IDE and modeling (which is quite difficult if you ask me!).

BUT! 2dsupershoot hasn&#039;t been forgotten! I still intend to finish it this year. Although the end of the year is coming rather fast right now. And if I&#039;m ever going to implement all the things on my &quot;Future Features&quot; list it could just as well take a 4 months extra (-well, with my current speed it will).

The last progress on 2dsupershoot was actually on HtbaaNET. I&#039;m able to register accounts from within the game and also to login. Which is quite fun.

Still, there&#039;s a lot of work to be done for Milestone #5. I need to get some splash screens done, which means I need to open up my favorite drawing application. Which is as most will know my weakest point. I&#039;m bad at graphics/art. Very bad. So I&#039;m not really excited about doing so.

I also need to get the in-game keyboard done. Or at least, something that&#039;ll allow the player to enter his or her username and login, or register.

So all in all it&#039;s now a whole lot that needs to be done, so it&#039;s not that bad. I just need to be in the right mood to get some work done. And at this moment, my mood lays with BlitzMax, BLide, SpriteForge and Wings3D. Although that mood isn&#039;t very stable as well.

Anyway, 2dsupershoot is still a ongoing project! ]]></description>
<pubDate>Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:10:23 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=273 ]]></guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ Milestone 4 finished: I&#039;m on a roll! ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=263 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ Yahoo!

Milestone 4 is now considered finished! It took me about a month and a half to get this far but the main game is now basically done!

Milestone 4 consisted of both game programming and engine programming. 

I have implemented a sound and music system based on SDL_mixer which works nicely. Although it might need some tweaking with sound volume it&#039;s considered done. Tweaking and optimizing this piece is part of the 9th milestone (which is about optimizing, level creation etc.).

So currently the game is equipped with music and sound effects. Level music will nicely fade out when the boss fight is going to begin.

Currently all sounds and music files are placeholders, but might just stay as well.

So far the engine part, on to the game part.

The graphical user interface (GUI) displays the amount of lives, which powerups have been acquired, score and score multiplier, and of course the players&#039; energy. Some of it was already available in milestone 3, but the GUI is now fully functional.

Finally, the most important part of this milestone was the boss fight. The boss has a ton of energy/armor so he CAN be quite difficult.

The boss has 5 attack patterns/stages. Each with different weapons. Also, in every stage the boss is being protected by other enemies. In it&#039;s final stage the boss will go all out and will use missiles, aimed bullets and will be shielded by space mines.

I&#039;m quite happy with the result but nothing is final yet. There are a few cons about the boss fight. For instance, one could create a very high multiplier by just killed the enemies that are defending the boss. Perhaps I should limit the multiplier to prevent this?

I also decided to make the smoke trails a bit thicker, which make them look much nicer. Further more I ditched .xm and .s3m sound files. Because of some weird bug with OpenGL and SDL_Mixer the game wouldn&#039;t quit nicely. When unloading certain music files the application would just freeze up. So all audio files are now in OGG format. Which does increase the size of the game but that&#039;s something I can live with :-).

As said in the title: &quot;I&#039;m on a roll!&quot;. It&#039;s true really. I already started implementing HtbaaNET. So far the basic foundations have already been laid down and account registration and validation is already working nicely. As I said, I&#039;m on a roll! ]]></description>
<pubDate>Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:40:01 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=263 ]]></guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ Milestone 4: Launcher... Lift off! ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=262 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ It&#039;s been a while but I&#039;ve been able to make some progress with 2dsupershoot. The Boss fight is more or less done. It needs some difficulty balancing and perhaps a bit more variation. But the biggest part is there so I&#039;m fairly happy about it.

Some bugs have been fixed and some new ones have been discovered as well. It seems that SDL_Mixer doesn&#039;t really like .s3m music files. When terminating the application it just hangs when trying to unload the music file. I had no problems under Linux so far. So perhaps I need to check my version on Windows XP.

I recently bought MaxGUI as well. I had some doubts about getting it since it doesn&#039;t have any data grids. Which can be really useful. But I decided I wanted to have a launcher application for 2dsupershoot so I bought MaxGUI.

To my surprise MaxGUI is very, very easy to use. I had a basic launcher application running in a few hours, including a simple C++ class to store config data, which can be used in BlitzMax as well. Although I had some weird errors all seems to be running fine now.

I also decided that, for the time being, it would be easier for me to do account registration and storing account details with the launcher application. At least for now.

The great thing about BlitzMax and MaxGui is that it works on Windows and Linux. So the launcher will be used for both platforms. Although I need to figure out why the layout is being mis formed in Linux. There are also a few small bugs in the Linux version of the launcher application.

So a few bugs need to be fixed, some fine tuning needs to be done and off we go with Milestone 4. Which by the way won&#039;t be released. You&#039;ll all have to wait till the final release :-).

Here are some screenshots of the launcher application:



 ]]></description>
<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:21:58 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=262 ]]></guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ KEMusic and sound placeholders ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=255 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ Haven&#039;t done too much work on 2dsupershoot since the last worklog post. I thought I had fixed the OpenGL bug where texture id&#039;s were being overwritten. Earlier today I saw them once again. It has something to do with the newly textures created after creating a text with SDL_ttf and then converting it. So this is on my to do list. As well as splitting up the level background since some video cards don&#039;t support large textures.

I did make some progress though with my sound implementation. My KESound class isn&#039;t done yet but I did some renaming. I decided that music playing shouldn&#039;t be part of KESound, instead KEMusic was born. With SDL_Mixer only 1 music file can be played and it isn&#039;t affected by any effects over normal sounds. So currently it contains all the functionality I need.

Now I can play music and sound I searched for some placeholders. I got some .s3m and .xm audio files from DIV2 which will do for now. As well as the laser and explosion sound. These are of course placeholders until I find something better. Now that sound is being added it really makes the game more lively and I realized I should have done it earlier.

The boss fight is getting worked on as well. The evil guy can already show up and can get damaged as well as destroyed. But all very basic. I need to implement the various attack patterns which once done will make him a tough guy to beat. But more fun!

To score some big points on the online leaderboards you&#039;ll need to get through the levels and especially win the boss fight. The score multiplier can increase big time which in turn will add a lot of points once the poor guy gets killed.

Currently I&#039;m starting to get at the point where I think it&#039;ll be total overkill to implement a online account system for high score submission. Although I do plan on using it for future projects currently I&#039;m not sure about using a online account system. Yes, you avoid people from using semi-duplicate names or any other name fraud. But is it really worth the time and effort? I&#039;m going to think about it some more. Currently it&#039;s not something I really need to worry about since it isn&#039;t part of the current milestone. But still... It&#039;s always good to think ahead. ]]></description>
<pubDate>Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:06:57 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=255 ]]></guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ Sound with SDL_mixer ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=252 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ Part of the 4th milestone is implementing a sound system in my game (and of course engine). I had already decided to use SDL_mixer without checking out if there&#039;s something else I could use. All the SDL libraries are all pretty straight forward and thus easy to use.

SDL_mixer does even more then I expected. I was already thinking about a channel assignment system that handles all available channels and frees them when necessary so they can be reused. But none of that all is required :-). 

I&#039;ve only added basic sound playing support. It&#039;s stereo and the sounds panning depends on at what side of the screen the sound action takes place.

I&#039;ll be adding some callback support to it later so I&#039;ll be able able to halt looped sounds. Music support will be fairly easy as well. SDL_mixer does it with 1 call, 1 call to check if music is being played and 1 call to halt it. Can it be much easier?

Besides sound support I also finished the GUI. So all that&#039;s left is finishing the sound system, finding placeholder sound effects and music. And as a finishing touch: The boss fight. And that wraps up milestone 4 :-).

Milestone 4 won&#039;t be released as a demo. Milestone 4 will more or less be the raw game. After that I&#039;ll be building the online part of the game and foundations for future games. After enough testing and finishing up the online stuff it&#039;ll be time to polish the game, building levels, fine tuning graphics, sound and music and release it! Although it doesn&#039;t sound like a lot of work, it is :-D.

I more or less started the KrasEngine late October 2007 and in late December I actually started working on 2dsupershoot. So with a bit of luck I can finish the game within the year. I&#039;ve got about 6 more months to go. Considering the game has 10 milestones and the 4th isn&#039;t even finished now being halfway doesn&#039;t look good for the schedule. But, a couple of the later milestones involve the online part (HTTP XML API) and with that I have experience enough so that won&#039;t be too much of a problem.

One thing I do worry a little about is the music. I don&#039;t like using those Music Makers and my guitar skills, well, I don&#039;t like to call them skills. So I wonder how I&#039;m going to do that :-). But I&#039;m sure everything is going to be alright.

Hopefully next week a new update. ]]></description>
<pubDate>Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:10:18 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=252 ]]></guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[ 2dsupershoot 0.3.1 demo ]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=250 ]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[ Hoorah! After finished milestone number 3, some tweaking and a few bug fixes I can present you the latest build of 2dsupershoot! The demo level contains all enemies that are there (although enemy number 4 and 5 only show up a few times) and it contains the most important power ups: Homing missiles and the smart bomb.

More importantly this is the first release that uses OpenGL for rendering. I&#039;m really curious about what kind of framerates you get. In my experience the framerate doesn&#039;t increase with integrated graphics cards. But with a normal graphics card you can get some very decent framerates. On my own PC I get between 640 to 740 fps. That&#039;s with a NVIDIA 8400GS. On another pc here with similar specs, but a slower graphics card I get about 300 fps. So let me know how much you reach!

Bear in mind that the targeting system of the missiles still needs some tweaking. It should make better decisions on what target to take. But that can be done later when I&#039;m finishing the game :-). I&#039;m sure there are some other bugs as well. So let me know if you found them.

*small sidenote: FRAPS didn&#039;t capture the smoke trails very well. So it&#039;s not really representative.*

Controls
A: Fire main weapon
S: Fire smart bomb if acquired
Arrow keys: Move

Download
Download 2dsupershoot for Windows and Linux

Screenshots




 ]]></description>
<pubDate>Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:18:04 GMT</pubDate>
<guid><![CDATA[ http://booleansoup.com/index.php?p=43&m=viewpost&id=250 ]]></guid>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>