Communtity Project... Top Down Shooter
Community Forums/Showcase/Communtity Project... Top Down Shooter
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Who doesn't love Gauntlet, Alien Breed etc etc...    Well I was thinking about these the other day and thought wouldn't it be fun to get something like this started. Blitz has seen a couple of attempts but none appear to have moved in any direction. So, after the success of Jump Around I thought I'd fire another start of a project into the arena of blitz. "Top Down Shooter" Ok, not so much of a catchy title, but that because there's not much of a game yet... I spent a few hours coding up the basic bits and pieces needed to get this going... Included are: Map editor - This needs to be extended however, it allows you to create maps. Basic Engine - Nothing much at all, basic collision detection on the walls and walking around Example Map - Um... example map. Tile Set - A tiny tile set, most of which I've lifted from somewhere or another so this needs a complete new set. Let see what we can make of this, we need tile sets, maps, and of course a story and an engine. Personally I'd like to see Alien Breed style, however, let's hear your suggestions. The maps are 256x256 tiles in size with 32x32px tiles. They are made up of 4 layers: Layer 0: Collision layer, either yes or no. Layer 1: Base coat: The basic look of the level. Layer 2: Objects: Pick up/ shoot etc. Layer 3: Overlay : Drawn over the top of everything else to give a sense of depth. OK, So there we have it... This is probably going to require discussion before people go head long into this. The code I am submitting here is public domain, feel free to use it, credit where due etc. If you want to use it though, add to this project, lets get another great community project going. Download the zip here. http://www.mentalillusion.co.uk/tmp/TopDown.zip  PS Don't you just love it when you have a spelling error in the subject and you can't change it :( |
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| Cool idea. What happened to the other community project? I never see it being talked about anymore. But Im not looking either. |
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Frickin hell, I'd love to do this...I have had an Alien Breed project on the backburner for years: I'd help with any graphics (mainly sprites) if you needed em... |
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| I've done quite a few map editors in my time, think i'll see what I can do on that front. If the map is in layers.(I.e layer0=floor,layer1=wall/no wall) then light mapping and bump mapping can be added. |
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| Jim Bob, any graphics are helpful, I wrote a top down rendered a while back that took 3D models and did all the rotations and stuff and saved them as anim strips. I think this might be the way to go. Antony, the map is as described above! I've thought about doing real time shadowing from layer 3, this layer is drawn last and sit over all the action. If you took every pixel in this layer (that's on screen) that wasn't the mask colour and half brighted the pixels offset from that on the lower layers it would probably look very cool. The problem you've got with this though is speed. Updated zip to include timing code. |
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| Andy thinks PARADROID 90 REMAKE! http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/paradroid90/paradroid90/frames.html |
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| Updated zip so you can now collect objects. Andy, no idea what Paradroid is... if it's a regular top down shooter (ala gauntlet/alienbreed) then I'm sure ideas can be used from it. From the screenshots though it looks somewhat different from what I'm suggesting here. |
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| Yup I'll add some content as well. What about taking it down the Chaos Engine route ?? |
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| What do you mean, the sort of Pseudo 3D look? If so the engine as it stands could deal with it as it has an overlay layer. I've emailed the bitmaps and team17 to see if we can use the media from alien breed or the chaos engine... you never know! :) And that'll be the decider about what direction to take if I get sent a truck load of media! |
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I almost finished an Alien Breed remake a while ago.. some of u might remember "alpha breed". It had loads of stuff, A*, light mapper, basic script engine. There were a few demo's floating round, on my ftp some place might post later. Towards the end I just didn't feel th eproject any more so I scrapped it. I cant help out but I'll be keeping an eye on this project. |
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| Coffee, you can help out if you donate the media from your scrapped project. |
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| Andy, no idea what Paradroid is... *gasp* Well if you have an Amiga or C64 emulator kicking around I'll drop you an email tonight. Paradroid basic premise: You are an influence device that can attach and control a droid for a period of time (depending on how powerful teh droid is). You have a crappy weapon and you are droid rating 001. You can hold down the fire button when stationary and it puts you in transfer mode, then you bump into the robot you want to take over. You play a little sub game where you have to make a central section of blocks your color and if you win you take over that droid. Once you have control of the droid, you can use its weapons and use it to take over other droids of higher caliber. The rest of it is a top down shooter. The object of the game is to rid a space ship with several levels (that you can jump between using lifts on teh levels) of all the droids. Then you move to the next ship. Its quite good fun and all the droids have different capabilities (i.e. different weapons, speed, shielding, etc). Jester interactive held the rights to this game (http://www.jesterinteractive.co.uk) but they are not looking very well at the moment and there are rumors that the company is going down the pan. Shame really. There is a great PC remake over at:- http://freedroid.sourceforge.net/download.php |
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| Sounds good, if you've got an amiga adf file of it I'll give it a shot. |
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| Will email you when I get home. Unless I can find a link that isnt banned by my firewall. |
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| Paradroid was one of my absolute faves on c64. |
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| That would be gauntlet surely? [edit] It's always nice when people edit their posts to make your's look silly... The question was something like, What about a top down Dungeon Master, hence this answer... thanks! [/edit] |
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| Here is a link to someone who has it on their site http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/paradroid90/paradroid90/para_amiga.zip |
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| Actually all of these games were really good but none of them had big enough bad guys, I think it would be kinda cool to have some massive bad guys where you've got 4 people running around them shooting the crap out of them. |
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| Gauntlet Online .. Sweet [edit]I didnt mean to make you look silly mate, you just replied quicker than I thought any man could :) [edit] |
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| Coffee, you can help out if you donate the media from your scrapped project. Yeah, some really nice stuff coffee. the new map editor i'm doing has lightmapping/shadows...combined with your art this will be the start of one great looking game. |
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| Alpha breed was pretty cool, I remember that. Why did you scrap it coffee? A |
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| lo Andy boy, long time no speak. Iv already started knocking out some code. but wont post anything till its looking better. I think what we really need is some good media. |
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| yeah coffee.....why did ya scrap Alpha Breed??? |
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| Well this went down like a fart in a spaceship. Oh well. |
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| I've got a bunch of code from my Gauntlet remake from a couple years back. Editor and Engine. SInce I haven't, and probably won't get around to finishing it. I'd be glad to throw it in, along with any time I have to spare. |
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| Well this went down like a fart in a spaceship. What makes you say that. I think you have to understand this is a more complex project, its not as simple as JA, so adding code will take longer, as there will be more to it. so dont give up on it. you have a lot of people here willing to put their time effort and code into this project. |
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| why not finish Alpha Breed as a community project? since coffeedotbean dosnt want to work on it anymore... |
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| Sorry guys got rid of the media and code for Alpha breed a while ago... on one of my tidy-ups, I loose so much useful stuff doing that. >( |
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| Yavin there are many small jobs that could be done. eg. 1. Shooting... Give the player the ablity to shoot. 2. Doors... Add door objects that when the player touches them they open 3. Keys... Add a key object so that when the player has this object doors open 4. Player 2... Add types for the player information so that there can be multiple players 5. Push scroll... Instead of the player being fixed in the middle of the screen the player walks around in the centre section of the screen and when he reaches a boundry will push the scrolling. 6. Bad Guys... Once the player types are in use this form to add bad guys 7. Bad Guy Ai... AI for the baddies 8. Ammo packs... Add an object that puts ammo up 9. Credits... Add an object to give a player credits to buy things using the... 10. Intex Systems... Or whatever, the consoles to log on to get weapons/armour etc. Anyway that a starter for 10. These are just a few basic things to get the engine into something that can support a game. I've already the added the ability to pick up objects so many of these will be dead simple. The biggest 'stopper' we've got at the moment is media. Yes media will make it look nice and it'll be great to get hold of some. I trawled the net last night for some tile sets we could use but came up with nothing so we'll have to stick with crappy media until someone who can draw decides to join in on this project. If someone's got a 3D model of a marine email it to me and I'll render it top down with all the animations and rotations so that will at least give us the main character. Disussion: Weapon types - What weapons should we include? Objects - Any special objects that will help/hinder Missions - Any objectives that will give a mapper some idea of what do design. Ie, Mission: Find the 3 parts to the computer code and shut down the mainframe in a space station. |
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| There is a sprite set out there of a rendered(I.e high quality, not hand drawn) in game soldier anims, for a top down shooter. Even includes a whole bunch of free tiles. Is fully animted, and has weapon/s.(Maybe just one.) The question is..where? It was months ago when I found it.(And downloaded, it was no fake).. Something to keep an eye out for... |
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| I'm going to work on a tileset this weekend, hopefully I'll get some basic walls and consoles done that look half decent. Creating the main character isn't going to be a problem if someone dontates a model with full animations. I won't keep or steal the model, I'll just render the animation frames from above and save off the sprites. |
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| I've just finished writing a top down shooter like this. But in C++ and OpenGL. |
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| Are you lying? |
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| Nope. :) It's 8 player with 2 human players max, the rest are computer controlled and it uses fairly advanced collaborative AI. Therefore you can stand still if you like and it's quite well possible that the AI will complete the game for you. It's true I tell you, I finished it last week. |
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| Do we have a link? That sounds really cool. |
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| coffeedotbean :: do you have any other screen shots of the version of the game around ? Your answer could solve our media problem, or at least put a dent in it. |
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| Here you go, One Tile Set. needs a little tweaking though to get rid of some of the white text and the wee guy but hay... ITS a Start.
Global img=LoadAnimImage("ab4.png",32,32,1,298)
Global timage=CreateImage(32,32)
SetBuffer ImageBuffer(timage)
For looper = 1 To 299
DrawImage img,0,0,looper
SaveImage(timage,"set\tile_"+looper+".bmp")
Next
Small change to the image to get the tiles in line, I guess I coudl have used an offset in the code but I did it this way so huh. So coffe- If you have any other images which I rekon you must as thats image 4, then we could apply this little code to them and rip as many good tiles out as we can. If your still willing to help out that is.  |
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| Please note we also have 2 good sprites on that image, so it will be really easy to cut both of them out, and rotate them 360, and flip them to get a nice basic char and alien walking. |
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| I found some demos of Alaphabreed: www.handson.creators.co.uk/Tab4.zip <--(The last version I think) www.handson.creators.co.uk/TAB.zip www.handson.creators.co.uk/AlphaBreed_B2.zip www.handson.creators.co.uk/alphabreed0_1.zip < --- (Miltiplayer/online version) Fell free to use the gfx. |
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| Could you remove the packs ? or is that not possible if you have lost the source. Either way with that little bit of code ans some good creen shots, we should be able to grab every tile and character frame that you have. |
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| Dont have any of the source code. www.handson.creators.co.uk/alphabreed0_1.zip <--- multiplay online version That dwload has all the gfx (no enemies) in .png's no need to rip em :) others may have the aliens. |
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| Checking it out now... Fantastic, thankyou very much. :D |
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| Zip file update with new media thank to Coffee. Created a very basic map using the new tiles. |
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| > Do we have a link? That sounds really cool. Here you go:- http://enaysoft.co.uk/ZOMBIESURVIVALMOVIE1.avi http://enaysoft.co.uk/ZOMBIESURVIVALMOVIE2.avi |
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| I'm not sure I like this 3d spriting going on...would you mind if I used the engine basis for my own handddrawn 2d project? If not, I'd really like to see a stage where you are driving on a jeep with one man manning a turret while taking out hoards of chasing aliens and breaking gates open (with either Driver AI or a second player). That'd really float my boat :P  |
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| I think we need a list of things that need done. Rob you should edit your first post and make it look like the project plasma post. So we know whats still to be done and whats been done. gives it a little more order, which is needed for a project like this. |
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| I've got a list up a few posts ^^^ However, you're right... I'll do it this evening when I've got some time, can't really do it at the moment, at work! |
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| If you want I can upload a complete game I created ages ago called Blast'em/Onslaught? |
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| Rob, I'd be interested in using an idea such as this in expanding an old RPG idea I've had. With your permission I'd like to use your tools and idea's for the engine for use with my RPG. I'll fully give you credit where needed. I just need a jump in the right direction and this is a large step. |
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| I had a bit of a quiet evening so I decided to have a look at the code you got. I have no idea what the plan for the final game is going to be but just for fun I knocked up some code. What I ended up with is still a work in progress but I have the player info stored in a type. I have a type defined for weapons so in theory the engine could ultimatly load the weapon details from a file. Types are used for shots as well. The player can fire a weapon ( space to fire, tab cycles through the weapons ) and if the weapon is defined as having a fuse ( eg a thrown grenade ) then the shot will bounce off walls and explode ( another type ). Would any of this be useful ? |
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| QuietBloke, that would help me quite a bit. I'm hoping to have a couple weapons to choose from and if you could do that it'd be awesome. Also, I need something for melee weapons, swords, knifes, blunt objects etc. If you could do that also I'd be grateful. I don't have a vast knowledge on all this programming so every bit helps. |
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| Continues on this thread |
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