teaching computers physics

The worst possible happened: the source code an even a buggy windows version version of my asteroids clone leaked to the internet! It took me quite long to finally get it run under windows and now that hard work simply pops up in the internet… I don’t know what to say. I fear it is probably an evil German hacker, just like in the 2003 leak of the Half-life 2 source. Tough times, I’d say…

Apart from that I am actually quite happy to get it finally run on windows. On the way there I ran into quite a few obstacles. I tried to use portable tools and libraries (CMake, freetype, OpenGL, SDL, libpng, boost), however getting them compiled and correctly linked in Visual Studio Express 2008 took quite some time. I also used a few precompiler #defines that were not supported by the Microsoft compiler (e.g. used __func__ instead of __FUNCTION__). There also was a critical bug that would make my game crash under Windows but not under GNU/Linux which was caused of improper initialization of a variable. The biggest hassle in the end was however getting it compiled so that it can be run on a computer on which it wasn’t compiled as there are some dependancies on the redistributable runtime libraries of Visual C++. I hope this is solved in the uploaded binary.

When you look at the asteroids.rc file you can mess around with some variables of the game (such as ship acceleration, maximum speed, etc.) and also set the controls the way you like it (so far only keyboard). Oh and there is also a very basic console (to access it press F8) with which you can run simple commands such as the ones in the asteroids.rc file.

For those who want to have a look at it here are the official links to the “leaked” versions ;D:

• windows binary
• source code

Known issues so far:

• If you struggle to get it run or receive a “This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect” error you might want to download the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package from here.
• There are also sometimes crashes when shooting a lot of rockets to a asteroid. Doesn’t show up under GNU/Linux.
• On a test machine with Windows XP Pro I had a small bug when parts of the exploding ship are drawn. Here are two screenshots that show how it is supposed to look like and the buggy version on the test machine:

explosion of an innocent ship

(buggy) explosion of an innocent ship

*too bad 1st of april has been already 9 days ago