Hi folks, I''ve asked a bunch of questions over the past fews months and I found everyone very helpful. I just wanted some more input on my programming. I have currently finished working on my first "game" in Windows. It is a version of pong. It started out with just a ball bouncing around the screen and I decided one day to add paddles and a score and stuff. I just wanted people to check it out and tell me what you think. Oh...and by the way, if anyone needs help with their first game, I included the source code of what I did. So please check it out and respond in this thread letting me know what you think! It is at: http://cs.wpunj.edu/~bowersom The file is called Pong Beta 0.02.rar or something to that aspect. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks! Mike

You can''t open .rar. I tried to but no program would open it up. What program is that file for? Unless I was supposed to download something else, your game doesn''t work at all.

tcache
Contact Me
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Games don''t affect kids. If Pac-man had affected us, we''d all be sitting in darkened rooms munching pills and
listening to repetitive electronic music. -- Kristian Wilson(Nintendo Inc., 1989)

It''s cool, but it needs some AI.

quote: Original post by Tazel
You can''t open .rar. I tried to but no program would open it up. What program is that file for? Unless I was supposed to download something else, your game doesn''t work at all.

WinRAR or WinACE

-Ryan "Run_The_Shadows"
-Run_The_Shadows@excite.com
-The Navidson Record! The best film you''ll never see!

There is region in the top right corner of the screen where I can''t see the ball.

Good work. You did what most people find very hard to do...finishing a project!!!

The second paddle cannot be moved, some menu items don''t work, in 1024 x ??? mode, the balls get stucky after passing a goalline, and there are some spots where you can''t see the ball. But other than that, I congratulate you for finishinga project!

tcache
Contact Me
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Games don''t affect kids. If Pac-man had affected us, we''d all be sitting in darkened rooms munching pills and
listening to repetitive electronic music. -- Kristian Wilson(Nintendo Inc., 1989)

Bower,

I run a tutorial series that is designed to help people who know how to program and have a limited amount of experience with game programming, program their first game.

The series started with Pong and is moving on to super breakout now. There is a small group planning to take over the project I think, though I will still be acting as somewhat of an advisor for the group.

If you're interested, check out the thread in the beginners forum called OldGames: Making Games from Old to New

You can also check out the NEW URL at:

http://dungeons.dyndns.org/oldgames/

There you will find a tutorial on design of Pong, and complete source code of our version of Pong for Win32.

Best Regards,

Jeromy Walsh
Programmer
Liquid Entertainment
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"The question isn't how far, the question is do you possess the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far as is needed?" -Boondock Saints

[edited by - jwalsh on December 1, 2002 4:32:07 PM]

One suggestion. You need to change the way the paddles move. Currently, you have it set so every time the game recieved a "keydown" event, the paddle moves. This makes it so after the first time you press a key down, the paddle moves, then there is a delay, then it starts moving again. Instead, you should create a variable called something like: paddleYMove

When the mouse goes down, you set
paddleYMove = PADDLE_MOVE_INCREMENT;

When it goes up, you set
paddleYMove = -PADDLE_MOVE_INCREMENT;

Then, in your game loop. You say:
paddleY += paddleYMove

That way, it will move smoothly. Also, I think this will resolve the ''chunking'' problem with paddle movement, since you can make the move increment very small, and the frame delay very fast, because you don''t have to wait for the key repeat delay.

Other than that, very good for a first effort.

Actually, come to think of it, I have a few more suggestions. =)

Since the ball does not have a transparent background, and since the paddle is square, you should draw the ball first, THEN the paddle, or else make sure the ball never overlaps the paddle at all.

I would make the paddles much smaller too. As for AI, that should be pretty easy. Just make it so if the AI paddle''s Y adjust toward the ball''s Y. You can make it faster or slower to adjust the difficulty, or even ... well, you could set up a ''decay'' system that would make the AI VERY human, (i.e. it would overshoot the ball, sometimes), but it might take a bit to explain. So let me know if you want to do that. (Don''t worry, it''s not very hard to implement.)