Finally I’ve ported it away from XNA to OpenGL, still got the (almost) same lousy controls, for your pleasure. Still needs .Net 2.0 to be installed though, but should be compatible with Mono, and thus playable on Linux. If someone like to try to compile it on Linux, contact me. Some things have been tweaked and added. But the game play is the same. Added ugly clouds for better sense of height movement. Updated the physics lib to the newest version.

Arrows: (over) steer

Z: Claw claw claw!

X: TURRRRRRBO

Space: Reset heli position

R: Reset level

N: Next level

Download now! 441KB Now with dependencies included!

Only 4 people rated my game. Thats unacceptable, I need get rid of XNA. So I’ve thrown all XNA stuff out of it. I needed to poke a bit in the source of the physics lib as well to cleanse out the filth, thankfully that was easy. Now I need to tame the horrible controls (That was my fault, cannot blame XNA for everything), and then pretty it up and I’ll make a release. I plan to port it to linux too, with Mono.

I’m only using Glfw, OpenGL and .Net 2.0 as we speak. For sound it will be OpenAL.

What went wrong

1. Choice of development platform, XNA studio 2.0 Beta. People were having trouble running the game. I knew this before I started but things like Intellisence, love for C# and curiosity of XNA took the upper hand. This was my first XNA game, and my first use of an physics engine. I used Farseer 2d physics lib. Having no previous experience in both fields was challenging.
2. The controls are like standing 100m away from a real helicopter with a remote control keyboard that has a delay of 2 sec. It made the game totally unplayable for most of the people who actually got the game running.
3. Too advanced idea for the time frame.
4. No guidance when flying out of scene.

A lot of these stuff are related to the physics engine and my lack of experience with them.

What went right

1. The editor was whipped up in director’s authoring app very quick. Place and size different rects and run generate() to make the xml level file. Yeah, loading levels were easy too. with xml serialization.
2. Sound effects came out great thanks to DrPetter’s sfxr program. The xna audio framework was a bit confusing at first, but it did the trick. Adjusting the helicopter engine sound along with the thrust was effective for game play.
3. Game play is really fun once you get the hang of the controls. I found myself several times playing around when there was stuff to code.
4. Code. The code is clean and got unusually many comments for a LD contribution.

Porting

So I decided to try to port the game away from xna, to OpenGL, so that more people can play it. The rendering part went fine. But then the physics lib stabbed me in the back again. It uses the xna lib. So I dug out a version that did not. But I failed again. It turns out that that lib also is xna dependent. So I tried to get the source code and remove all dependencies. But failed to grab the source. Not much energy left to de-xna it.

A helicopter physics game, made with XNA 2.0 beta.

You will need a pile of shit to get this to work, here it is:

1. .Net 2.0 SP1 (we are currently uncertain if it ships with Vista)
   • Note you can also use the original .Net 2.0 but you will also have to install the C++2005 SP1 Redist (G4WL will also install this, so this is only needed if you are not also installing that redist)
2. DirectX9.0c
3. XNA runtime 2.0

I’ve had ppl not being able to run the game anyways, Im looking into the problem. Pls tell me if it works for you.

Anyways I hurried with the levels, Yay it was fun to make them I hope to release a map pack soon. Unfortunaly the editor is built within director, so I will have to work on it a bit to enable the community to build their own maps, unless you got director. All sound was made with DrPetters godlike sound effect app, sfxr. Kudos to him!

Game goals: make the red box be within the red rectangle for 3 seconds to go to next level.

Controls: (Xbox360 controller should work, not tested, buttons? test them!)
Arrows <- -> Steer

ArrowUp/Down throttle

Z – Open/Close the CLAW!

X- Turbo (For making panic manouvres)

R – Reset level (Yeah this key you will know by heart)

N – n00b?

Here is bin 440KB

And here is source + editor + bin + other useless stuff 3MB

Yay! I have a working editor! Im using director and layout out sprites and rect at positions and various sizes.

And here is an ingame view of the map, after a little playing

I had some framerate issues, was only stuff intersecting at load (Phew)

Thank to DrPetter’s sfxr app I managed to get a decent heli sound. After wrestling the XNA sound app, I got it to pitch with the heli’s thrust value. I got rid of the polygon objects and focus now on rectangles. perhaps I need some springs… hmm. Oh and I got to get some gameplay, important that one. Anyways I gotta catch a train, there is a x-mas “smorgasbord” waiting for me 110km south… ta ta!

Farseer physics lib woun’t play nice with my polygon collision meshes. I think I will have to redo them as primitives instead. Thus changing the chain-claw thing I had in mind, and perhaps make heli bowling? Man, I made my dev pipeline so awesome! Created paths in photoshop to define the collision mesh. Read the ai file with the object, all was swell.

Those pins just fall by them selvs, thats an easy win. Anyhow, Im off to bed, tomorrow I will be away a few hours on dinner. Yeah, I’ll bring my laptop!

Camera and sidescrolling implemented (not wrapping yet though)

Oh and I made a tripod, a bit small. Fixed the controls a bit by cheating. turning left n right adds forces in those directions not only changes the upforce. Up n down still needs tweeking.

The physics seems a bit unstable, (stuff act strange) I’m not sure my idea with chaingrapplings will work, perhaps I should revise the idea a bit.

I finally got a working claw on my heli! Yay!

The controls are really hard though. Its like… controlling a 1ton heli with a keyboard from remote that has a 1-2 sec response time. I guess I’ll have to fake it a bit.

Finally I have the Farseer physics lib working and showing the geometry of the collision objects.

Now I’ll have lunch and then play with some physics

Perhaps not much of a reaction though. Here is my first sketch, I haven’t decided if I’ll do this yet.

Im thinking of using a physics lib on this one.