Alien Flux Alpha Test 3

(Apologies if you’ve seen this on the other forums I lurk upon!)

Yes, another opportunity to work for me for nothing! If you’ve got an idle few minutes, a broadband connection, a reasonably modern 3D card which supports DOT3, and a reasonably speedy CPU on your Win32 box, you’d be doing me a spiffing favour by downloading Alien Flux Alpha Test 3 (6MB).

Instructions
Left button = move
Right button = shoot
Left shift = shields - don’t forget to use them!
Space bar = smartbomb - again, don’t forget to use them!

Tips

  • Don’t fly straight at the enemies! Pick a safe spot and pick them off!
  • If you get close to the aliens get ready with the shields and smartbombs!
  • Practise! It’s actually very easy to play, but you’ve never played anything like it before so you’ve got to learn it! My wife got to level 3 on her first ever go and can easily score over 10,000 points.

Cas

[This message has been edited by cix>foo (edited 03-22-2003).]

One word: Wow!

No problems and it ran nice and smoothly. Great graphics, sound and gameplay. A very nice work. I really liked it.

My system; a dual P3 735Mhz, Win2000, GF2MX.

Cheers Bob!

Cas

Ran fine. On exit, I noticed that my desktop wallpaper was scaled down to something like 640x480, where it definitely wasn’t before.

j

Very not bad. Ran very well. Reminds me of the kind of game you used to get on the ol’ Amiga.

Geforce 3 Ti200, Win 2k, AMD 2400+ XP, 512Meg PC3200 RAM

Very nice!

Worked without any problem.

WARNING: Default charset Cp1250 not supported, using ISO-8859-1 instead
Exception in thread "main"

Worked without a problem on Radeon 9700, but I find it unplayable, too fast, or maybe it’s the interface. Nice apart from that though.

Great job!

Ah, I got the hang of it now, it’s pretty good. Kinda like a variation on Defender but with 2D scrolling instead of 1D.

Thanks all!

rgpc - well, by a strange coincidence I wrote this game originally in 1993 for the Amiga in AMOS… it was called XAP back then, and still runs on an emulator, just about. And what’s all this “very not bad” comment! Hehe.

Dorbie - I’ll put you in a head-to-head against the missus

MZ - what’s strange about your system compared to everyone elses? That’s a peculiar error I’ve not seen before.

Cas

MZ - what’s strange about your system compared to everyone elses?
hmmm, tricky question… Task Bar docked at upper screen edge? 420W PSU? Caps Lock + Windows keys extracted from keyboard? Ah, it could be this: Windows 2000 Polish version.

I have very limited understanding of all those Code Page issues, AFAIK there are 2 ones for my region:

  • ISO-8859-2, which is recommended
  • Windows 1250
    why the 1250 was named “default”, I have no idea.

That’s a peculiar error I’ve not seen before.
Neither have I. It happens immediately after launching, no gui appears.

Ah-ha, Polish locale. I would need to run JetPerfect with some other locales before I got a version that ran on them all. Damn!

If you’ve got Java 1.4 installed you could always try the Webstart version at http://www.shavenpuppy.com/downloads/jarbuild/alienflux.jnlp

Cas

The java version worked too.

Scary signature warning of course.

It didn’t exit correctly though. It “stopped responding”. I killed it with the process manager.

Nice game! A bit off topic, nevertheless I want to know: Did you compare the performance of your native exe (JET compiler I guess) vs. Hotspot? Any improvements (GC pauses etc.)?
[If this has been discussed in another forum just let me know where]

Cool game! I don’t like how the yellow blob things can locate and move towards my ship as it is respawning but before I’m able to move the ship. And a mini-map might be a neat feature, to show you the enemy locations so you don’t have to fly around hunting them down.

Ran fine on my Radeon 8500, Athlon 1100, 640 MByte RAM, Win2k. Thanks for sharing!

Those bastid Mad Jellies have a special sixth sense

stefan - performance is more or less equal to the hotspot server VM with Jet - it’s OpenGL limited really. I use -Xincgc and -Xconcgc with the server VM and don’t see any GC glitches whatsoever, and neither do I in Jet. However, the game has been coded to produce very little garbage. The Jet .exe of course starts up 10x faster and runs at 100% speed immediately, whereas the server VM takes 30-60 seconds to warm up which looks a bit unprofessional. The client VM is a little too slow to get the required 60fps all the time on sub 700Mhz processors.

Cas

Originally posted by cix>foo:
rgpc - well, by a strange coincidence I wrote this game originally in 1993 for the Amiga in AMOS… it was called XAP back then, and still runs on an emulator, just about. And what’s all this “very not bad” comment! Hehe.

Ah the nostalgia…

It must be very not bad, I played it a few times yesterday as a break from coding my game. It’s only very not bad because it’s decreasing my productivity.

It failed to load for me.

“java.lang.Exception: Failed to set display mode.”

Programs dumps display modes and writes above message to console.My system: athlon,win2k-sp3,gf2gts,drvs 43.00. I have tested these drivers with several games, which all run fine.

Are you using the latest version I put up on the site? (About 4.5MB or so) That should’ve worked.

And - is there any console output you can give me? (Run it from the cmd line)

Cas