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About Super IsoBomb
Gameplay
Screenshots
System Requirements
Download
Source Code
Super IsoBomb is a project I worked on as a class project in winter quarter 2002-2003 at college for my 2D Game Programming course. Compared to all of my other projects, this one is by far the best. Most of it is due to the fact that I had other people in a group with me in this class who were as motivated to work as I was, plus my the game was part of my course load, so I HAD to work on it. My other projects have been in my spare time, and where almost all of the work was done by myself.
Super IsoBomb consists of multiple players attempting to achieve the goal of being the last player standing in the level by eliminating the other players. The players have a two tools at their disposal to eliminate the other players -- an infinite supply of bombs that they can throw at the other players, and a small supply of homing bombs. When the bombs explode they create an explosion that damages all players in their path (possibly including the player that threw it).
When a bomb explodes, it explodes on a 2D plane of its height, but only in two straight lines on its plane. The explosion will be blocked by tiles whose height is greater than the bomb's, but not by players in its path. This stricter definition is important because a bomb may explode in the air. A player will have a certain height, and if the explosion touches the player, then the player is hit by the bomb.
The game has various powerups, but sometimes random powerups are "infected" with viruses:
The right player is taking advantage of the high ground and is doing some bomb sniping of his opponent in the egyptian level.
An intense bomb fight by the grates. Pieces of shrapnel from recently exploded bombs are bouncing around the industrial city level.
The right player has reached the top of the hill and is using the ground to his advantage while the left player attempts to attack on the hill level.
Right now for the first version, the system requirements are higher than we would like. This is because we had to work on this for a class that lasted only 10 weeks, so we were more interested in implementing features than making sure the game would run on old systems. The weakest machine this game has been tested with is an AMD 1800+ CPU and a Geforce 3 Ti 200 card, where it ran very acceptably. The game should run very well on almost all computers, until the particles start flying, and this takes up a lot of CPU power -- thus this game is much more dependant on CPU power than having a great video card.
I would love to hear your experiences with the game so I can determine better what the minimum requirements are. Please contact the team and let us know how well the game runs on your system. From what I guess right now, the requirements to run the game well are as follows:
In the future, we want to work on lowering the system requirements by providing a 16 bit graphics mode to support old video cards, and by allowing to cut back on the particles (this should allow the game to run on a 500mhz machine).
I have heard of some issues with Super IsoBomb. Firstly, it appears you can run Super IsoBomb on a Voodoo3 card if you run it in Windowed mode. You can do this by opening the isobomb.cfg and setting the fullscreen line from 1 to 0. Your desktop depth MUST be in 16 bit and MUST be greater than 800x600 for it to work. However I've noticed on the one system I've tested this on there are very bad coloring artifacts near the edges of the player windows where the tiles go off the screen.
Secondly, I've seen a problem that has started occuring since DirectX 9 comes out, and this occurs even on my own system. On some systems the right-hand screen side's map will look fine but the objects on the map will not work. It seems there are two types of systems: those that shift the right side images and those that don't. And I can't find a way to determine that right now. Theoritically installing a different version of DirectX shouldn't affect versions compiled with an older DirectX but it does. I know of a hard way to fix it involving using a different rendering method but I haven't had time with classes to do that. If I get enough interest/requests, I will fix it.
Download the Windows EXE self-installer program. This will install the Super IsoBomb program and also install shortcuts into your start menu, and optionally your desktop.
We've just released this game, and it has not been tested widely for different system configurations and espically not on older/slower systems. Please contact us and tell us how well the game runs!
Setup Program (2.4 megs): Version 1.0b, 2/28/2003
Note: Version 1.0 was released on 2/28 as well, but some users reported errors. If you got any "Error setting up Direct3D" error messages, please use version 1.0b which has bug fixes for users with old video cards (prior to NVIDIA GeForce1 card, such as the NVIDIA TNT2 card). It also includes an option in the isobomb.cfg file to go immediately into full screen mode on start up: change "fullscreen = 0" to "fullscreen = 1" to start in fullscreen mode (you can still toggle back and forth as usual using the F1 key).
Legal: The current Super IsoBomb license
I still haven't cleared up the legal issues enough to release the source as a full open-source (GPL) project, but I do have enough permission now to post the source on the web. The main problem being the code in the "sound" directory of the project. So for right now I want to have the code up as my latest and best code samples for employment reasons, but this code is NOT open-source. Right now officially the code is still copywrited with rights reserved excluding the sound directory, which I THINK is free to distribute and modify (It came from CodeProject, and its copywrite belongs to an author I cannot contact, but the CodeProject terms page says that code submitted must be available for modification, but I don't think I can repackage it under GPL, a stricter license).
So you may feel free to view the code and get ideas from it but cannot use it directly in your projects. I don't want it to be this way, so please e-mail me, and I'll try to open-source it but it can't be GPL since the end result won't be compilable and requires linking with non-GPL code, so I may release the source files that our team did personally for the project under some license (BSD-style perhaps?) separate of the main Super IsoBomb code. But I don't want to go through the trouble if there is not a single person out there wanting to use it, but certainly something can be worked out so please contact me.
Download the source code (563k).
The package includes C++ source, MSVC 6 and MSVC.NET project files, Inno Setup installer script source, Doxygen configuration file, and pre-generated Doxygen HTML documentation. If you are interested in just seeing the technical design, check out the docs. If you want to see implementation, I would check out the docs first and then locate in the code the exact function you want to know more about.