Hey guys. I think I'm gonna rename my game to Atomic Ball, because 'Atomic Pong' sounds too much like it's a 'pong' game rather than a 'breakout' game. Anyways, here's what it looks like: You can hit those angled blocks and the ball will reflect off them like you'd expect. Those two walls open and close, and you can get your ball smashed if you're not careful! There's a total of 11 levels, and MANY new features and fixes since the last Atomic Pong beta. Check it out and see what you think! Atomic Ball Beta 5 Just download the 1.6 megabyte zip file, create a folder on your harddrive and extract the contents of the zip file there. Doubleclick 'Atomic Pong Beta.exe' and it'll go right into the game (no menusystem yet). Use the mouse to move the paddle, the left mouse button to fire your weapon, and hit 'esc' to exit the game. I'm not much for 'pushing my game' (bragging about it until you don't want to download it anymore), so I'll simply tell you some of the facts: - Coded in C++, so the animations are very fast. - Game objects are rendered primitives (quads) in Direct3D, so the game takes advantage of the hardware in today's video cards. - Reflection collision code; balls bouncing off rotating and angled objects bounce realistically. - Stereo sound; if you hit a block on the left side of the screen, you'll hear it in the left speaker. - High-res textures for very sharp, detailed game objects. - Sixteen different powerups, some are good and some are bad. - One level has a ball smasher in it. If you get your ball caught in it, it will get smashed! This game is still a beta; it has the ability to have up to 100 levels and currently there are only 11, and there's no menusystem yet. But this beta should be very stable, as most of my work since the last beta was concentrated on the stability of the game engine and its ability to recover from alt-tabbing and abnormal situations. Let me know if you find any bugs and post them here please, but hopefully you'll just have a fast-paced, unique, and entertaining 'breakout' experience! Enjoy, and let me know what you think! :)

Well, no news could either mean 'no bugs' or 'who cares?'. Hopefully it's the former, because this quad engine will be the basis for many future games (platform game a'la Mario and Megaman, sidescroller shooter, 'Secret of Mana' style rpg, puzzle games, etc). I don't want any 'old' bugs creeping up in my later games... Anyhoo, I'll get started on a menu system and finish up this game. Then I can get rid of that 'Trek' crap and put my DirectX games on my website! :D

Sorry, I guess I coulda put the system specs in the first post:
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
DirectX 9.0c installed
Pentium3-700mHz (or AMD equivalent) or better processor
256mb RAM
DirectX-9 compatible vid card, hardware video support is recommended
Two button or better mouse
Options:
DirectX-9 compatible audio card

Thanks for all the beta help in the past, this game is running pretty fast and stable thanks to you guys!

Awesome, thanks for the input Alt F4! I was hoping to hear from some people that don't have nVidia and ATI video cards, because those are the only two platforms I've been able to test the game on myself. I'm glad to see the game plays well on your Intel Extreme video and RealTek sound cards! My sound is just a stock SoundMAX integrated audio device on my Intel board, and the game sounds seem to work fine on it.

Thanks again for the input! :)

When starting it says 'createdevice, can't create direct3d device'.
I have an s3 twister card, 16 mb, HAL, directx 9 installed.

This game rocks. Easily the best breakout/arkanoid clone I've ever played. You really have done a nice job.

I was wondering if you gave the player infinite lives on purpose. The ball kept coming back even after I had lost my last life. It was nice to be able to play through the entire game without worrying about dying however.

All I can say is MORE LEVELS PLEASE!!!! The ones you have are absolutely fantastic but a game like this needs 30 levels or more IMHO.

Thanks for the comments guys!

Thanks for the compliments, Qa303asmGuru! More levels are definitely in the works. The game's capable of having up to 100 levels, and I hope to get a BUNCH of levels in the game before I finally release it. What's cool is that when you get past every 25th level, the blocks and background change... now all I need to do is put in enough levels to where you can actually see that feature! The quad engine is also capable of playing a background music track while a game's in progress, but I can't find any music to put into the game... dang! :( I'm probably going to have to release the game without any background music. Oh, and I don't have a 'death' routine yet so you just keep on coming back when you've used your last paddle; I left it that way for now so people can betatest the entire game without worrying about losing all their lives. I'm glad you like the game! :)

That's weird, Marmin... The game engine falls back to the next compatible video mode when you start it up ('hardware vertex processing', 'mixed vertex processing' and 'software vertex processing'), so it should work with pretty much any DirectX 9.0c-compatible setup. If the game doesn't start at all, then either DirectX 9.0c isn't installed yet, your s3 twister vid card isn't compatible enough with DirectX 9.0c to play the game, or the 16 megabytes on the card isn't enough RAM to load all the game's textures. I'd first suspect that DirectX 9.0c isn't installed yet, because DirectX should emulate any features not supported by your video card and Windows should start using system memory to get past the vid card's 16-megabyte limit. Also, because there's a DirectX 9.0, 9.0b and 9.0c out there, it's easy not to have the most up-to-date version installed. You can run DXDiag.exe to see what version of DirectX is currently installed on your system (it should actually say "DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c" in the 'System Information' box under the 'System' tab), and you can run the tests under the 'Display' tab to see if your video card can fully handle DirectX 9.0c. You can run DXDiag.exe by going to 'Start' -> 'Run' and then type 'dxdiag' in the 'Open:' blank. Hope that helps!

Here's a quick update on the current status of the game: The menusystem is coming along GREAT! Hopefully I'll have a beta out soon where you won't have to tweak the 'settings.cfg' file in Notepad every time you want to change the game's settings. Also, I'm working on a HighScore system so you'll be able to record your highest scores! And also working on a handful of extra debug edits to the gamecode ('pause and then un-pause a windowed game sometimes makes a mousebutton stick in the game' is fixed, etc.).

Thanks again for the beta help guys, I really appreciate it!

Ah, I see now.. my drivers are not DirectX 9c compatible, only DirectX 8. That explaines everything.
M.

Liked it. Although a bit to easy maybe, the first levels..
Nice effects.
Thanks for sharing,
M.

Hey Marmin, I'm glad you got the game to work on your computer! :)

Yeah, the first couple of levels are 'warm-up' levels (let's players get used to the game) so they're designed to be pretty easy. Hopefully the later levels are a little more challenging, though. If you want to make the game a little more challenging you can open the file 'settings.cfg' in Notepad and change the 'Game's difficulty level' number (the eighth number) to 4. I think it defaults to 2, which is somewhat easygoing, but it might be set to 0, which is REALLY easy. Just be careful how you edit the 'settings.cfg' file or Atomic Pong may not load correctly... If that happens, just delete 'settings.cfg' and Atomic Pong will create a new one. Or if you want to wait a day or so, I should have a beta done with the menu system operational and you can set the game's difficulty level in the menu. But let me know if the game's still too easy when set to 4, because I think I left enough headroom in the ball-block collision routine to make it even harder (if the ball travels too fast, it won't bounce correctly against blocks or it may pass right through them).