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Comment by hexer303

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Comment by hexer303

I ported my old project from 2007 to WASM. Original game was built in C++ for Win32 DirectX. This was an educational project with a team of 6 and 5 months of development.

How to play: Press Quick Start. Left/Right keys to aim, Up/Down for power. W/A/S/D to move the camera, tab to lock/unlock the camera.

Works on mobile too, though not perfect yet - drag the arrow around to aim, adjust the power bar, tap fire.

Originally started porting back in 2020. The first step was to port native DirectX code into OpenGL, DirectSound to SoLoud and platform code to SDL.

I ended up porting the rendering code to bgfx and coding agents game me a big boost this year so to finish the project.

The aesthetics and feature all remain original.

Some of the porting challenges: - Lots of DirectX code. Back in 2007 portability was not a high priority for us. Custom-built engine.

- Packed 32 bit custom model and animation file format with packed structures.

Back then we also made some interesting choices: - Wrote our own custom STL-like library. - For performance, the model loading code was pre-allocating a block, reading the entire file and then fixing up the binary structure offsets into pointers. This was the packed structure binary format and was not portable to modern systems so had to rewrite the loader. - Originally I wrote a custom Maya exporter plugin and model format that supported skeletal animations. Ironically we ran out of budget to produce the animations so it ended up barely used. - We had a strict rule: Absolutely no exception handling or RTTI. This ended up paying off 19 years later because it made it easier to port to WASM.

Trivia: - The weird player names are mostly nicknames of other students and staff at the time. - There are some pop culture sci/fi references to Space Balls and other movies if you notice them. - The game pre-dates Angry Birds by 2 years but has some of the same vibes to it.

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