Hey guys,

I've been reluctant about making a thread for this as I wanted it to be my secret project, but tifreak convinced me, so here it is

Faces is a 3D space shooter taking place in a distant (and much unlikely to happen) future where a rebel armada took over many planets of the universe to do rebellion-related stuffs. Your mission, as an agent sent by the official government, is to free these planets by destroying the turrets the rebellion put on them.

The game is far from finished and not really enjoyable as the enemies don't have sprites, don't fire and die with one shot, I have only one planet (although the level format/loading is working) among other things.

BUT ! All the 3D rendering is done, XY rotations are working, planets are solid, I have a beautiful stars background, 3D collisions between your laser and the faces of the planet and the enemies are done, score with custom font is working (thanks Keoni29 from Omnimaga for the font), everything running at 20 FPS at 6 MHz on my TI-83+.fr.

So, let's have a little screenshot, shall we ?



I don't post a demo for now because I don't think it's really worth it, but if you want to try anyway with the few things you can do with it, just ask and I'll post it

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amazing, though i find the lazer to be kind of weak. perhaps make it's hit area bigger?

will the enemies be able to fire back at your, or will there be a time limit to clear the cube?

will there be better weapon possibilities, like upgrading?

I didn't plan to change the laser. I think it looks good since you fire at a point that is far from you.

Of course the enemies will fire back. What do you think, it's rebel army

I don't think there will be weapon upgrading. Maybe rapid fire (this will be more obvious when I'll have incorporated firing delays).

Great looking 3D rendering of the cube!
What mathematical algorithm did you use to plot the cube ? Is it pausing during the firing routine to due constraints on processing ?

I use a "classical" 3D XY rotation + projection to draw the cube, among with backface culling to handle occlusion. It's real 3D, I don't use an algorithm to simulate 3D.

I do Pause 50 after the firing to let the player admire the flash I just got too lazy to think about something more elegant when I implemented it ; it's not definitive.

I'm sure the Federation would have liked the Borg to have been this easy to beat.

Thanks for finally posting a topic about this, matrefeytontias! It looks really great, and I'm excited to see this progress since you first started posting pictures on IRC. I think the laser area-of-effect is fine, and you can see from the screenshot that it kills anything within 3 or so pixels of the impact point. I agree that keeping the cube spinning while the shot is fired would be a cool effect. I can't wait to see more updates on this project!

Actually, my goal is to make the shot last only 1 frame, and I want the player to be as precise as possible. You can't see very well from the screenshot, but you actually have 1 pixel margin around the square to hit it.

Ah, that makes sense. Thank you for the clarification. I'd ask if you had any plans to port this to the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, but I don't think the cube rotation would work without very careful pixel manipulation.

Not possible sorry. Also, remember this is Axe, not ASM, making it impossible to port without complete disassembly and modification. And I don't feel like doing that.

Ah, I did indeed forget it was Axe rather than pure assembly. I think that speaks to your skill in making it look fast despite being a level above assembly, though!

To be on topic, I like how something as simple as a rendering a perspective-projected cube can be made into a shooter. I can see that the cube renders onto a black square as the stars aren't rendered on it, probably since it is easiest to render white lines and not fill in the cube with black.

It would be interesting to see if the controls did something like asteroids where you alter the velocity, not absolute position with the arrows (for added difficulty)

Do you plan on having more solids that just a cube? Pyramid? Torus?

Thanks KermM actually not only it looks fast, but it actually is fast - 20 FPS !

AHelper : it looks simple because I only render a cube, but the engine can render any existing convex polyhedra without any modification to the code. Actually, I planned to increase the number of faces of the planets (starting with a tetrahedron) as you progress in the game. For example, level 1 could be a tetrahedron, level 2 a prism, level 3 a square-based pyramid etc.