General information

Back in 2004, A few friends and I started working on a DirectX Gravity Force clone game. To make a short story even shorter - that game was never finished. Now I don't like projects that just die, which seems to be a common problem for a lot of hobby programming projects, so I decided to create a DirectX game that at least reaches some kind of "playable" beta state.

So, what is Slancontrol? You can say that it's a "2.5D space racer", if such a term exists. The physics simulation is plain 2D but the graphics are in 3D. There are four different tracks and the players task is to control a space ship around the track the predefined number of laps as fast as possible. There are a few power-ups (such as increased energy or a speed boost) that will aid the player in getting a better total time. The tracks are filled with different types of obstacles to increase the challenge.

You can play in both online and offline mode. By registering on this site you can create a unique user account, that is used to start the game in online mode. If playing in online mode, your track records are automatically uploaded to the Slancontrol server. The top ten track times and presented on this site (see the standings). There is also an offline mode, where only local records are kept. The goal is of course to be at position 1 for all tracks in the standings (world records).

Development

The libs, APIs and tools used are listed below:

• DirectX 9.0 as rendering API
• Box2D used as physics engine
• TinyXML used as XML parser
• Curl as network/socket library
• IrrKlang as sound library
• Lua library for object scripting
• Terragen for skybox texture and heightmap data generation
• Genetica for surface texture generation

The rest..

There are of course several things that can be added, improved and/or enhanced. A possible list of things to do is:

• There are no shaders used at all in this code, everything is rendered with a fixed pipeline. So, it's kind of out dated on the graphics side. This is not how it should be done 2010!
• Switch to a 3D physics engine
• Since I suck at 3D graphics, the meshes and textures used are not that good. A power-up that gives you full energy could be something more than a textured sphere, don't you think? Thanks to Magnus Jonsson for the space ship model though, it is very nice!
• Multiplayer online support
• Weapons