Well, things have progressed fairly well in a short time, and I am now on the verge of attempting to tackle DirectPlay (TCP/IP) programming. Whether or not networking will be implemented in this game is still up in the air. One thing that is fairly certain is that it will be a while before this game is updated again. It's in a very playable state now, and is free of any seriously nagging bugs. I might make a couple of more updates for the purpose of "tweaking" the game to adjust the level of difficulty, but this is probably the last major release for a while. When/if I get DirectPlay figured out, I'll either add that to RockJock, or start on another, more sophisticated project altogether.

Be sure to read the revision history for the specifics on the new version... Enjoy ;-P

RockJock is my first attempt at programming a game using Visual C++ 4.0 and the DirectX 5.0 SDK (hey, every other name was taken, give me a break =P). It's your typical "Asteroids" type rip-off, with, of course, many enhancements, the most notable being the 16-bit, raytraced graphics. This is more or less a learning experience for me, it is still in it's early stages of development, and will probably never be totally finished, though it is playable as it is right now, and I do intend on adding many features to this game before I take what I've learned from this project and move on to something more serious.

RockJock System Requirements

• Windows 95 with DirectX 5.0 installed
• Pentium or better recommended, though it does run on high-end 486s to some extent, still working on that. :-)
• 8MB RAM
• 2MB graphics card capable of 640x480x16-bit resolution.

Download RockJock

Until all of the lawyers of the world are rotting away in Hell where they belong, I guess I need this...

Josh Langley (that's me =P) will not be held responsible for anything that happens in regards to your very existence as a result of the use of this program. This program comes with no warranties, expressed, or implied. Use at your own risk! By downloading this program, you are agreeing to these terms.

Download RockJock 0.10 (324 KB) - ZIP file

Download RockJock update (79 KB) - This will upgrade you from versions 0.03 and later.

The arrow keys move your ship, while the CTRL key fires. ESC to quit. Spacebar to pause/unpause.

Revision History

0.10 - Additions/changes:

• Powerups! You can upgrade your ship to 2 or even 3 barrels. There are also 5,000 point bonuses that you'll find floating around occasionally.
• There is now a ROCKJOCK.INI file. In this file, you can turn sound on or off, and you can also reverse the stereo channels if needed.
• Changed all of the sounds to 8-bit, and shortened some of them a little. The .EXE is much smaller now.
• Pause has been added. The previous version only paused when the screen was minimized, now you can manually hit the SPACEBAR to pause/unpause the game, and pause is initiated automatically when the screen is minimized.

0.04 - Additions/changes:

• SOUND! Some of it a bit crude, but that'll change soon. Also kinda big, I opted for 16-bit sound since it's not as noisy, but given the huge increase in the ZIP size, I'll probably drop that down to 8.
• You now lose 25% of your score when you die.
• After you die, you have about 2 seconds of invulnerability to get your butt out of trouble.
• Slowed the asteroids down just a hair.
• Hi score is now saved to disk. (Delete the hiscore.dat file to reset it)

Bug fixes:

• You can't steer after your ship has been blown to bits now.
• Hmm... I'm sure there are a few more that I fixed, but I'll be damned if I can remember what they were. :-)

0.03 - Additions:

• Player death has been added. Instead of the conventional limited number of lives, 10% of your score is deducted when you die.
• Hi score (hey, everyone else mis-spells it too =P) has been added.
• Asteroids have been sped up a little bit.
• Asteroids only split in to 3 pieces now instead of 4 to compensate for the speed increase.

Bug fixes:

• When the game screen was minimized, it would take a very long time to restore when you tried to bring it back. It should come back instantly now.
• The frame-skipping routine didn't pay any attention to when the screen was minimized, causing huge jumps when you restored it. Now the game "pauses" completely when it is minimized.

0.02 - Added player score. Also fixed the following bugs:

• Screen would not restore after the game was minimized, problem has been fixed. However, the restoration process takes quite a while, sometimes up to 20 seconds even (or maybe more). I'm not sure why yet. :-(
• You could not fire while holding down the up and left arrow keys at the same time. This has been fixed by changing the fire key to CTRL.
• New speed compensation mechanism has been implemented. The old time delay has been replaced with a new mechanism that handles the both short wait periods for fast machines and frame-skipping for slower machines. You should now be able to run the game on slower machines, at the cost of a lower frequency of screen updates.
• Put a limit on how fast the ship can travel. Now you folks with lead fingers can't get yourselves in to a pickle. =P

0.01 - The initial release of RockJock... whoopee.

Known Bugs

• On slower machines, the game can "freeze up" for a few moments on occasion.
• The multi-barrel guns can sometimes fire a bullet off in a strange direction, depending on what your angle is, but it's rarely a problem.