Space Race HD

Check it: http://youtu.be/4s44qu5zgXE

That's “Space Race, the Musical!” in full seven-twenty-pee.

This is the result of a few things: first, Antares can play games in higher resolutions now. This will be in the next release (“soon”, where “soon” is what I would have said in January). Second, I've written some scripts that can turn replay data into a movie. They're not user-friendly but they do the job.

There's a “third”, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

And this: http://youtu.be/PSa3EwEuh6A

Third, I've hacked together the ability to make new replays. It's too much of a hack to make the next release, but should make it in a release or two after that.

That's awesome. I can't wait.

Now someone should be able to make an actual Space Race Musical using the level editor and this technology. 😛

During the early days of Antares, I started out trying to get the game to run a replay without any graphical interface at all. My plan was to get it to simulate the physics of the game and produce a log of events like "Zoom to Hostile", "Player 0 HVD destroyed", &c. I would have posted it under the title "Space Race, the Novelization!".

Unfortunately, there was a bug, and it turned out to be much easier to investigate by implementing drawing code and looking at what happened, so by the time I had Space Race running bug free, I had pictures. I later used them to make the older Space Race video. (Fun fact: the bug I was investigating was that ships disappeared when they picked up an energy blob. The cause of the bug was ultimately due to the fact that the C++ standard leaves sizeof(enum) unspecified, and I was using a different compiler from the original)