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Am I required to attach binaries in order to post?

Actually, come to think of it, I'll just go somewhere else.  Ta ta!

[went ahead and removed, not everyone has blitz installed, my apologies]

Does this run crawlingly slowly for anyone else or is it just me?

Hint: the problem has nothing to do with the distance function.  Remove the distance check entirely and have it just plot random dots and it will still run at a snail's pace.

Does it have anything to do with the fact that I'm not clearing the buffer every frame?  There is no cls in there...

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Source removed; not everyone has blitz installed.  Sorry to be a bother

Maybe it's just that it doesn't like to flip the buffer, and that takes some amount of time, therefore "batching" the draws would make things faster.

Edit: Yes, it did.  It just seems very strange to me that the above code would run (for me) at maybe 5 frames per second.  If anything, batched draws run at a grossly higher framerate-- not just a faster fill rate.

Blitz is strange.

Thanks for the good help.  That DSP site is just what I wanted.

And yeah, the reason I was interested in 4k synths is because I figure that 4k is small enough for my tiny brain to comprehend.  This is probably wrong (my brain is much smaller than it used to be, at least the parts that work) but there has to be some complexity-limiting thing going on there as well.

I'm starting to think that some of the things I'm running into (crackling) may be issues with my hardware.  Or something. 

Games using a synth didn't do a very convincing job in that area.

Ain't talkin' bout no Call of Duty up in here.

Talkin' bout clicks and beeps.  "PEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWW" and "POWWW!"

I'm primarily interested in programming games and the reason I'm interested in 4k synths is because they seem to offer a very quick and simple way of producing sound and music.  I'm looking at implementing one of my own now, none of the offerings for Blitz seem to fit the bill, really.

Can anyone recommend one with well-commented C source?

Ferris: I thought probably someone from here would be on that site.  One of those things that seems like a huge coincidence but isn't. 

Found this on in4k...

http://in4k.untergrund.net/index.php?title=4k_synth

This is very pretty.  I'd like to see it implemented in C.

Oh, I appreciate it that you make exes-- sometimes I'm writing on linux anyway.

I like the oldstyle effects too and I often think something has been lost with the transition to more powerful hardware.  One of my favorite latterday demos is "Cube," by Farbraush.  Trippy does not even begin to describe it, and you can really see the scene roots.  For best results view in HD and fullscreen, it's really worth it.

Or even, like, download the demo and run it on your own box...

Someone a while back was asking how to do copper effects.

For those who don't know, the "copper" was the name of a very simple but powerful graphics coprocessor on the Amiga.  It had a very small list of commands available to it, having to do with changing color during scanline operations.  It also allowed some other strange idiosyncrasies like having different resolutions at different vertical positions on the screen, something unique to the Amiga as far as I know. 

Of course, like everything on the Amiga, the Copper was pushed beyond any sane limits by the demo scene, who did things with it that it was never designed to do.

I often wonder why the demo scene don't push limits of new hardware the way they used to.  Perhaps because they don't need to anymore to achieve beautiful effects, but as amazing as they are, people seem to be resting on their laurels to some extent and not continuing to really push the technology.

Probably because they're obsessed with ancient hardware like Spectrums, and effects that were already played out in 1989...

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Source removed; not everyone has blitz installed.  Sorry to be a bother

That's strange because I don't have the problem on windows 7.

NO idea.  Are you compiling from source or using the one Zawran built?

It's not that important anyway and frankly the demo is not that interesting, I only put it here for people who might want to learn how to do tilemap collisions.

I always feel sketchy sending out exes because I am afraid people will get viruses and blame me

I looked around at the available mod players and synths.  Looks like something like ufmod will be what I need.

With those, is it possible to play mods out of memory instead of loading them from a file?  Are the samples the mod player uses tweakable in realtime, eg. can I write sin or square waves to the samples?

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Source removed; not everyone has blitz installed.  Sorry to be a bother

The collisions are broken in a couple of ways but I think they're quite literally corner cases having to do with the fact that the colliding objects are points with 0 width and height.  Will implement collision of all four corners in the colliding square, though I vaguely forsee some more problems that may come from that.  Perhaps it will make things easier, however, because I will be able to simply revert to oldx, oldy.  Maybe this needs some sort of Verlet integration to do it in the easiest way possible.

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Source removed; not everyone has blitz installed.  Sorry to be a bother, the last thing I want is to annoy anybody.

It does have multichannel sound.  However I am a complete noob to sound programming.

maybe I will find some short sound samples and have a play around.

Any thoughts about this?
http://code.google.com/p/maxmod/

Thanks for the kind words.

- Retro sound would be really really good

Will do.  I have thought to some extent how I want to do it-- several channels, one for a bass line, one for a melody line, one for chiptune arpeggiated chords of the kind you hear in keygens, and two for game sounds-- one a squarewave channel for shots and explosions and another for divebomb whistles for the aliens.

How does that sound to you?  What would be a good way of handling this, particularly the music?  Perhaps procedural music would be a little much to bite off and I should just concentrate on alien whistles, explosions and a bass thump...

- Fullscreen support would be nice

I will look into it but then you have to mess with resolutions, widescreen, letterboxing, et cetera.  Ideally the window could just go fullscreen with no titlebar, toggled by "f."  Anyone have any idea how to accomplish that?

- In window mode it would be cool if the game recognize when you leave the window with the mouse pointer and automatically pauses the game. When I re-enter the window the spaceships movement seems to be bit laggy/buggy

Agreed.

- Maybe it is because I am just not good enough at the game - but it would be cool if you have something like 3 lives or so...but on the other hand it might be more casual if you only have one life. So I am not sure about this to be honest.

I want the game to be exceedingly difficult.  Like Super Crate Box.  This is how games used to be!  If you want to see difficult, try some Alien Typhoon.  I recommend the emulated Apple II version:
http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Galaxian/Home_version_comparisons

It is probably an insincere impulse I'm having (meaning something I think of but will never do) to load up the Apple II emu, load up a disassembler, and study the code for some of those old games to find out how the sound is done among other things.  There are probably easier ways of going about learning that (like stabbing myself in the eye with a burning, sharp stick and learning that way...)

- And I definately second another point va!n does - that switching from keyboard to mouse after you pressed start is not really user friendly.

Agreed and easy to fix.

Nevertheless, this game is really great. It is worth polishing IMHO. Good work!

Thanks again and I will put in some more time on it.  I think the "procedural critters" thing is the most fruitful part of it and I will very likely expand on that part.  Part of my goal here was to produce a harvestable framework-- stuff I can pull out and reuse.

How are sound systems typically programmed for games and demos?

Let's say I want to produce something similar to a mod tracker.  Let's say I want to make it tiny. 

How are the different audio channels handled?  Do you have, eg, 4 channel audio, each one with a different sound bound to it?

Educate.

Game logic is finished, scoring added, several new enemy types and behaviors.  Weapon upgrades.  Difficulty scales.  Attract mode added.

Source code above is now updated, as is this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/590198/space%20gimps.exe

I would like to release this on TIGSource so anyone who wants to playtest this and comment, I would appreciate it.  Enjoy!

It's Sofa King hard.  It makes DoDonPachi look easy.  This is the way games used to be in 1982 or so...

Thanks for all the help.  This is only my second largish program with Max so I have a lot of questions.