arcade | Learn C Games Programming Blog

DungeonRush – open source C + SDL 2 game

Posted on February 10, 2021February 8, 2021 by David

I continue my quest, looking around for open source games in C that use SDL 2. The latest one is DungeonRush by developer Rapiz1 (does no one ever use their real names these days?) who hails from Wuhan.

It is not a rogue-like, but more a Snake-like game. You move your hero around the playing area avoiding monsters and things fired at you while picking up stuff and people to give you extra lives. As well as the difficulty levels it includes multiplayer mode as well though I haven’t tried that.

If you are learning C or games programming, it’s worth studying to see how others do things; this includes its own text drawing and high scoring and saving high scores. It’s quite fun to play though I am rubbish playing it, even at the normal level. I’ve added this to the C Code links page. (Accessed on the top menu),

Snake games are interesting because if you use a circular buffer, no matter how big the snake grows, you can move it by just moving the head and tail elements. An O(1) operation!

Raspberry Pi 4 – Perfect for arcade quality games and development

Posted on April 26, 2020April 25, 2020 by David

I got my Pi 4 a week ago and have been doing experiments on it with my Asteroids game. If I disable the line of code that kills the player ship in the DestroyObject() function and just add a return after case tPlayer: and uncomment the code that adds Asteroids when you press A then I can have lots of asteroids on screen. Also set the MAXASTEROIDS #define to 128.

Then you get the likes of this screenshot which is a 1024 x 768 size window. It’s still running at 40 fps, there are 116 asteroids on screen, around 60-70 explosions and the Pi’s temperature is still a balmy 44.79 C. I’ve never got the Pi’s temperature (and it does have an internal 3.3V fan) to rise above 51 C.

But what’s also impressive is that with Visual Studio Code and Clang on the PI, I can compile the whole 2,200 lines of C on the PI in about a second. This makes the Pi very usable for developing games. And I say this as someone who is used to powerful Windows PCs for compiling code.

This is it running in debug mode; that’s all the numbers and wire frame bounding boxes around every moving object.

Further experimenting and removing the limitations (I used a While loop to limit it to 60 fps back before I had enabled the hardware video flyback). With that while removed and the hardware video flyback disabled, I was getting over 100 fps with 100 asteroids on screen at once. I pushed it up to 6,000 asteroids and the frame rate dropped to 10 fps. Given the amount of stuff that was colliding and blowing up, that’s still very good.