This Asteroids game is a hybrid between the original arcade game and the Mac
reflex game Crystal Quest. The player's spaceship moves by following the
cursor, much as in Crystal Quest, rather than the traditional Asteroids thrust and
rotation. The Asteroids are still there, but the Crystal Quest stars have been
added, these need to be collected instead of shot for points.
This game was written entirely on a virtual PC emulator running on a Mac, so it
should run and respond quite quickly on any actual Windows PC.
Originally some of the sprites, most notably the player ship, were drawn using
3D polygon meshes and rendered real time, but the spaceship models I had
were high polygon count models, which draw too slowly. By far the fastest
performance was found by simply using bit maps.
Please note, the graphics and sounds are not mine, they have been adapted from the games "Escape Velocity", "Apeiron", "Maelstrom", and "Mars Rising", all by Ambrosia software (see http://www.ambrosiasw.com).
The following cheat keys have been installed for testing the game:
- use ' ' [space] to add extra ships, to a maximum of eight
- use '1' or 'a' to add extra Asteroids
- use '2' or 'm' to add extra mines, to a maximum of two
- use '3' or 's' to add extra stars
KNOWN BUGS:
1) Do not resize the game window as this will cause sprites to draw in the wrong locations.
2) If the cheat key is used to draw extra stars ['3' or 's'], then the new stars will draw above, not under, existing asteroids.
