Hi.

Over the past couple of months I've been working on an RTS called Emoticon. It is currently at an Alpha release, and this release features a fully playable level. You start with a reasonably sized army and the enemy has an even more reasonably sized army, at this stage, there are no set mission objectives, but it is a bit of a challenge to wipe out the enemy, so give it a shot

The game requires the VB6 runtimes (like everything should ) and DirectX7. It was developed on a PII400 with 64mb of ram and a Geforce2MX400 graphics card. Definately not a high end system, and it runs quite smoothly here, so hopefully it will run ok on other computers.

If you could download it and test it for me, it would be great, it seems to be fairly stable and works on most computers, I have had a couple of once off errors reported by people, and unfortunately, I can't reproduce them, thus debugging is made somewhat difficult. The more people who test it, the more likely it is that I fix the problems.

Other feedback is also welcome, there are a couple of additions to the game I'm already planning, but your input is always welcome, when you have a look at the screenshots/game you will notice that the style of it is fairly... abstract. Thus, I can do whatever I want without any regard for realism, this is good for me, because I don't have to come up with a contrived and flawed story to be able to include various cool things

Finally, if you would be able to report the FPS you get when playing, it would help me a great deal. To do this, run the game and go into the options menu and turn VSync *off*. Play the game and have a look at the FPS you get. After that, turn VSync back on. If you could state your FPS, CPU, RAM and Graphics card, it would be appreciated greatly.

Anyway, more info and a download is available at:

http://emoticonvb.cjb.net

Thank you