Visual Basic 6 - Bitblt Shooter Example w/ Online Highscores

Edit:Could a mod please move this to the game programming Code Bank?
I originally made this as a project for school. It is a game called Space Fighter. It is an arcade shooter loosely based of Galactica.

I was helped out in creating it by a lot of people in this community, especially Damasterjo. I decided I would pay back this community by giving them my creation, completely open source.

Space.zip contains the VB6 project (VB5 users may need to open space.vbp in notepad and edit out any lines that VB complains about).

If your computer lacks the internet transfer control, you will have to find it on your own, as the rules here forbid posting the system file.

The code itself is kind of messy. I've commented some areas, but others are devoid of any humanity. If you are like me, you learn best by modifying and recoding sections of projects. I've created a checklist to help you do that. It is ranked with the easiest tasks first and the tasks get harder as it descends.

Hopefully once you are done with the list, you will be more comfortable programming games in BitBlt:
[]Get the game to fully work
All you need is a free webhost that allows FTP. Change the password, remote host, and username function of Inet1 on frmScore and frmViewScore to match your chosen host. Then use the FTP program to upload the the attached scores.txt to your website.

[]Replace some of the graphics
Be sure to create masks for all of the ships you replace. The scrolling background is an easy one to replace.

[]Replace the explosion animation with a bigger, more volatile one. If you want an extra challenge try using a different amount of frames

[]Add a new wave of baddies
Try looking at the code in Main() in Form1

[]Try adding new bad guy types

[]Give your bad guy a custom targeting system like what the Borg use

[]Make the bad guys randomly appear

[]Add a weapon

[]Add a ship

[]Put that weapon and ship in the shop

[]Stop the shield from replenishing automatically after every wave. Now add an item to the shop where they can replenish their shield, or sell the remaining shield energy for cash.

[]***Challenge*** Add sounds

[]***Challenge*** Add a pixel collision detection system

[]***Challenge*** Create a framerate system so it runs at about the same speed on every computer.

[]***Challenge*** Modify the enemy movement code to allow the individual enemies to move in different directions

[]***Challenge*** Modify the code to work with OpenGl or DirectX

[]***Challenge*** Try using a MySQL database instead of a text file

[]***|-_-\SUPER Challenge/-_-|*** Modify the code to use winsock so a two people can work together over the internet as a Co-Op shooter.

I hope this project can further your understanding of game programming in VB. If any experienced code would like to clean up my code, feel free.

I'm officially releasing this to the public domain. You need not give credit to me. You can even remove frmAbout if you so choose.

-Shadow

In accordance with this CodeBank policy regarding attachments, System.Zip has been edited and the compiled .OCX file removed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hack

In accordance with this CodeBank policy regarding attachments, System.Zip has been edited and the compiled .OCX file removed.

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I've removed that zip as it is useless without the .OCX file.

I forgot to include the necessary scores.txt file that is necessary to use online highscores. It is now included. Simply put it in the root directory of your FTP host.

thank you for noting me