I'd like to show off some of the cooler parts of my game to the coders.
This is
Gimbal. Players build ships from pieces, fly them, and blow up other players' ships. It's top down 2D to keep game mechanics simple. Wide open maps. Newtonian physics with aerodynamics.
Rewind a couple years, and this is the game I wanted to play and wished existed. The end result is pretty close to my original vision. I like where it is now.
APIs C# codebase
XNA for sound/graphics/input
DirectX for gamepad support
Lidgren for UDP networking
Tools Visual Studio 2008 is my IDE
Paint Shop Pro 7 for art
Audacity for sound
Reaper for music
Lightworks for video editing
Some cool stuff...Per-Pixel collision detection, optimized with bounding circles. All the parts of a ship affect the physics and handling.
Aerodynamics. Players can mount functional control surfaces to ships.
Custom GUI engine and widget kit.
Motion blur on particle effects.
One aspect of the component-based physics engine: Missiles physically leave the launcher when fired, and free up some weight and drag on the parent ship.
Networking: Client-Server multiplayer network model. Clients send their input changes (deltas), and the server runs the simulation. Server sends regular vehicle state updates to the clients.
Physics: The physics engine is multithreaded and runs on N logical processors. It runs my own physics engine, using a rigid body model with elastic collisions.
There are more cool programming tricks in this game. I can speak to any part you are interested in.
This is a pretty broad summary, but there are a lot of elements to Gimbal. It is a very large project. I haven't run into many problems with the managed environment. It seems there is always more performance there to grab if you give it a good shot.
Anyway, I'm open for questions. There's not a lot that's secret, and I will share!
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