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Welcome to the Home of SABlaster

Computer games were my first attraction to computers and since then I always wanted to write one. My inital work in this direction was a clone of Flying Shark which I implemented up to a quite advanced level on a C64. Then the C64 platform died and I was going on and my next platform was a Acorn Archimedes A3000. There I had to learn that this machine did not have hardware support for sprites like the C64 did and I implemented a sprite engine which was a graphics to ARM assembler compiler. I hand optimized every instruction and the results of this effort were quite impressive. I actually never found the time to port my C64 Flying Shark clone to the Acorn because I started my studies at university. But I never lost my idea of writing a computer game out of my eyes and over the last year whenever I had some spare time I tried to improve SABlaster.
So after this long "Blah Fasel", what is SABlaster?

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SABlaster

SABlaster is meant to be several things:

• first of all SABlaster is a game project written in C++ and targeted for the Linux and Windows platforms. It is a clone of the well known bomberman type of game.
• second, SABlaster is meant to be a library integration project, where I test the compatibility of several different libraries and technologies like the
  • ACE (Adaptive Communication Environment) Framework
  • SDL (Simple Direct Media Layer), a portable multimedia layer abstraction
  • STLport, a thread safe and exception safe implementation of the STL (C++ Standard Template Library) library
  • the C++ Boost library, an extension library for the STL
  • WFST, a Finite-state template library in C++
  • ParaGUI, a cross-platform high-level application framework and GUI (graphical user interface) library
  • libmzscheme, an implementation of the programming language scheme as scripting language
  • SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator) to be able to plug in several different scripting languages into the same project
  • xtl (eXternalization Template Library) to externalize data structures in C++
• as a third point SABlaster is meant to be a design study of using patterns and object oriented methods in game programming
• and finally as a long term aim SABlaster should be used to compare the object oriented design methodology with functional programming design methods by reimplementing the game in different functional programming languages like Haskell, Lisp and SML and having a direct comparison of the different game sub modules.

• A menu system
• An integrated scripting language (mzscheme)
• A playable game with a maze, players, bombs, extras, ...
• And an initial version of a network interface.

• Game graphics. The projects desperately needs a graphics artist.
• Game sound and sound effects.
• And a cool intro.

At the moment the development is done on MS Visual Studio v6 because I made the experience that projects are easier to port from MSVC to gcc than the other way round. Sounds strange, but because MSVC has so many limitations and areas where it does not conform to the C++ standard it is easier to first write the code with the weaker platform and only later port it to gcc which suports a superset of the functionality of MSVC.

There are no binary packages and screenshots available yet, because the graphics is still missing, but if you would like to get a feeling of what the targeted aim is have a look at MasterBlaster. If you would like to join the project I'll send you a CD with the whole development environment set-up correctly. If you are a graphics artist and would like to join the project then I'll send you a prebuilt binary which you can use.