Bartop for my College programming students finished

[Hurray Banana]

I announced this in a round about way a couple of months ago, when I posted some Visio templates for button layouts.

I am in charge of ICT courses at my sixth form College (16-19 year olds) here in the UK. One of the units we do in the second year is programming design, production and testing. To make this interesting the students design a retro styled game.

This is their first real introduction to programming (they have done simple form based programs prior to this project) something with complexity. In order to minimise the complexity of the code they would need to produce I also developed a sprite and game engine for the students to use. This turned into a bigger job than originally planned because I kept adding features that the students would need and were too complicated for them to program themselves. This engine is written in VB.Net and uses Windows GDI functions. I had originally planned to talk to Direct X but I've had a nightmare with my college laptop (couldn't get any DirectX code running properly due to lots of reasons) and time ran out to keep trying with this. It would be easy to port this over if I had the time to let the IT techs rebuild my laptop, but the work I do I can't afford to be without it at the moment.

In order to make it a little more real they had to design their games to work in an Arcade cabinet. Which I decided to build for them. I originally was going to build a full size cab, but quickly realised this wouldn't fit anywhere, so I went with a Bartop.

I had to keep it simple because it had to fit in as much as possible with the room it was going in. Luckily the computers we have are black, so a black colour scheme was decided upon. I did toy with the idea of side art and a marquee but I felt this would be over the top.

Anyway here's a couple of pictures of the machine at college. I purposefully went with a design that was plugged into an external computer, this was to make sure that the code they wrote would work equally well on the arcade machine and their development gear.

I will be putting a complete site of construction up at some point so the students can follow what I did. I used a mini-pac for the interface.

[Hurray Banana]

Here are a couple of construction pics and a pic running my test code through my game engine.

Got loads of different things happening at the same time.

Worm from Super Ghouls and Ghost,

Pacman and a cherry moving round the Pacman Maze

Some invaders walking along

Some stars scrolling in the background

Some random clay pigeons moving under gravity and a rotating crosshair to shoot them.

I had so much fun writing the engine and building the machine, and I told the students I was doing it for them

[patrickl]

Is there a way to hide the bezel behind smoked glass? I'm pretty sure that will improve the looks.

[sphetr2]

Hey, maybe you should have the BYOAC group "test out" their games when they're finished with them.

I think it'd be really cool.

[Hurray Banana]

Is there a way to hide the bezel behind smoked glass? I'm pretty sure that will improve the looks.

I planned on painting the edge of the monitor, but ran out of time, it will be a job I do in the future

Hey, maybe you should have the BYOAC group "test out" their games when they're finished with them.

I think it'd be really cool.

In my other thread we talked about this, I have chatted to the students about this and they sounded ok about this.

Today is the last day of term and then we have a few weeks after christmas to finish off. Some of the games are looking good. I'm pretty impressed, the engine has really freed them up.

I'll post some pics in January.

[MaMeNnO]

That's a real cool idea!
Years back I did my best in programming games, but most of the time I didn't finish it. That was in the days of the Acorn Electron, BBC and later on a Archimedes. Just sold my RiscPC 600 a few weeks back, because I didn't had the time to do something with it.

[Hurray Banana]

most of the time I didn't finish it.

I'm the same I always write the cool stuff then get bored, this is the first game related project I have actually fully completed. Started on the Amstrad 6128 doing Z80 and the BBC model B doing 6502, those were the days. Loved the purity of machine code back then.

I'm going to knock up a few games using my engine over the next month or so and I'll definately put these up on this board.

I've got sprite scaling in the engine, so I might have a go at a Space Harrier type game.

[Pekay]

This engine is written in VB.Net and uses Windows GDI functions. I had originally planned to talk to Direct X but I've had a nightmare with my college laptop (couldn't get any DirectX code running properly due to lots of reasons) and time ran out to keep trying with this.

Hmmm, when or if you plan to get the engine to talk and work properly with DirectX, if you do have the problem of it not working properly, try a virtual machine with basic Windows XP (VMWare, etc).

[Kaytrim]

Very interesting class, wish I could be a student there.    Seriously I am a VB.NET programmer too.  What language are your students using to program their games, VB.NET or C# or something else?  When you are finished with your sprite engine would you mind making it available to the masses.    I'd sure like to learn the same stuff that your students did in your class.

[Hurray Banana]

Very interesting class, wish I could be a student there.    

Yes it is interesting, and to think they could have met the exam board requirements by creating a naff quoting system.

They are using VB.net 2005. It's a nicer environment than 2003 (hides loads of nasty easily breakable stuff from them).

I was thinking of releasing it, but I'll need to throw a lot more error checking into it before I did that.

Hmmm, when or if you plan to get the engine to talk and work properly with DirectX, if you do have the problem of it not working properly, try a virtual machine with basic Windows XP (VMWare, etc).

I'l have to look into that, thanks for the tip. I won't do any more dev on the engine till early summer (end of may june) got too many other units to sort out! If I do go the DirectX route I'll probably get the students to work in C# instead of VB. They have looked at it briefly as part of their introduction classes in the 1st year.

[Kaytrim]

Speeking of VS 2005, service pack 1 has been released.  Click Here if you want to download it for yourself.  Be warned it is quite large, over 450mb and takes quite a bit of time to install.  Anyone else who is interested in looking into Visual Studio 2005 can get the express versions free from the link above.  There are separate versions for VB.NET, C#.NET, C++, Visual J#, Web Developer and even SQL Server 2005.

[theCoder]

I'd love to see what you came up with.  I used a library from a .net programming book to play around with game programming.  Perhaps this community could build up a game library to legally clone some of the classics. 

[Hurray Banana]

I'd love to see what you came up with.  I used a library from a .net programming book to play around with game programming.  Perhaps this community could build up a game library to legally clone some of the classics. 

I looked at loads of books about Direct X, ordered them for college. But most of the Sprite Engines were very simple. In fact most of the games that come on the CD's look lame compared to what some of my students are putting together.

My students would not be capable of some of the complicated logic that most books get you to put in your own code when working with sprites, so I had to put loads of functionality into the sprite class, to make it as easy as possible for them to use. I've actually suprised myself with what it can do.

Also because the students are doing lots of different types of games the engine had to really generalise which pushed the feature list up. It took me about 6 weeks to write it, bearing in mind that I had to snatch time to do this, as I had other classes to worry about and the time of teachers that I am in charge of.

Some bits are a bit rough, like the collision detection, it works but I want it to handle sticking logic, this should be handled by the user but I'd like the engine to prempt as many problems as possible.

When I get some time next year I'll finish my reference manual that I use with the students and put something together for the board members. When I do I'll start a new thread in the software forum.

[Pekay]

I'd love to see what you came up with.  I used a library from a .net programming book to play around with game programming.  Perhaps this community could build up a game library to legally clone some of the classics. 

Reverse engineering, not cloning . AnotherSpaceInvaders != Space Invaders. Er, I think :p.

[theCoder]

... My students would not be capable of some of the complicated logic that most books get you to put in your own code when working with sprites...

I can relate.  Converting the book examples into the game I was "reverse engineering" (Star Castle) was a major pain, good learning excercise, but a pain just the same.

If there is anything I can help with, just let me know.

[Hurray Banana]

If there is anything I can help with, just let me know.

Thanks for the offer mate I'll let you know if do.

It's funny you should say Star Castle, I once (1994) started writing Star Castle in 68000 Assembler on my Atari ST, but ended up doing a versoin of Space Pirates instead (all vectors - which was an adaption to my degree project which was 3d Engine in 68000 asembler). I enjoyed writing the linked lists to manage bullets and enemy ships, plus a load of wobbling sprites for demo mode.

I had a thought this morning while shopping to add vector support to the sprite engine, so instead of drawing a bitmap you would draw a pointF list. This may be appauling using the GDI drawing routines. More of an incentive to get my laptop ghosted at work and re-install my VS2005 pro, and latest DX SDK, and move the engine over to DX.