clarvalon / spacepoolalpha

An intergalactic arcade pool simulation

Space Pool Alpha

An intergalactic arcade pool simulation. Featuring time attack, tournament and two-player modes.

Programming and Game Design by Steve McCrea. Portraits and victory screen by AngelicCharon. Music by m0ds.
Additional game design and testing by bicilotti. Port to XAGE by Dan Alexander.

Prerequisites

• Windows7+ x64 is required for development (although x86 game executables can be produced).

• Visual Studio (2019 and up, with .NET Core 3 installed - the Community Edition is fully featured and free for small teams). It is also possible to use VS Code.

• Cross-Platform Adventure Game Engine (XAGE).

Getting Started

1. Clone this repository.

2. Open the project in XAGE Editor (Content\Game.xag).

3. Click Run button to build content and debug using Visual Studio. The build process will:

   • Prepare raw assets into .zip files.
   • Create any missing autogenerated code.
   • Ensure the latest runtime DLLs are in place.

For more information, please see here.

Possible Improvements

• 1st gamepad (simple support added, needs work).
• 2nd gamepad support for two player (currently limited to two players on keyboard).
• Leaderboards via IPlatformService (e.g. Xbox Live).

Publishing

To publish a standalone executable for easy distribution on Desktop platforms, navigate to the Publish directory and run the relevant .bat file. These .bat files can be edited to fit your individual needs.

To prevent the console window from appearing in Windows, ensure you have set the project's output type to 'Windows Application'.

There are some additional options that can be added to your .csproj that you can make to change the publish process:

• The PublishTrimmed option can reduce the DLL size considerably, as it will remove framework code not being used. It is not foolproof however and you may need to add 'TrimmerRootAssembly' items to ensure needed code is not trimmed away.

• The PublishReadyToRun option can pre-compile some of the code for the given platform, which can give a modest boost to startup time at the cost of size.

Additionally, Warp can be used to create a single-executable for distribution. In future this may be possible with the PublishSingleFile option once it matures.

OR - it is also possible to compile using the experimental CoreRT platform by following the instructions here.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the license file for details.