Alpha Shooter is a 3D FPS game with a sci-fi setting, developed by Nicola Cocchiaro and released under the GNU General Public License.It is currently written in C++ and uses its own reusable game engine, named Neutron. The game (and its engine) will evolve to include simulated physics and artificial intelligence, a scripted storyline, involving music and sound effects and more.
Use the menu buttons above to find development news, a history of the game, its description and features, screenshots, downloadable content and resources for developers.
The source code for version 0.1.0 and later can currently be found in the SVN repository, while the older version 0.0.3 is still available either as a pre-compiled release or as source code in the CVS repository. Note that until version 0.1.0 Alpha Shooter did not use the Neutron engine -- please read the Documentation page if you're not sure of which version you're looking for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Alpha Shooter is a simple 3D FPS game, originally written in C with OpenGL, GLU and GLUT
for a university graphics course assignment; it used to feature a single room, with crude
and limited collision detection and particle generation, the ability to fly around and
rotate in any direction and not much else. The game evolved over time, and is now written in
C++ with the help of the Neutron Engine, a game engine developed to give it new life. For a
more in-depth discussion on the history of the game see the History
page.
Both versions of the game are released under the GNU General Public License version 3.
Both versions of the game are released under the GNU General Public License version 3.
Alpha Shooter as a C game was getting hard to maintain, it didn't have a strong enough
design and, while multi-platform, what would be considered its engine was tightly coupled
with the game-specific logic. A much better design choice would have been to have the engine
as separated as possible from the game logic and assets, and I generally find C++ to be a
language much better suited for this kind of design. Given all that, it was also clear that
rewriting all the components of a game engine from scratch would have meant reinventing too
many wheels, with questionable results; thus the Neutron Engine was born, with the aim of
being able to use existing libraries for subsystems in addition to internally-developed
components, and Alpha Shooter was made to be the first game to use it.
It's true that many game engines are available today, both commercially and non-commercially;
several of them are also quite advanced and well-tested, not to mention constantly improving.
It would have been easier/faster to use one of the available engines to rebuild Alpha Shooter on;
however, I really wanted to learn how game engines work and what it takes to develop
one (almost) from scratch. That's why I decided to try and build my own, and see where
that path would take me. What I've learned thanks to that choice has been priceless, but it's an ongoing
process that will take a very long time to complete; partly for that reason, I've decided to add
support in the engine for readily available libraries to use as subsystems (eg. Ogre3D for graphics
rendering, CEGUI for GUI rendering, and so on): I'm more interested at the moment in the engine
core, and if I had to completely reinvent by myself a graphics rendering engine (or any other
subsystem for that matter) I would hardly achieve the same results the whole Ogre team (to name one) has
achieved after years of development :) So let's say this tries to be a compromise between a readily
available game engine and one built completely from scratch.
Version 0.1.0 of Alpha Shooter is still under development. Therefore it's only available as
source code in the SVN repository, until it will be mature
enough for a stable, pre-compiled release.
Screenshots:
Download.
Tar/GZ:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/[..]lphashooter-0.0.3.tar.gz?use_mirror=osdn
Tar/BZ2:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/[..]phashooter-0.0.3.tar.bz2?use_mirror=osdn
Changelog:
http://sourceforge.net/[..]es.php?release_id=530879&group_id=149680
Debian package:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/[..]shooter_0.0.3-1_i386.deb?use_mirror=osdn
OS X package:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/[..]r/alphashooter-0.0.3.dmg?use_mirror=osdn
CVS tree (cvsweb):
http://alphashooter.cvs.sourceforge.net/
Bug tracker:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=149680&atid=777029
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