Jamming Signal

Screenshot

I got a lot done on my new network game “Vortex 2” as presented at ECCC 2013 during the long winter, and I’d like to unveil it as a playable work-in-progress to get help with testing and feedback.

You can’t do much in the game yet. Enemy ships will fly around and chase you and each other, you can shoot at them and they will shoot back, but nothing will happen. But it’s still pretty fun, especially with friends!

Notes:

• The game is auto-updating. Every time you run it you will get the very latest sprites, graphics, music, and gameplay automatically.
• You need to forward UDP Port 3000 to the IP address given to your C64, displayed on the startup screen. I recommend setting up a DHCP rule in your router to always get the same address. The MAC address used is 00:80:10:00:51:00.
• Obviously, you need an RR-Net or compatible card (64NIC+, FB-Net, etc) for your C64.
• The VICE emulator works but seems to have terrible lag. This is something I need to debug.
• The server will be occasionally rebooted/restarted/down/messed up while I continue development.
• Joystick in Port 2.

You can download the boot program here. No need to download anything else ever (unless the server changes)!

https://github.com/LeifBloomquist/Vortex/blob/master/Client/src/!vortexboot.prg?raw=true

To see the list of players, some server stats and a realtime map, visit this page:
http://vortex.jammingsignal.com/menu

If you want to get involved in the development and testing, please join the Google Group here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/c64-vortex-development

I’m looking forward to hearing your input and ideas. Now that the basic concept is proven, I want to focus on the specifics of the gameplay.