Air Hockey Tutorial 2

From SwinGame

This tutorial will teach you how to use the SwinGameSDK to develop a simple air hockey game. At the end of this tutorial you should be able to use Visual Basic 6 to implement your game which makes use of Vectors, Sprites and SoundEffects.

This page contains a Tutorial. Tutorials are designed to walk you through the development of a small game.
Warning: You must have completed the previous tutorial(s) to go through this tutorial

Contents

Creating an AirHockeyGame Type

In GameLogic we are going to create a function called "CreateGame" which will return a AirHockeyGame. This will start to set up the data structure for the our game. The data that needs to be in the an AirHockeyGame data type is Players(), Ball and TablePics. First before we can create the data types we need to load the pictures so we can use them. The pictures are here for you to download. To do this go into "GameResources" and in the "LoadImages" method put this code: 

Call NewImage("ball", "ball1.png")
Call NewImage("Table", "air_hocky_table.png")
Call NewImage("TableHorizontal", "air_hocky_table_collision_horizontal.png")
Call NewImage("TableVertical", "air_hocky_table_collision_vertical.png")


At the moment we will create the Ball and TablePics. 

Private Function CreateGame() As AirHockeyGame
    CreateGame.TablePics = CreateTable
    Set CreateGame.Ball = New Sprite
    Set CreateGame.Ball = Graphics.CreateSprite(GameImage("ball"))
    Call CreateGame.Ball.SetUsePixelCollision(True)
End Function

In here we have created a game with a ball and a table, but the table is empty. Now we need to create a table using a function called "CreateTable" which is called in "CreateGame". This will return all of our pictures for our table. 

Private Function CreateTable() As Table
    Set CreateTable.BackGround = New Bitmap
    Set CreateTable.BackGround = GameImage("Table")
    Set CreateTable.TableHorizontal = New Sprite
    Set CreateTable.TableHorizontal = Graphics.CreateSprite(GameImage("TableHorizontal"))
    Set CreateTable.TableVertical = New Sprite
    Set CreateTable.TableVertical = Graphics.CreateSprite(GameImage("TableVertical"))
    Call CreateTable.TableVertical.SetUsePixelCollision(True)
    Call CreateTable.TableHorizontal.SetUsePixelCollision(True)
End Function

Drawing The Table

Now that we have loaded the pictures for the table we need to display them. For this we are going to make a Draw method that will draw everything we want to the screen. At the moment all we want to do is draw the table and change the background colour. So Draw will look like this: 

Private Sub Draw(Game As AirHockeyGame)
    Call Graphics.ClearScreen_ToColour(Core.GetColor(159, 207, 241))
    Call Graphics.DrawBitmap(Game.TablePics.BackGround, 0, 0)
End Sub

Now you need to call Draw in the loop that is in Run, Run should now be: 

Sub Run()
    Call StartUp
    Dim game As AirHockeyGame
    Do Until MouseAndKey.IsKeyPressed(Keys_VK_ESCAPE) Or Core.WindowCloseRequested()
        Call Draw(game)
        Call Core.ProcessEvents
        Call Core.RefreshScreen_WithFrame(60)
    Loop
    Call ShutDown
End Sub

Setting The Constants Of The Table

To make some of the code easer to read we will add some constants. These will be things like the position of the sides and so on. 

Public Const TopOfTable As Long = 70
Public Const BottomOfTable As Long = 530
Public Const RightOfTable As Long = 584
Public Const LeftOfTable As Long = 216
Public Const MiddleOfTable As Long = 300 
Public Const CenterOfTable As Long = 400

Download

Here is a copy of everything that is covered in this tutorial Air Hockey Tutorial 2.zip

List Of Tutorials

  1. Introduction
  2. Table
  3. Ball
  4. Player
  5. AI
  6. Scoring
  7. Sound
  8. Menu
  9. Finishing
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