Variations on Rockdodger

VoR is an exciting Free Software video game, licensed under the GNU GPL. It runs on GNU Linux, Windows and AmigaOS4.

"it's fast-paced, difficult and addictive." -- Linux Format

VoR is a simple, fast-paced action game that will challenge your reflexes. It has excellent gameplay, great physics, good graphics, and a retro/synthoid thumpy beat to help put you in the mood for old-school 2D gaming.

Status

VoR is very stable, well polished and loads of fun! It gets timely bug fixes (as of 2016) but hasn't seen new features in years.

Screenshot

A shower of sparks is starting to shoot from the right thruster as the pilot tries to lose a little momentum.

Here's a video of VoR in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdrmm3ef040

Downloads

Linux: VoR is included in many distributions. Please install in the usual way through your package manager.

Windows: https://jasonwoof.com/downloads/vor-win-0.5.4-rc1.zip

OpenSUSE users: http://software.opensuse.org/package/vor

Gentoo Linux users: emerge -av vor

FreeBSD users: cd /usr/ports/games/vor && make && make install

Maemo users: install through the Application Manager

Foresight Linux: sudo conary update vor=@fl:2-devel

AmigaOS4 users: http://os4depot.net/index.php?function=showfile&file=game/action/vor.lha

Debian and clone users sudo apt-get install vor

Source code: https://jasonwoof.com/downloads/vor/vor-0.5.8.tgz or git clone https://github.com/JasonWoof/vor.git

Browse source code history and download any revision: https://github.com/JasonWoof/vor/

EXPERIMENTAL Joystick support is in the "joystick" branch of the repository above.

Old releases and other misc. files: http://qualdan.com/vor/

Help out!

Please help us by making VoR easily available on other operating systems!

In particular we'd love to get someone technical make a Mac binary. The source code compiles fine on Mac. The work is mainly collecting the libraries and creating a bundle. Please contact Jason Woofenden about getting transparency to work.

If your platform supports a larger icon than provided, you can use this 128x128 one: https://jasonwoof.com/downloads/vormacicon.png

Please contact Jason Woofenden with any questions or binaries.

Requirements

VoR requires the following to build and/or run:

Libraries: SDL, SDL_mixer and SDL_image (which requries libpng and zlib)

Software (used to build): gcc, make.

If you want to change the graphics or work from the repository, you'll also need: povray, netpbm. (On some distribution(s) the necessary part of netpbm is in the package "netpbm-progs".)

Notes

This is a fairly hard game, intended to be a quickie game for when you want to kill a few spare minutes. For reference, my best time [Josh Grams] is about 2 minutes in version 0.3. I'm not generally very good at video games, but I have been playing this one for quite a while now. However, as of version 0.4, there is an easier mode (press '1' for an easy game).

The most important thing is to tap the keys very gently! Overcontrolling is the leading cause of death among new rockdodgers!

As an exercise, try using only the shortest taps you can manage. On the easier difficulty setting, it's usually possible to reach 30 seconds with 15 (or less!) very brief pulses of the jets. It's often good to kill your speed with a pulse on the opposite jet once you're clear of the rock you were avoiding.

History

Jason Woofenden and Josh Grams like rockdodger very much: both playing it and hacking on it. VoR is the result. They forked from rockdodger 0.4.2 in the summer of 2004, and over the next few years rewrote or refactored most of the codebase. The premise is still the same: dodge the rocks until you die; almost everything else has been modified in some way or another.

User-Visible Changes

0.5.6:

The sparks from your exploding ships can make rocks disappear (when enough of them hit the same rock hard enough.)

0.5.5:

build with autoconf

0.5.4:

New music and explosion sound
Key to toggle full-screen mode

0.5:

Lots of bug fixes, including a rounding error that caused crashes on x86.
Tweaks to engine and explosion.
New font.

0.4:

Rocks now bounce off each other, and are pushed by particles.
Now with two difficulties: normal and easy.
Better new ship placement after you die.

0.3:

Scrolls to the right so you can zoom ahead.
Fully random rock generation; rocks no longer wrap vertically.
Rocks' relative speeds are now uniform in all directions (i.e. much more up/down speed variation). Noticeably hard...err...more "interesting".
Command-line option --game-speed.

0.2:

New graphics, generated by POV-Ray. Yeah, okay, the ship is really cheesy. At least the rocks are cool.
Real collision detection; no more "ship is 1 pixel bigger all around than it looks."

0.1:

Moves like a real spacecraft; no more friction!
No more silly shields or lasers; just pure rockdodgin' fun!
Up/down scrolling; gives you more escape options.
Proper time display for score, not just raw milliseconds (bleh).
Ship explodes, blowing rocks away, rather than automagically vanishing them.

Internal Technical Changes

Switched to a font generated by POV-Ray and our own display code.
Started factoring a lot of stuff out of main into their own .c files.
Removed a bunch of unused code.
Function definitions: name at beginning of line (line following the return type) for easy grepping as per GNU coding standards.
Real collision detection (bbox/bitmask).
Switched from getopt to argp for command-line parsing.
Build/install system now uses autoconf