Fingers crossed there is now a version 1.02 of the game that should work for people who couldn’t get it running before.

Go get the game…

I’ve fixed some wrongly sized textures and also compiled the game with the latest version of Blitz3D (v1.103) which has had some fixes for Data Execution Protection which might have stopped it working on a few machines.

Because of the Blitz3D version I’m using for the game now I had to rip out the music playback and replace it with Bass.dll based music playing – the Fmod implementation in B3D versions over 1.086 are totally broken and cause seemingly random crashes when using some music formats, which is a shame. It’s terrible that this has never been fixed even though it’s been known of for literally years and years now.

Aaaanyway… Hopefully the game will run for everyone (fingers crossed) now.

If you have any problems with this (or any other of my games) then please let me know.

I don’t have an Intel Mac or a Linux machine here so I can’t test them myself.

Can someone please grab them if you are on either of those OSes and let me know if they work and if they work well enough?

Thank you!

Donations received = 4

I must say I’m rather disappointed.

I hope people get some fun and enjoyment out of the game – and I want to see all your high-scores in the online board.

Go to the download page!

Here’s a vid I recently uploaded to YouTube to show the game in action.

Hopefully it’s coming along pretty nicely?

My reasoning was maybe access to the high score board of future games could just go to people who donate after playing (or even before of they want to) while everyone still gets a 100% full featured game still with a local high-score board.

Remakes should be free, but hopefully this side-steps the issue in a fairly ok way.

The remake or original game will still be free but if you want the bragging rights of showing off your score and putting it online on the official score board then you help to keep a poor starving coder in coffee.

Where’s the irony I hear you ask? I was looking at the high scores stuff on the site and on my previous games again and noticed that the database stuff had gone wrong and high scores weren’t uploading or downloading for a while – and no one had noticed. Well if they have, no one had brought it to my attention anyway.

Maybe they would have if I had actually coded a game this year though. LOL

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Would you be happy with things working this way? Perhaps COB can test the waters and see how it goes.

Visually I think the game is just about there now – as you can see from a comparison to the original. Hopefully it’s looking like a nice mid-80s arcade machine game or something.

Over the last couple of days I’ve added in scoring and the combo and bonus metres both work now. Bonus points aren’t added at the end of the level yet because I haven’t finalised how it will work although I have a few ideas bouncing around.

As you can see I have forgone the original game’s instant death. Although we still have just one life there is an energy/health display and colliding with the chasers won’t be instantly fatal. A tiny amount of life will be restored after each level but you will have to hold on to as much of it as you can. I hope this will make the game a bit more accessible.

I’m not finally adding in some sound effects and working on the title screen. Hopefully the game is on course for a release this month now, if I keep my head together this time.

What is a frame? It’s just another name for a level.

There are a couple of extra frames in the Dragon32 version of the game which I’m going to try to uncover and add to the game also – and perhaps a few more extras of my own. Maybe take it up to about 10 frames in total?

After some mutterings in the Retro Remakes forum about the game looking a bit overly glowy and stuff due to the plasma code I’ve had a bit of a shake up in the visuals and I think it looks more classy now. Not as full-on in the glow, but nicer for it. Scanlines too to give it that arcade style look.

Here is a little look at Frame 4 so you can see what I mean.

Is that a big improvement? Hopefully.

It might be due to the nice boost I got when contacting the original author of the game who is more than happy to let me remake it and seems enthusiastic about Cruising still after all this time.

Mega thanks to Jeff for being such a bloody nice bloke and making my week.

I spent some of this evening/morning after spending a nice day with my missus working on the Chaser code – hopefully it does a good job of mimicking the behaviour in the Spectrum version already but if it needs some tweaks then not to worry.

Apart from not being able to die or progress the code for a level of the game seems to be filling out rather nicely.

I’ve been looking at videos and screens of my old games and thinking maybe they weren’t so bad and maybe I still have a little more to offer to the remaking fraternity even if things have progressed and quality levels have increased.

I’m not going to try and compete but I’m just going to have some fun and code a little and if a new release comes out of it then all the better.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I can capture even a little of my previous remaking passion.

At the moment I’m just playing around with my most recent aborted project that I started around a year ago and which didn’t progress past more than a few 100 lines of code.

I’ve imported and tweaked some plasma code from Super Obliteration and am going to just have a mess about and see if anything comes of it.

Oh, it’s Cruising on Broadway btw. About the simplest game I could think of to have a play with to try to get my footing again.