Xtarda Rescue

Rationale

Just a bit more retro fun as a Rust learning exercise. This is a game I wrote originally for the ZX Spectrum about forty years ago.

Playing the game

The object is to rescue people from the hostile planet Xtarda. You are orbiting in your mothership and you can drop pods with the down arrow key. You can steer the pod left and right as it drops with the left and right arrow keys. You must avoid colliding with any of the asteroids below. Once the pod has landed (on the landing pad only), you can then take off again with the up arrow key to attempt to return to the mothership with one rescued person each time.

Joystick Support

I've added really rudimentary joystick support - if you have a gamepad controller connected, then the right trigger functions as 'release pod' and 'launch pod', the right-hand joystick will steer the pod, button A functions as pressing Y or Enter at prompts, and B will quit when you see the Restart Y/N prompt.

To-Do List

• The game struct is too large and all-encompassing, making unit testing harder, it could be refactored
• The whole concept of resolution-independence should be addressed just in the display code, with everything else working on a "virtual" resolution of, say, 1920x1280
• Maybe animation of rescuee floating back down if pod crashes while ascending
• Joystick buttons could be configurable

Pre-requisites

Linux

Ensure you have libcsfml-dev and libsfml-dev installed.

WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

As per Linux above.

This runs surprisingly well in WSLg (see note below), but very, very slowly in regular WSL2 (plus regular WSL2 won't support the sounds and will cause the program to crash).

If you are running this from WSLg, and you see errors like the following,

Failed to create an OpenGL context for this window
X Error of failed request:  BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)

then try doing export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=0 in your bash shell first.

Mac

brew install sfml and brew install csfml (install homebrew if you haven't already)

then export SFML_INCLUDE_DIR=/System/Volumes/Data/opt/homebrew/include and export SFML_LIBS_DIR=/System/Volumes/Data/opt/homebrew/lib

Note if you get an error like the following:

CSFML/src/Window/Touch.cpp:13:84: error: no type named 'Window' in namespace 'sf'

then edit the file ~/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/sfml-0.19.0/CSFML/src/Window/Touch.cpp and add the include #include <SFML/Window/Window.hpp> to its list of includes - it seems a bug in CSFML.

Building

Just the usual cargo build.

Running

Just the usual cargo run.

Running unit tests

Just the usual cargo test.