A single helicopter flys around a vector flatland inside a giant square, firing missiles (fully automatic) and running over power-ups. Other helicopters randomly appear in the playfield, on- or off-screen. Beware shooting the red power-ups (ammunition) or blue power-ups (fuel) for they explode dramatically, pushing, damaging, and possibly destroying your helicopter. The screen is smart and follows your helicopter with Newtonian momentum while rotating the playfield around it (which can be frustrating if the window is too small).
Aegis (aka 'Chopper Madness') was written in about two to three months just after leaving school for my first job with a small consulting company. I didn't really know C or C++ very well at the time (applied math major) so Java was more approachable for me then. The JDK 1.1 had just been released by Sun so this demo generated more interest among my peers than it merited from a technical and production standpoint. Interestingly, it was possible on a 150 MHz Pentium (probably with some marginal 2D acceleration by a 2 Mb card) to get nearly 60 fps in Java if there was no game, just a few simple graphics running in a tight loop. But as a game world was added (and especially the particle explosions) the frame rate dropped to a minimally acceptable 18 fps. Java's integer performance was poor. Sound was added over a night of hacking after a management person wanted to use it as a demo. Rhett Guthrie gave me a nice audio class and also got me this job too.
last updated Tue Mar 21 2000