Pure Slime Volleyball

[Cervantes]

Oh so long ago I tried oh so hard to make Slime Volleyball. Homer made the basis for me, then I continued. But the collisions were all wrong. After a while I discovered how I could use a repulsing gravity field for circular collision data. It worked well, and I polished the game up. Now, about half-a-year later, I've decided to post it.
The game is not by any means finished. There is a lot more that can be done with this in terms of gameplay, I'm sure, though I'm mostly out of ideas. If anyone has any ideas for gameplay, please share.
Perhaps in the future I will add a single player mode with AI.
The game is currently two-player only.

CONTROLS:
Player 1
Move Left : a
Move Right : d
Jump : w

Player 2
Move Left : Left Arrow
Move Right : Right Arrow
Jump : Up Arrow

You have three hits to get the ball to the other side. You have an unlimited number of hits on serves. You can only score points on your own serve.
Grab a friend and play to whatever you want, or, if you have incredible video game coordination, try playing against yourself.
Press escape to exit.

[cool dude]

wow thats so cool. it's a copy of slime volleyball. i don't know if it's your code or my computer but the score is kinda screwed up and i couldn't exit your program until i pressed control alt delete. anyways very nice!

[Cervantes]

How's the score screwed up, specifically?
As for exitting, I decided on a whim to check the "Prevent user from exitting program" box, just because I don't like terminating the program in such a manner. That's why I said to press escape to exit

[zomg]

works good just that u cant exit and thats very anoying

good job tho

[Cervantes]

So, pressing escape doesn't work? It works for me.

[zomg]

ok that works...

but usually people press the little x in the right hand corner

so u might want to enable that
just a suggestion tho

[Cervantes]

Well, it really doesn't matter, given that this is not the final copy, and I am more looking for suggestions on gameplay / any bugs.
If I ever finish this, it would have a menu and such with a quit option. And to quit in game, just press esc. Any full-screen games are usually exited by pressing esc or an F# button. That's kinda what that was like.
Anyways, suggestions anyone? The more radical the better!

[Neo]

I can barley play it because the screen resolution is a bit too big. I can barely see the tip of the players head and if I scroll down to see the players it gets all distorted and the screen doesnt update right so there is streaks left all over. Perhaps you can add a resolutions option.

[Cervantes]

Good idea. I assume you're using 800x600?

I'm also wondering about speed: does it seem to run well on your computers? I opened this program yesterday for the first time in a few months and it was running very slowly. I can't remember changing anything, but when I opened it ran very slowly. So I switched the View.Update to a few View.UpdateAreas and it mostly returned to normal pace, as far as I could tell. If anyone experiences very slow game play, please let me know.

[zomg]

i know slime volley ball is just shapes but do u think u could input pictures over that...

[m&m]

this is kewl man nice work just like the real thing

[Cervantes]

I suppose I could. Though I was planning on having an option for adjusting the player's sizes, so as to give one player a handicap or make it more difficult for the other. Pic.Scale would do the trick, here.
The other thing about doing this is: what would the pictures look like? Would it be like the pictures they use here? I'm kinda against that, because one of the most unique things about my SV is that the slimes are full circles, not just semi-circles, allowing the players to spike the ball. I suppose the pictures could be full circles.
The final reservation I have against doing this is speed: would it be slower (in terms of the speed the program runs at) to, say, draw a preloaded picture, or to do a drawfilloval for his body and a drawfilloval for his eyes?

[zomg]

ya thats a good idea that would be awesome if u made difficulty levels against the computer

[Cervantes]

Heh, that's the ultimate goal. Way back when I was working on this I figured out that, given two points, I could manipulate the quadratic formula to determine where the ball would land. I got it to work in a fresh program, though it was always off when I tried to add it into Pure SV. I guess when I start working on this again I'll try to sort that out.
For levels of difficulty, I was thinking to have a random and purposeful miscalculation of where the ball will land. Perhaps this a too simple way of doing the difficulty setting, though I think it's a pretty good idea given I've never made any AI before .
I was also thinking that, at higher levels of difficulty, the computer could move back a little bit if the player has positioned himself close to the net, or to move forward a little bit if you are far away from the net. When I say move back and move forward, the middle that I am using is such that the ball would bounce off the slime in the same trajectory that it came in at.

[Carino]

Nice prog. It runs a little slow and i think you should make them half-circles because it looks weird when the other half of their body appears when they jump. Also, in the original SV you can spike the ball if you know what your doing, I learned this through many hours of play during com-tech. When the balls near your have to jump then push forward hitting the ball with the slimes front/nose area which will cause the ball to go down on an angle.