SkyDrop Delivery

For the curious who watch over this game or have heard me talking about it; I thought I would finally announce the existence of the C++ Edition (built on SDL 2.0 library).

How did this edition come to be? Well, I was learning how to use SDL 2.0 (I would've learned SDL 1.x years earlier, but the licensing of SDL 2.0 proved to be more viable for any application). This was back in 2013 and I decided to experiment with porting an existing game to it. SkyDrop Delivery was my choice to try it out.

This also happened to be one of the first C++ projects I have ever worked on to start utilizing good portions of the C++11 standard. One of the first enhancements over the BYOND version is of course Joystick/Gamepad Support (which was added years before BYOND itself supported such features). Not a necessary one, but thought it would come in handy. Another enhancement that is more noticeable is better coloration. However, I have discovered the same can be accomplished for the BYOND original. In fact, I might remaster the BYOND version at some point.

The biggest enhancement is the game itself is a lot smoother compared to the original BYOND version. However, I have discovered an interesting range of problems that delayed the proper release of this port. It actually happened when I was adding online two player multiplayer support. Due to not knowing how timesteps worked back then; it caused all sorts of timing issues. Instead, I used sleeping functions like SDL_Delay way too much. On top of that, I also polled SDL events incorrectly. Network code was very broken too.

Moving forward to 2017 and after learning more about timesteps; I decided to fix the code. Network is still not reimplemented yet, but overall responsiveness has definitely improved. Without further ado, here's a nice working link to the Win32 port of SkyDrop Delivery built on SDL 2.0:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mae6k0h76syeou9/ SkyDrop%20Delivery%20-%20Win32.zip?dl=0

Let me know if it needs any more improvement. Besides, I still need to add two player online support.