Work @ HHS: TankCraft III
January 20th, 2007 | View Comments
Before MIT, I attended Hoover High School (HHS). If you watch MTV and/or follow high school football, you might know that HHS has one of the best football teams in the US and has its own TV series on MTV called Two-A-Days. While there is no TV show about this, they also have some excellent CS-related classes run by some brilliant teachers. My favorite class was AP Computer Science (APCS) where you learn both programming as well as theory behind writing programs.
When I took APCS about 5 years ago, the big final project we had to do was create a game in C++. The game I created, representative of my addiction to WarCraft III at the time, was something called TankCraft:
You can download and unzip the executable by clicking here: Download TankCraft III. The instructions on how to play the game should be displayed on the opening screen itself, but the game isn’t very complicated at all. You just have to move your tank around the screen and shoot down the UFOs that fly above you. The challenge is trying avoid the filled circles the UFOs try to drop on you. I haven’t been able to stay alive for more than a few minutes, so hopefully you all have more luck!
The game was developed in unamanged (non .NET) Visual C++ 6.0, and all of the shapes were drawn in code itself. Much of the functionality for drawing/redrawing things had to be implemented manually, but some of the heavy-lifting was done by a graphics API provided by Carnegie Mellon. Looking back, it would only take a few hours to create this game in either Flash or WPF/C#. Oh well. This is another reason why we need time machines!
Cheers!
Kirupa 
January 21st, 2007 at 8:09 am
Hmm… I might have owned you in WarCraft 3 before. If you still have the CD around maybe we could play each other.
January 21st, 2007 at 6:25 pm
You probably would have. I wasn’t great at WarCraft III. After reaching Level 10+, the people I was playing against were just better!
February 4th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Well maybe we’ve never played each other, I never liked those normal games, I liked the player created games in the “Custom Games” section much more. Leveling your hero up to level 150 is much more fun than just to 10.
March 28th, 2008 at 12:47 am
[...] they used), but I wouldn’t know where to begin to actually write working C++ code myself. The last C++ app I wrote was over six years [...]
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