Wing Commander Arcade Now Playable With Wii Remote
Mark Smids has added a neat new feature to his Wing Commander Arcade scroller shooter project. In addition to keyboard control, the game now supports input from the Nintendo Wii Remote. Anyone with a Bluetooth uplink and a Wii controller can try out this impressive addition right now. The game itself is still in demo form, but it's already pretty fun. Additional stages, ships and background terrain will be added as development continues. Download WC Arcade here (1.8 meg exe) and check out a controller demonstration here (3.8 meg avi or YouTube, thanks to AD).
It is now possible to connect a Wii-mote to the PC (using a Bluetooth connection) and use the motion sensor inside the Wii-mote to fly the ship (roll/pitch) and of course use standard button actions (shoot, full guns etc.). In our project we use the Wiiuse API to obtain data from the Wii-mote. We think this is a fun addition to the WCA project. Let us know what you think of this Wii-mote feature!-----------------------------
How to connect the Wii-mote to your PC:
Before running 'Wing Commander Arcade' perform the following actions:
1 - Make sure your PC is able to send and receive Bluetooth signals (USB dongle or integrated Bluetooth).
2 - Install the latest Bluesoleil Bluetooth driver / connection tool.
3 - Open "Bluetooth places" by clicking on the Bluetooth icon in the system tray.
4 - Press (and hold!) buttons 1 and 2 of your Wii-mote and click on Search Devices in the "Bluetooth Places" window.
5 - After a few seconds the device should be recognised as a 'Nintendo RVL-CNT-01', the status should be Idle.
6 - Now again press and hold buttons 1 and 2, right click on the Nintendo RVL-CNT-01 and press Connect. The status should change from Idle to Connected.
7 - Release the buttons 1 and 2 and start Wing Commander Arcade by running wca.exe
NOTE: Steps 1, 2, 4 and 5 only need to be performed once. When you want to run 'Wing Commander Arcade' in Wii-mote controlled mode again, only perform steps 3, 6 and 7.
Enjoy!
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What's still to be done?
A lot. In the end Wing Commander Arcade should at least contain 10 playable stages and 5 playable ships (as the game progresses). Furthermore we would like to have some ground missions to get the typical Tyrian look and feel. Also we will implement a shared highscore database in which all player scores will be collected. As the game progresses we will release more test builds and hope to have a larger test group which may give us some feedback. We will also develop a user friendly terrain/map editor, so you will be able to create your own stages/backgrounds/etc.
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