Weapon Shootyness

[trif]

I would love to see an example of a contra or metroid style side scroller.

I would be especially happy if you made it easy to do Abuse style controls. If you're not familiar with abuse it's a cross platform 2d side scroller with a keyboard and mouse style control system. You aim a cross hair around the screen with a mouse. The character is always pointing it's weapon at the cross hairs, and button 1 fires. The arrow keys or wasd move your character around the world.

Would this be an easy control scheme to implement in lua or would you have to implement something in c++ to make it possible?

[loken]

I think you can already do this if you use a bit of math to get a vector for the mouse cursor's position in relation to the player entity. Then it's a matter of letting the bullet/ammo/whatever to go in the direction and angle of said vector.

You would probably have to do without using the Brain Manager, and you'd have to use the SetRunUpdateEveryFrame(step) entity command as illustrated in the Beer Invaders example.

An Abuse style game written in Novashell would be pretty sweet, especially if you make clever use of the rigid body physics!