Fish Salad: Become the king of the ocean!
This term a friend of mine, Martin Kinkelin, and I programmed an OpenGL based game for university. The aim of the game is to become the king of the ocean. You start as a little fish and eat other (smaller) fishes. As you eat, you grow and are able to eat bigger fishes. This goes on until you have reached a certain size to be called the “king of the ocean”.
How to play?
Use the arrow keys or A, S, D, W to control the fish. Try to collide with smaller fishes to eat them and try to avoid collisions with bigger fishes. Before starting each level the game tells you what kind of fishes should be avoided in the upcoming level. All other fishes can be eaten!
Special effects
We have implemented pixel and vertex shaders. The caustics are implemented in the pixel shader. They are displayed on each fish and the ocean ground. Side note: To display the shaders you need a decent video card!
The game includes also per-pixel-fog and motion blur. You can see the motion blur, if you collide with a bigger fish. It is shown as long as your fish blinks (in that time you are invincible).
Other points of interest
All models in the game are stored in a custom written format. We have written a converter to translate .obj files to our .fsm format. The model-configuration is found in the Models directory and stored as xml file. That allowed us to easily customize the models behaviour. The levels are also stored in the game.config file, which is found in the same directory as the game’s .exe. Feel free to add your own levels 
We are also using quaternions to rotate stuff in the 3D space. That’s gives us better results and is faster when rotations are concatenated. To make the game even more performant SSE intrinsics are being used 
If have had some problems with the game under Vista. That’s due to the buggy nVidia drivers for my mobile GeForce 6800. I haven’t had any problems under Windows XP. The game works well in Vista on my girlfriend’s computer. She has a GeForce 7xxx. Martin has an older Radeon card and Windows XP and it works also great there!
I hope you enjoy the game!
Note: If you get an error while starting the game, try to download and install the latest MSXML package from here.
Published on Jun 25th, 2007 —
Tags: 
Howdy,
Im involved in helping a Marine Conservation Trust in fundraising for a new facility…see http://www.aquariumnz.org.nz. Was wanting to develop a fish game using NZ fish in which an educational message is told…..for our Octopus Club…
Would you be interested in helping?
KR
Marco
Comment by Marco — July 16, 2007 @ 3:09 am
Hi Marco,
Sorry for the late reply. I haven’t not much time lately, although your idea is really nice. If you want I can discuss with a friend of mine and release the source code for the game.
Christian
Comment by Christian Liensberger — August 2, 2007 @ 6:56 pm
[...] engine that needs also to be developed by the groups, which we did by recycling and enhancing the FishSalad [...]
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