valentjn / santa-racer-rust

Open-source Rust clone of an old Christmas-themed advergame

Julian Valentin (@valentjn)

Hi! I'm the maintainer of LT_EX (an extension for VS Code), the creator of bsplines.org and sparsegrids.org, and the former administrator and contributor of SG⁺⁺ (also, a member of the Church of B-Splines with the very prestigious title of Cardinal of B-Splines).

Some of my more interesting repositories:

Name	Description
vscode-ltex	LTEX, grammar/spell checker for VS Code with LanguageTool and LaTeX support (homepage)
ltex-ls	LTEX Language Server, the language server behind LTEX
class-notes	LATEX-ed class notes (German) taken during various mathematics and computer science classes
thesis-arxiv	Source code of my PhD thesis (arXiv version): “B-Splines for Sparse Grids: Algorithms and Application to Higher-Dimensional Optimization”
uni-stuttgart-phdthesis-template	Unofficial LuaLATEX template for PhD theses at the University of Stuttgart, Germany; used e.g. for my PhD thesis
uni-stuttgart-beamer-template	Unofficial LATEX template for Beamer presentations at the University of Stuttgart, Germany
turnips	Yet another turnip price simulator for Animal Crossing: New Horizons
santa-racer-rust	Open-source clone of an old Christmas-themed advergame (without image/sound assets)

santa-racer-rust's Issues

Leaving the game before fullscreen mode

I discovered in the code that Alt + Return takes you into fullscreen mode, which is great for the real screensaver experience!

When I quit the game to return to my Linux desktop and to the year 2020, my screen resolution was still 640x480. It turns out that is necessary to quit fullscreen before leaving the game.

Highscores only show after winning

At the moment the player has to win the game to be able to enter their name and have their highscore recorded (because score_points in ui.rs is only set if the player wins).

In the original game you could lose and still have your score counted. Pressing the escape key also triggered the "Nikolaus zu langsam" splash followed by the highscore screen.

Is this a bug or a design decision? :-)

Minor elements missing

The original game had a splash screen when it started and zeppelins. Any plans to implement those? :-)

Game pacing & length

The original games only takes 2:30 to complete and you can race to the finish with a little over 50 seconds left if you want. This seems to be because the game scrolls faster when you have the right arrow key pressed. (When you just move the sleigh as far right as possible but don't keep the key pressed, you reach the finish with around 7 seconds left.)

I've been fiddling with the code and I can obviously set game_duration to 150 seconds but the level is too long to finish it in that time and the speed of the sleigh does not depend on whether the key is pressed.

Again, is this a bug or a design decision? :-)

Current binaries?

Hi, I found your project by chance while trying to get Nikolaus Express 2000 to run properly on Windows 10 (the .scr file starts once you manage to get it out of the .exe but it's very slow and choppy). Funny that my family and I are not the only ones who thought of the old screensaver as Christmas approaches!

I tried running it from the v1.0.0 Windows binary. I have the assets in an assets folder inside the game folder and started the game, but most of the it does not seem to be working properly. I can see the sleigh and landscape, but no buildings, chimneys, or items. I saw that one of your last commits changed something about the level assets, wheras the binary I have been running is the one from the release two weeks ago, so I was wondering if that would already fix it - and in case it does, if you had plans to upload a new binary?

(I also tried running the Linux binary but it seems to be missing some libraries? I did extract the assets on Linux, because of the dependencies like wrestool. That seems to have worked fine except for the .ogg file - the version of timidity I was using was too old to have the --segment option. The level.png file is there.)