Invaders, possibly from space
We’ve resurrected a classic shoot-em-up project from a long lost Linux magazine. All you need to do is save the world.
Once upon a time, there was a magazine called
Linux User & Developer
(LUD). It was a reasonable title, but not in the same highcalibre league as
Linux Format.
Noting it could never be
LXF, LUD
did the honourable thing and ordered its parent company to pledge fealty and hand over all assets to Future Towers. So for a while
LUD
was part of the Future family, and then a spreadsheet in London cried out in panic and suddenly
LUD
was no more. (I’m
pretty sure none of that really happened – Ed).
Anyway in issue 136 of
LUD,
a young Russell Barnes introduced a great project called
Pivaders,
a
Space Invaders
clone written in about 300 lines of code. Then in the next issue he added some bells and whistles, in particular animations and sound.
It was a great project and thanks to Future Towers’ infinite content funnel we can reproduce it here with impunity. The only problem is LUD136 is from February 2014 and in that era writing code in Python 3 was seen as a little postmodern. In this era, most distros have done away with Python 2 and attempts to install it often lead to problems later. Especially on Raspberry Pi OS if our reader letters are anything to go by. Anyway, we digress. So with as light a touch as possible, we set about updating Russell’s dusty old code. After not too much hassle, we got it into a workable shape and now you can download it from our GitLab: