Adanaxis

Adanaxis is a deep space first-person shooter game in four spatial dimensions, written by Andy Southgate. The latest version of the game is 1.5.14, released on October 3, 2020. It is written in the C++ programming language using the GLUT library.

History
The 4D aspects first appeared in the game in 2005.

Licensing
The game is distributed under the Mushware Software License version 1.4, which refers to the GNU GPL v2, the public domain, proprietary and a number of other licenses.

The commercial version sold from the author’s website contains some encrypted non-free media. There is also a piece of non-free code needed only to work with those files.

Availability
The author submitted a free GPLv2-compatible version of Adanaxis with those media and code removed to free operating system repositories. They include at least Debian (since lenny/sid) (maintained by Debian Games Team, uploaded by Barry deFreese), Fedora (7, 8, 9), Ubuntu (since hardy).

4D
Adanaxis is designed to minimise the visibility and impact of 4D on the player. With just one extra control required, the game looks and plays a lot like a 3D shooter, with another aiming stage added on.

It uses 3D for rendering, and things like explosions, planets and galaxies look “normal”.

But other objects are rendered, very roughly, as projections of 4D objects on the 2D screen. In the game manual, the author says he didn’t yet figure out how to implement real 4D and 4D explosions without making the game require a thousand times more processing power.

Aiming
Targeting is helped by 3 color markers moving around the crosshair.
 * Red: x axis. Move mouse left/right to aim
 * Green: y axis. Move mouse up/down to aim
 * Blue: z or hidden axis. Move mouse left/right whilst holding down the right mouse button or space bar to aim

Weapons

 * The basic Plasma Spitter is self-recharging but does minimal damage. Projectiles are guided, so once the player's crosshairs have registered a target (by turning blue or red) these projectiles will be guided to that target.
 * The Machine Cannon provides more rapid fire than the base weapon. Damage is minimal and projectiles are unguided. Useful at close to medium range on lightly armoured targets.
 * The short range Plasma Flak variant of the Spitter. Very effective at point blank range or in a target-rich environment.
 * The Machine Cannon provides a rapid rate of fire that overwhelms its target quickly. It also rapidly exhausts its ammunition.
 * Heavy Cannon projectiles are simple and effective. Dense and fast moving, their repeated impact does enormous damage and can rapidly destroy targets.
 * The range and power of the Beam Artillery makes it ideal for long-range engagements. There is a downside to that power - it will destroy anything that the target is carrying along with the target.
 * Guided Ordnance is a medium range guided missile. Ideal for picking off a number of distant lightly armoured craft, or deployed en masse against a larger target.
 * Heavy Guided Ordnance carries a high yield warhead and will damage both the target and surrounding objects. Also has excellent seek characteristics, long range and rarely loses a target.
 * A captured device named the Gravity Sink. Precise characteristics are unknown. The weapon appears to be gravitational in nature, but has never been seen in operation.
 * The Heavy Demolition Charge is cumbersome and slow to deploy, but the results are astounding. Fitted with a five second fuse. Its enormous blast radius makes it unwise to hit the target and cause early detonation. Aim to miss.

Health and Shield

 * The health display shows the basic condition of the player's craft, and when it reaches zero his/her craft can’t go on any more. Health boxes can be collected to improve the state of things.
 * The shield protects the player's health from damage. Collecting shield boxes increases the shield strength to provide better protection.

Reception
There was an article about Adanaxis in Spanish Linux Magazine in November 2008, on pages 87 and 88.

The game received a mixed reception; some like it, but others expected something like Tesseract Trainer or a similar experience after reading “4D”. As a result, before November 2008, only 14 people have registered Adanaxis.