UDG: Nanocrisis mac prerelease 193

[phydeaux]

Hi everyone,
If you get a chance, I'm looking to performance test ( including performance>0... does it work?) and find any really obvious bugs. Keep in mind I'm trying to double the number of rooms by the end of the contest (less than a week), and there is one room where you will fall off the edge of the world if you go to the right, and also behind the red lock block is nothing. Other than that let me know if anything doesn't work or seems screwed up on your system.

It's built for 10.2, so it should work if you are on 10.2. 10.1 probably will not. The application is phydeaux-rpg.app- I still need to change this, and move all the files into one directory, sorry.

EDIT: It's 8 Meg approx, sorry about that size as well. The majority is the ogg music and the application binary. There are about 5 pieces of music, adding 5 meg to the download, and the binary is somewhat large because it has about a million things statically linked into it. I know about the .tga files- the reason is my crappy modeler uses only tga, though I will try to compress these to png automatically later if I have time.

The link is here:
http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~alexni/udg/phydeaux-193.tar.gz

Thanks,
p.

[skyhawk]

I get a a solid FPS, but it feels slow.
also, a typo "I'm a dinsaur expert, you know?"
when I'm buying something, show me how much money I have
ummm... I fell and the game quit on me. (right by the well)
I would not recommend you have your folder so cluttery
while a few things felt clunky, I am jealous at the level of details you have here

[phydeaux]

Shoot, can you post the results of the file luacrash.txt? Hopefully that will give some clue. The framerate problem I'm still struggling with.

[ThemsAllTook]

To sum it up in a word: Stunning! I love it! :wow:

Here are the issues I ran into:

The character needs to move faster! I got tired of plodding along at a half-walk-half-run.
The attacking animation is pretty rough... Can't you do some interpolation between keyframes? The other animations don't seem to have this problem.
The physics are rather of annoying at times. Why is every slope so terribly slippery?
The framerate is about half of what I'd expect for what you're putting on the screen... What's slowing you down so much?
There are many places in the well where your texcoords are kind of screwy. Vertical or mostly vertical surfaces in particular.
The player doesn't die when his health drops to zero... Although I admit that was a kind of handy feature. ;)

Other than that, looks great! I'm really looking forward to seeing this fleshed out.

- Alex Diener

[skyhawk]

game.lua:2009: bad argument #1 to `mod' (number expected, got nil)
=[C] -1: C field mod, 1884136 -1
@game.lua 2009: Lua global stdtick, 1884136 1982
@game.lua 2113: Lua global playertick, 1884136 2111

[phydeaux]

Thanks for your comments- I would really like to get it working well. It works a lot better on my PC, and unfortunately I think it has something to do with the way memory is managed on the graphics card, and in general- there's a big more paging going on in my app that causes a few hiccups. I need to do some more pre-caching so that you don't get the hiccups when new textures appear, and that might help a little.


Here are the issues I ran into:
[list]
The character needs to move faster! I got tired of plodding along at a half-walk-half-run.

Unfortunately at this point I've designed the gameplay around that walking speed, though maybe I can increase it a little bit and not mess anything up.


The attacking animation is pretty rough... Can't you do some interpolation between keyframes? The other animations don't seem to have this problem.

The problem here is that I try to cache as many frames as possible in display lists- to try to limit this, I turned off my linear interpolation, though I probably will turn it back on for the player because you really notice it with him.


The physics are rather of annoying at times. Why is every slope so terribly slippery?

This is intentional to try and make sure you don't get anywhere on the map you're not supposed to be. It's also a flaw of that I don't have enough time to do map design, so there are some sloppiness. This also answers your question about the textures looking rather odd in places- if I have time I'll try to go back and make some of these things look nicer.


The framerate is about half of what I'd expect for what you're putting on the screen... What's slowing you down so much?

On the Mac version there is an intentional framerate limiter to try and sleep a little to try not and hog the processor too bad, so it's not getting the maximum, but the maximum may not even be that great; I'm not sure. The bottleneck is clearly sending stuff to the video card- in the case that a display list for a certain frame is not cached, the model has to be sent in intermediate mode.


The player doesn't die when his health drops to zero... Although I admit that was a kind of handy feature. ;)

This is also intentional, so you can play around without having to restart.

[isgoed]

I got 5 FPS on a PB550mhz, Sometimes in the cave i got 10fps. In the cave I can't rotate the camera.
It took me a time to figure out I had to press enter to start the game.
The outosave option is great.

I would like to see sounds and fullscreen.
It took me a while to figure out that doors don't open (Or do they? 'O' gave a fade to black)
Gamplay is good, like zelda. Only I can't die? Tech demo?

[phydeaux]

I got 5 FPS on a PB550mhz, Sometimes in the cave i got 10fps. In the cave I can't rotate the camera.
It took me a time to figure out I had to press enter to start the game.
The outosave option is great.

I would like to see sounds and fullscreen.
It took me a while to figure out that doors don't open (Or do they? 'O' gave a fade to black)
Gamplay is good, like zelda. Only I can't die? Tech demo?

Thanks for the input- Sorry, I should have mentioned, there are some rooms you have a fixed view, others you can move the camera around. There is actually fullscreen right now, though it's kind of a pain in the butt, you press control (not command, gotta fix that) and the spacebar at the same time. I think it's fixed at 800x600 or something now though, it's just temporary to allow you to enter fullscreen. You can also try resizing the window- you may get a better framerate if you make it small.

Yeah, in town the doors are just decoration; I haven't had time to make rooms for the town, and it was easier to put people outside, so I'll have some person talk about that or something. The O key actually has an interesting function right now (it will be gone in the final version) which is that your autosave starting position is set to where you press the O key, and the room is restarted (this is to help me test things.)

Right, you can't die yet, this is to help me and you test things.

[JustinFic]

Very cool stuff! I was getting ~30-40 FPS in town, and 60 in the caves. 1.3 GHz Albook.

I have to echo the thoughts on character speed. In the caves it's not that bad, but running around town is where I really notice it.

The attack animation needs more whoop-ass. Maybe an overhead chopping motion?

Gameplay wise, the monsters seem to chop off too much health per hit. The RPG fan in me could use a numerical readout of my hp near the bar, and get damage readouts when I get hit. I also found the giant frog to be more difficult than the nanoplasm. The giant frog could use a cut in HP, and perhaps make the nanoplasm take more than one shot to split? Finally, since they seemed like boss monsters, it felt weird to see the nanoplasms respawn. Kind of makes exterminating them a little difficult :p

The dialog rocks, and so do the item descriptions. So delightfully tasteless! Keep it up :lol:

[drzeip]

Are we allowed a few different attack types with different damage/speed tradeoffs?

I like what i see, it's probably the most 'gamey' i've seen so far in that it actually has a long term objective. Also a good variety of creatures, I especially liked the nanoplasm and the way it can rejoin itself.

In the room after the frog, the ledge was too high to jump upon or am I just being stupid?

[drzeip]

Oh yes and the music! It's going to be stuck in my head for years... :wacko:

[JustinFic]

In the room after the frog, the ledge was too high to jump upon or am I just being stupid?

You need an item. I tried that jump like a dozen times myself before I decided to let it go.

Maybe that ledge should be a little further away? It seems like if I just got the perfect angle I could make it, but I miss it by inches each time. Make it obvious that we're not supposed to make that jump yet.

[phydeaux]

Thanks for comments; solutions for a few of the issues:

As a compromise (aka hack) I'll just make it so you can walk slightly faster in town so it's not as annoying.

I'll try to put some hint in about the ledge.

I'll put in more numbers for your getting hit (just sticking it in the health bar.)

Giant frog hp -30% ( I thought it was a bit too much, too)

I'm not sure if I'm going to change the way attacking works, because a lot of the gameplay balance is centered around you just having that one attack. I'll put it on the list, though.


Another quick note- the reason bosses respawn is a cheap trick to have 'more content'- you can go back and fight them again for the hell of it if you feel like it (you also get a small reward.)

[Duane]

When i make a new game, it just quits. a couple weeks before, (yes, i have been watching your blog), I couldn't get it to open. Yay!

[phydeaux]

Sorry, I haven't been able to test on very many systems, so I don't know what all can go wrong yet- if you can let me know a few things I can try and figure out what's going on.

What version of OS X are you using? Could you post the luacrash.txt file?

[ThemsAllTook]

The newest uDevGames version of Nanocrisis is looking really good! I like the improvements you've made, especially the SpeedSoles. It's nice to finally be able to move faster.

I don't know if this is a bug, or just the end of what you have so far, but after fighting the Nanosaurus, the lock on the door wouldn't open, and I was stuck in his room forever...

One minor gripe that I didn't mention earlier: The textures for the inventory items are quite tiny, and don't look too great scaled up so much. It'd be nice if they could be replaced with better, larger textures. No biggie, though.

Keep it up! I'm looking forward to seeing where this game goes.

Alex Diener

[phydeaux]

Check the title screen- if you're on v197 there's slightly more after beating the final boss; if not, that is just the end of it. I'm not sure if I'm going to add much more for udg, though I do worry there's not quite enough content in the game. Not sure how many people are going to beat it all the way through.

About the inventory items; it's sort of a subtle reference to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night where all the inventory items were of really low resolution, though it's not really that great of a reference. I'll think about redoing them, since there's not too many.

[ThemsAllTook]

Aha, I was at v196. I'll try it again with v197.

I think the amount of content you have is adequate for uDevGames (it's certainly more than my game has at the moment!). There are so many games to play that I don't imagine the majority of voters will get all the way through Nanocrisis. So I'd say you're in good shape.

Alex Diener

[skyhawk]

eep out of bandwidth! I'm willing to host it for you for the next 2 weeks

[Taxxodium]

eep out of bandwidth! I'm willing to host it for you for the next 2 weeks

Putting it on versiontracker was probably not a good idea...

[skyhawk]

Putting it on versiontracker was probably not a good idea...
and getting a good review on VT =)

Icarus has gotten 15GB of downloads in the past 2 weeks

[phydeaux]

Sure, I could always use another mirror. I've been afraid though to delete my primary download site, because I'm worried it's going to reset my download count. Instead I've just added a few mirrors (don't know if people are using them or not.) The mirrors should hopefully still work though.

I had no idea VT was so popular.

[skyhawk]

it won't kill your download count

[cozza]

I'm enjoying this game immensely, been playing for a couple of days and I think I've run out of places to go. I don't have any technical problems, I'm using a new ibook.

The only impossible moves I found were
a) the white platforms jump (shortly after a well save), although I have the boots, I can't make the jump.

b) the red key seems inacessible but since there's nothing behind the lock perhaps this is intentional.

c) I would up with a pink key in my inventory although I'd already gone thru the pink lock, I think.

d) Dunno what the pink suit is for, seems to serve no practical purpose, but it's cute.

I think I've done all there is to do with the game at this stage, I loved it.

[phydeaux]

It's possible to get the red key if you are in version v197 or above- if you downloaded a while back you can download a new version and your saves should still work if you copy them over (copy from the data folder all files starting with save.)
I think I fixed it also so you don't get any more pink keys- if you get more, they're just redundant, it won't hurt you. The pink suit is just for entertainment value, and for people to scratch their heads, asking themselves, "Why?"

[ERaZer]

Edit: Sorry, just had some trouble, but that was becouse my computer is so old and crappy :P