uDG 2004: BugThug 1.1

[aarku]

I'm happy to show the contest-ready version of BugThug! It also comes with our new mac games website: http://www.graveck.com . Please give it a whirl!

BugThug download is here:

http://www.udevgames.com/downloads/?dlid=15

Please post any problems you have with the game.

Thanks! Good luck everyone!

-Jon

[arekkusu]

Looks pretty polished. It did freeze up the first time I went to the Help menu and clicked to go to the next page, but it worked the second time after force-quitting. No crashlog, so can't tell you what happened.

The eyes on the title screen bug clamp up at the edge pixels, it'd be better with an extra border pixel of zero alpha. Otherwise, everything looks good.

Dev-wise, the only complaint I have is that you've got separate mask pngs for everything, why aren't these just alpha channels in the color pngs?

[aarku]

Looks pretty polished. It did freeze up the first time I went to the Help menu and clicked to go to the next page, but it worked the second time after force-quitting. No crashlog, so can't tell you what happened.

The eyes on the title screen bug clamp up at the edge pixels, it'd be better with an extra border pixel of zero alpha. Otherwise, everything looks good.

Dev-wise, the only complaint I have is that you've got separate mask pngs for everything, why aren't these just alpha channels in the color pngs?

Ahh, I was wondering about that with the eyes. Thanks for pointing out the reason, I'll fix it as soon as I get a chance.

The freeze and the separate mask pngs are directly the result of SpriteWorld limitations and bugs. Don't use it for anything that uses Hardwarie (abstraction layer for RAVE and OpenGL). The software side of it is rock solid. (And nearly completely obsolete) I'm learning and making my own engine. It's rather frustrating.

The crash is related to a memory bug in SpriteWorld. I've tried tracking it down with no success. None of the other SW developers have found it either. (Not sure anyone tried, though.) It is really frustrating, and I'm just trying to find some workarounds quickly and move on.

And yes, this means that I renounce my proposal for using SpriteWorld + glAArg + SPK in the next Inkubator game :-)

For all interested (yeah right) in SpriteWorld bugs, check out:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~czec0035/files/NeoSimpleLeaking.zip

and click the mouse button in the window repeatedly with Activity Viewer open and watch the memory leak.

Thanks for the review!

-Jon

[aarku]

OK. There is a new build up. It does some what I think will be optimizations that will hopefully work around SpriteWorld bugs. I also corrected the eye texture. Thanks!

It should in theory be a lot more stable! However, from all of my testing and feedback, it has always been pretty stable.

-Jon

[aarku]

Dev-wise, the only complaint I have is that you've got separate mask pngs for everything, why aren't these just alpha channels in the color pngs?

SpriteWorld is like this from legacy, when you'd have a separate PICT resource for image and mask, when you didn't want to use color keying for the mask. I haven't written a file loader for SW that does it. Aside from that, it does have the advantage of giving me more control of the file size. For instance, I can have the image be a png24, while the mask only have 4 or 8 colors of gray. Or I could have the image be a jpg, and have the mask be a png. (Which is critical)

-Jon

[arekkusu]

Eye is fixed, but it froze up trying to quit the first time. Worked OK second and third times.

Separate color/mask files do allow you to use JPEG on the color, true. But you're not doing that, and a lot of your files are < 4k, so you wouldn't be saving disk space anyway.

Anyway, it's a very minor issue. No TGAs here.

[aarku]

Eye is fixed, but it froze up trying to quit the first time. Worked OK second and third times.

Separate color/mask files do allow you to use JPEG on the color, true. But you're not doing that, and a lot of your files are < 4k, so you wouldn't be saving disk space anyway.

Anyway, it's a very minor issue. No TGAs here.

Yeah, it was minor to me so I didn't bother to try and rewrite things so I could use a single png24 for a graphic.

It is disappointing for me that it still froze. Did you get a crash log? When you click the quit button, the biggest thing it does is engineFullscreenSet(false), which will unload textures, switch to windowed mode, and reload textures to graphics memory. I think it must be yet another SpriteWorld bug. It's frustrating. I promise to make my own engine next time, honest! :-)

-Jon

[arekkusu]

No crash log, it didn't crash. The music keeps going... it just stops updating the screen, you have to force-quit.

[aarku]

There is a new build up that should improve Rage 128 support. Specifically, I *think* it will work in fullscreen now with an 8 meg Rage 128. I will test it within 24 hours to confirm, but I think I rooted out the source of the problem.

SpriteWorld was using GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE for the maximum texture size before it would break up a large sprite into multiple textures. I altered SW to divide that result by 2, which should force a Rage 128 to use 512x512 max size instead of 1024x1024 in fullscreen. From what I've heard, a 1024x1024 texture on a Rage 128 doesn't work.

Does this sound logical?

Here's hoping it fixed it. As a side note, BugThug has always worked in windowed mode at the minimum.

-Jon

[aarku]

No crash log, it didn't crash. The music keeps going... it just stops updating the screen, you have to force-quit.

If you are up for testing, could you see if you can get it to crash when it is in windowed mode? I'm guessing it won't.

Of course, I'm not sure how I'd go about fixing it in either case. :(

Thanks for the feedback.

-Jon

[aarku]

I added less wordy yet more intuitive help screens.

Download here:
http://www.udevgames.com/downloads/?dlid=15

I think this will be one of the last, if not the last, update to BugThug.

-Jon

[aarku]

I updated BugThug to 1.1 recently.

The most noticeable changes are:

* High score / last score display on title screen
* Level selection preference item.

Get it at the usual place:
http://www.graveck.com/bugthug.html

Under the hood there are some minor tweaks and a fullscreen bug fix. (Hopefully) This is most likely the final release.

-Jon

[hangt5]

When i open it, it immediately goes into full screen mode, and my monitor gets a signal out of range error.

[aarku]

When i open it, it immediately goes into full screen mode, and my monitor gets a signal out of range error.

Sorry about that. I'll have a proper screen/resolution selection startup dialog in future games, but I won't be able to add it to this one. You can still play it in windowed mode by pressing Command-F.

-Jon