Shooter Demo Issue

#1 I had only one prob that i could not get to reproduce.
After i killed one the the big guys, it slowed way down and the screen filled with enemies. It started playing normaly after i was killed though, but during that time my score jumped from 10 grand something to well over 180,000. I guess i was killing all those enemies that were spawning.

#2 Thanks guys, we've had this one reported a few times. Tough to reproduce, but we'll figure it out. If anyone figures out a solid way to reproduce (or, finds the bug themselves! ;) please let us know. Else, we'll get a fix out asap.

#3 It happened consistantly for me. When getting to a big guy you need to have fully upgraded guns (or fully minus one), and 2-3 of the side ships. Or something akin to that. Start shooting when it appears. Your score will jump to around 180k as Chris said as your screen fills with guys and debris. For what its worth the debris from the big thing never really seems to dissapate, and the guys spawn from around the same area. Of course its a bit hard to follow when the screen is full at 1/2 a frame per second... It happened to me about 3 times in a row though, so it seemed pretty consistant. Need to be powered up a fair bit and take out the big guy almost as soon as he appears.

#4 I'll look into this immediately. It's probably my fault for not capping the spawning-rate. I obviously underestimated how you guys would thrash the thing to its limits. I have learned a humble lesson today.

I'll get you a fix ASAP.

- Melv.

#5 I am getting slow-down problems with the demo too. I only get the problem on my laptop though (running a very poor VIA/S3G UniChrome graphics card - 64 megs shared memory). It can seem to play for about a minute or so but then all of a sudden loads of enemies appear on the screen and the frame rate decreases. My guess is that the screen updates every second or two. Here is a screen dump showing the start of this problem occuring:

dbartlet.freestarthost.com/screen_dump.jpg
(Please right click -> Save as to download the piccy)

Whereas the guys in the above posts say this tends to happen when getting to the first big enemy boss, it happens to me before getting to the boss.


Just for more information, when I play the game on my main desktop PC - P4 2.6GHz, 512megs ram, ATI Radeon 9600 128meg gfx card - I don't notice any slowdown or the above mentioned behaviour, even after killing the first big enemy tank.

Hope this may be of some help.

Daz.

#6 @Darryl: Yes, this just seems like there's just too many debris/particle spawns going on. Things to get a little crazy at the boss stage. I'll sort this problem out guys, don't worry.

Thanks for all the info. :)

- Melv.

#7 Another thing i found.
When there is alot of action going on and you decide to switch to fullscreen, it slows down to a crawl. I was getting around 300 fps then made the switch and it droped down to 2 fps. I did this a few times. Oh yeah, after doing so the screen started filling with more badguys.

#8 @Chris: This is the underlying platform. TGE does this as well. Maybe someone like Ben Garney (our resident expert) could help here. BTW: Approx 300 fps is the capped limit, so you're getting very good frame-rates. :)

- Melv.

#9 @Melv
Haha alright, but great work on T2D. I love it, in fact as of last month i ditched work on my 2D platform so i could use this instead. Now all i have to do is convert some of my functions to script and then im on my way.

#10 Cool.

Don't forget to post some regular .plans with nice pictures so we can all share.

Just can't get enough T2D game-dev shots at the moment!

- Melv.