Cloudburst: GG private release

#1 Woot! I'm downloadin' :)

All smiles here.

- Melv.

#2 David,

Would you mind posting that all over the internet? ;)

You're happy for me to post the link around?

Awesome. I know what our office is going to be doing at lunchtime.

How long did this take in total, excluding the graphics?

- Melv.

#3 Damn well made game, mate! It runs pretty consistantly on my Celeron 500 / Radeon 7500 with a little slowdown (totally bearable if you play lots of old playstation and NES shooters like me :) Unfortunately, I only made it to the latter part of stage 2. I'd play further, but I've got my own T2D dev to do ;)

My main critique of the gameplay is that the ship's movement feels pretty stiff. It'd be hella nicer if it were more maneuverable given all the stuff on the screen. (although I must wonder if it has anything to do with my slow-ass PC... who knows?) Also the hit detection was a little unintuitive - but that may be by design.

Overall, a great time and great graphics for this little demo! You've done a great job, and I can't wait to see what else you come up with!

#4 Very nice looking little shoot em up :) Are the graphics from another of your projects, or did you make them within the 2 weeks development time?

My only complaint is that you have a button on the help screen that is just a standard gui control saying main menu. Before a public released I'd make it into an image button of some sort just to be consistent :)

Other than that it looks great :)

#5 Ok, so I clicked some stuff and it ate my post-in-progress. Lemme sum up. Decent graphics for the short dev cycle. Ship speed was slower than I'd like. Didn't like the big blocky lasers for the enemies. Overall the polish and completeness of the demo was way more than I was expecting (I was expecting the tutorial + big rat guy). I am also a big fan of the simulator fade in/fade out. That was a slick idea.

/edit
Almost forgot...it was pretty fun too. ; )

#6 Was it just me? Or did your game not have any .dso's? o.O

Great game BTW. Very fun.

#7 The game has .dsos they're just hidden inside the gwp files, which I think are just renamed zip files.

#8 @David

If you weren't male I'd make you have my children ;o)

What are the stats on this as in :-

How much work did you put in over the two weeks etc etc.

#9 I ran it full screen without any problem. There is something in the faq about flickering with full screen, is this a specific platform or hardware problem only? Or to do with some having vsync disabled by their graphics drivers?

#10

Quote:
@David
If you weren't male I'd make you have my children ;o)

I'm not female but you could still have my children!

Seriously. You can have her long enough for me to get stuff done

#11 @Rob: Let's not hijack Davids thread, let's keep on topic here. There's been plenty of discussion on this subject elsewhere and I've already said I'll look at it, promise! :)

@David: One thing I noticed that you might want to change is that the screen-shake actually offsets the viewed-region so you need to extend your background slightly so that you don't undercover it. That's the little white border that appears around the edge.

Great demo. :)

- Melv.

#12 All joking aside, that was an amazingly fun game. I wish you would continue on with it

I noticed that the gwp files where like zip files but I really would be interested to know how it was done and how T2D read it if anyone has any ideas

#13 @Melv: Excluding the graphics? Hmm, lesse, I got T2D on Monday, and I started work on Cloudburst either late Monday or Tuesday. (The last two weeks have been a bit hazy. ;) I'd say about a week of actual coding; Subdivide that further into maybe just a day or two of script writing, and the rest was divided between making T2D changes and hunting down bugs in Torque. Some real and some not. :) I lost a good day on the bin problem, and nearly another on the targetFPS/limitFPS physics bug.

T2D changes:

1. Added SetDampingVelocityMinimum()
2. Fixed animation hold-last-frame bug
3. Added Ray's over-speed fix
4. Added getpanposition() to fxTileMap2D
5. Modified Target/LimitFPS to be a bit less aggressive (60/30 respectively)

General Torque changes:

1. Fixed scheduling bug for streaming oggs in audiobuffer.cc
2. Added encrypted* ogg & png support
3. Fixed problem in SimObjects::WriteFields (crashing when saving large dialog boxes)
4. Changed main.cs script so it used an encrypted version instead of the usual main.cs
5. Added char-to-ASCII console function
6. Figured out that Oggs can't be put into .ZIPs due to no seeking support for ZIPs. :)

Largely, my preference is to keep T2D as unmodified as possible, so as to ease future upgrades, but some of the problems I simply could not stand -- Such as the fact that streaming oggs cut out if too many sound effects play, or that animation frames reset at the end of non-cycled anims.

@Bryan: Yes, the hit detection is kind of like most modern shmups -- Your ship is largely just for looks, because the REAL hitbox is actually a very tiny, tiny diamond in the center. (You can use CTRL-D to bring up debug info and check it out.) I thought about moving the hit detection more towards the some visible point of the ship (such as the cockpit, as in Gradius V on the PS2) but ended up deciding to leave it as it was. Easier to code. ;)

@Gary: Two of the ships I had already made, it was just a matter of re-rendering them for the game. The rest I made up in the two-week time. The enemy ships I whipped up in less than a day or so, the big robot rat took about a day on its own. The cloud backgrounds are also rendered -- THAT took a whole day! Volumetrics look really nice, but take a crapload of time to render!

So, to sum up people's critics so far:

1. Ship is too slow
2. Enemy lasers (the pink/blue ones) are a bit lame and out of place
3. White border when camera shakes
4. Fix those default GUI buttons!
5. Add more! ;)

And here's my take on each one!

1. Okay, I'm gonna be a stubborn cuss on this. The ship speed is exactly what I want it to be. A number of people said the ship in Adagio was too slow, but that is what I want. This game is meant to be more like a slow shoot-em-up, like R-Type or Gradius. (Minus the speedup powerups. ;) Make the ship too fast, and getting the danger multiplier is nearly impossible!

2, 3, 4. Totally agree, I will fix those before my public release!

5. I'd love to, but I really really want to keep moving. I've got quite a number of additional T2D game ideas, but I am not sure which I want to work on yet. Expect to see some more prototypes in the next few weeks. What I end up working on will largely depend on what's fun or not.

The second I saw that T2D was out, I knew I had to do a short side-scroller in it. A sort of high-res graphics version of Adagio, just to prove to myself that I can do it.

And yes, the .dsos are just inside of zip archives. :) The zip stuff does work in Torque -- Mostly. It doesn't support streaming oggs, as I already mentioned.

(cont)

#14 (see previous)

Now that is outta the way -- Thanks everybody for downloading and giving this a shot! I really appreciate your comments. The more you tell me, the better I am able to tweak my next game and make it even more fun. I'm glad people found CB fun. That's something I worried about when creating it, as I wanted to make a nice graphical demo but also have it be pretty playable on top of that. Judging from the reaction so far, I'd say I came fairly close to my goal!

@Melv: If you don't mind, let me finish v1.01 before you start spreading this wide and far. :) I wanted to get some input before I did an actual wide-scale public release. v1.01 should be done sometime today, since the changes are very minor and mostly cosmetic. I'm also starting the OSX port today too.

PS: I appreciate the offers but yes, I am indeed male and quite unable to have babies :)

(*I say "encrypted" here tongue in cheek. I'm using Pat Wilson's resource with only slight modification. If I were doing a full commerical release I'd change that!)

#15 Personally, I thought the ship speed was about right.

I was a bit stumped by the hit box thing, and thought that it should have been a bit bigger. I repeatedly flew through the blue laser beams as I thought they were bugged and wouldn't kill me. Was proved wrong in the end though ;)

Haven't tried it, but surely to unlock the hard level, you just need to edit the prefs.cs file, so no need to play the game through on easy to make it available.

The music sounds a bit like the Terminator theme at the beginning, and I thought that was what it going to turn into. No bad thing, I happen to like the Terminator theme :)

On the whole I thought it was great. I look forward to seeing what you do next :)

#16 David, how about adding support for game controllers. On your game half-lite I'm able to use my xbox controller. I realize it's support that torque currently lacks.

#17 Will do David. I've been posting your pages on some other links on this site but I decided to transfer those screenies to my FTP to save your sites bandwidth especially as I noticed your comment on the site about it being quite overloaded. Hope you don't mind this.

Just thought I'd let you know that some of my friends have been playing this and they like it alot! I keep saying that I had nothing to do with it, well almost nothing. :)

I can only imagine what your other projects would be. While we're on the subject, I personally don't like (read that trust) PayPal. Is there any other way to make a donation here? Am I being paranoid about that PayPal?

- Melv.

#18 There's no gamepad support in Torque?? I could have sworn there was a "joystick" something or other variable in the input initialization code somewhere. Definitely need this to be added. :)

#19 Jason,
Josh said it was on the list of things to have done before the final release

#20 @Charlie: Thanks for the info. But "final" could be up to a year away, so we might need to be proactive and add support ourselves. Either way, I still love Torque2D!