Bugs found... and new features. Please be patient! (long text)

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Manu Segura

Hello all,

Time to bring SEUCK some new fresh air, now that the project looks luckily revitalized...

While starting to work with SEUCK, I've come with this "little" (LOL) list of features that IMO I think they can make SEUCK an even better program.

I know some of them are easy to implement, and other are much more difficult or a lot of work. Please keep in mind that my only intention is to help a little bit so be kind if I look too demanding :)

I've also found some bugs, if I find more I will tell you.

So here they are:


Bugs found
--------------

-Sound editor window is too small, you can't see 'Ok' and 'Cancel' buttons at first sight -- Leads to errors and compulsively 'Esc' pressing x-D. It could be redimensionable as other windows are.

-Warning message on pressing 'Esc'. You can throw away all your work easily with this abrupt and accidental exit.

-When moving the map on the Levels Editing Mode with the arrows buttons, you can make a mess if moving a tile outside the map itself, that never comes back. A simple warning would do ("You're going to loss tiles, are you sure??).

-Some information popups shows twice at different heights (Sound -> Import / Record buttons, for example). Just ugly, nothing serious.

-Animation: '8-Way Hold' doesn't work (behaves same as 8-Way)

-Animation: Add frames on directions dissapeared (saw it on older screenshots). So you can not do a several images walk cycle, for example, just two.

-Better slope handling on "Jump'n'run" game style (Mario example is too brusque)

-Palette button is not working? What should it do? (I think you are already aware of this). I can provide a nice palette for 256 colors, in the case you want it

-Player start/spawn position editable or error checking (in Mario example, a player can join the game just inside a brick)


New Features
------------------

-Color picker in Sprite Drawing Tool

-Player shot power up or upgrade, with definable behaviour (usually after picking up a PowerUp) - Number of shots, angle, different sprites... defineable levels for player.

-Homing missiles as a power up (an "Is Enemy" flag would be useful to track them). Also for enemies shooting players? A slow enemy missile that can be destroyed, for example. I love homing missiles!

-Smoke (or whatever) trail.

-Music adding (Sure you're aware also)

-Custom or handleable transitions between levels or handle the speed of the map scroll in a certain moment or gametime (boss appearance stops map scrolling, for example? A small intro level where the ship goes really fast and then slows down, and the game itself starts?) With acceleration/deceleration, if it's not too much to ask LOL

-Sprite rotation towards an object (An enemy facing you, or rotate/facing along its own path

-Enemy shoot to the actual position of the player (Additional to directional shooting)

-Enemy acceleration and bullet acceleration (nice effect for bosses bullets, or missiles)

-Impact animation (an enemy that gets a bullet but doesn't die shows a little explosion or impact on collision place, a red (or whatever) flash on the enemy would be a nice effect also)

-Custom splash screen (against "hello message"?)

-Main Menu (redefinable keys, difficulty setting, sound volume, vibration (iPod/iPhone)...)

-Undo function on editor. Please...

-Transparency, content and position of status bar. Custom graphic would be nice also

-Alpha blending on sprites

-Custom font and status bar icons

-Animated background (or foreground) sprites

-Small horizontal (or vertical) scroll if map is bigger in X (or Y for horizontal scroll) than screen size, altough the scroll keeps moving up (or right)

-If background could be drawn in the last order position we can build big bridges where every moving thing is going underneath them (players, shots) -- Selectable drawing order?

-Shadows for objects/enemies/players. Would be nice to have, in the sprite background part, a "height" parameter where you can define how far the shadow will be drawn, or if there is shadow or not at all (height=0). Could be the inverse of the transparent area, in a 80% transparent grey, for example

-Image slideshow for intro/between maps/outtro. Definable image for Loading Screen (iPhone/iPad/slower computers)

-Smaller hitbox on player sprite ship than the whole sprite (usual in every modern shooter), against the complete sprite collision detection

-Difficulty setting (frequency of enemy shots, enemy 'lives', speed of enemy shots, player lives, loss of powerups after dying or not?)

-Enemy child follows another enemy child, that follows an enemy father, and so on: with this, you can make an snake-type enemy, composed of several articulated sprites (even nicer if they rotate facing each parent). But they should all die if their "head" dies. Or split up in two if you break the middle... too complicated maybe? I did this with another program (Game Maker), creating a matrix where the coordinates of the second compound (for example) were the former coordinates of the "head" in the last gametime, or 5 gametimes (distance?) ago :). Maybe looks complicated, but looks spectacular. Or to create the "Options" powerup seen on Nemesis, for the Player ship. I think I can provide a video of the result of what I did with the "snake enemy"...

-iPhone control mode selection (accelerometer - virtual joystick (I don't like this, but maybe someother one does) - relative screen touch). Would be nice to access it via a Pause Menu

-Autofire for mobile devices (iPad/iPhone)

-Accelerometer calibration on pause or main menu (iPhone/iPad, you know)

-Pause button :)






I hope these hints can help you make a better program. It can look like a lot of work, but I think they are all quite usual on modern shmups.

If I find more bugs, or think about other features, I'll let you know if you think they are useful.

I am happy if I can help :)

And thanks for reading that much text... :-S

Cheers!

Kitty Hello

DUUUUUDE!
It took me half an hour to only READ that :P

I'll see if I can bring a few of these requests. I like the shadow idea, and rotate towards the player.

Colour picker works - select a colour, then press palette to change it.

Splash screens are hard to do. It would be a cool feature to combine a set of SEUCK games into _one_ game. You could make a sequence then in the game editor, making the player sprite invisible and put the scroll to "stand". That's one thing I was thinking about.

Now that the SFXR is working, I'll update the sound thing totally. I think sfxr sound is much cooler.

Manu Segura

Hey hello!

As you can see, I am really interested in helping with the SEUCK :) And as I can not help with programming, I can help with ideas... BTW, already started with the first sketches for sprites (iPhone-resolution oriented as you may figure LOL) :)

Sorry, that was not what I was talking about with the colour picker. My darn english... well, imagine you right-click with the mouse just over the sprite image, and capture the actual color underneath. A way to get the color of an existing pixel and assign to the actual pencil color... don't know if I am explaining myself. I suppose you're going also to expand the palette also, right? :-)

You don't like Rotate towards the path? Would be cool too.

Another bug BTW: When you shot, while flying to one side (tried with  the Riva Raid example), the graphic shown for the player is the central one. Pretty ugly effect.

I like the idea of joining games into one. A splash screen could be created as you say, making it splicing an image to a set of tiles, and place them as a background right? (Is fade from/to black difficult to do?). Besides, it will also allow to create multi-discipline games (1st level: horizintal shooter, 2nd level: vertical shooter, 3rd level: jump'n'run... like Salamander or Xaid'n Sleena). Like the idea?

IMO, from all the ideas I wrote before, the most _necessary_ ones are: player shoot powerup, scroll control (for bosses), enemy shoot towards the player, player spawn position (for one player only game, for example, or to handle different resolutions), and impact/flash animation.

BTW, if I can ask, you have an estimation of how far away are we from a next SEUCK release?

Ah, and if you need a Spanish translation just let me know...

Thanks, and kind regards!

Manu Segura

Hi,
Just a quick issue.

Player shots should be drawn before player, or with an offset.

If you got some big shots (and you should with power ups), there is quite a strange effect, with bullets starting from the middle above the ship. Try it.

Also, I'm losing quality on the sprites because of the limited palette, even if I use a 256 color palette.

Cheers!

Manu Segura

Oops...

Now a big problem.

If I try to add more than 19 sprites, SEUCK hangs up and a error is shown.

I'm attaching a screenshot of the window.

In this case, I beg you to fix it ASAP please.

Thanks in advance for your effort,

[attachment deleted by admin]

Kitty Hello

Send me the project and/or the exact steps to reproduce that bug, please.

Manu Segura

Just unzip SEUCK as a fresh install, build 15.

Empty project. Started also with dummygame as a base, but it gave me a "Load Error" when created standalone so I started from scratch.

Sprites - pick sprite 19 - right arrow to add a sprite - error.

Tell me if I can be on more ahelp. I did another SEUCK fresh install to try, but same thing happens.

Kitty Hello


Manu Segura

Hi,

If you try any of the games that came as an example, they all look like the graphics (maybe the resolution?) are misplaced. Unplayable.

Anyway, I was not able to load my project, because, strangely, it was not appearing in the list of .seuck projects! Only the examples showed... strange, huh?

The sprite problem looks fixed, in other way. But I could not test it really because of the loading project problem x-D

Any keys for emulating the joysticks?

Cheers!

Kitty Hello

place your project in your documents/SEUCK directory.

Manu Segura

Ok, that worked. I can load the project now. But...

I see you changed the resolution to iPad. That killed what I did, iPhone-resolution-wise (build 15 was 480 pixels tall and was nice for me), and what I wanted to do. Also any other demo project that was there (specially, Spawn Positions for waves are out completely), is not showing properly.

Would be great if you can make the program output resolution definible. "Output Window" at "Player" button doesn't do anything really usable.

Also, the virtual joysticks don't allow to really test the game's real playability properly from Windows.

Important: the Animations screen is completely screwed: see attached file. And the animation is also screwed in the game.

And Create Standalone doesn't work. See attached file 2 :)

I hope I'm helping with the betatesting :)

Cheers!




[attachment deleted by admin]

Kitty Hello

Sorry for the long time to reply. I fixed the bugs now and made it quite usable now. I'm still tweaking a few things here and there before I try to release an iPad version.
Also, I'm planning on an iPhone in-app-store where you can download games.

If there a better way to do that? Can we have a protcol that calls our app?

Ah, yes:
Code (glbasic) Select

http://iphonedevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-application-via-a-custom-url-scheme.html

Manu Segura

Oh wow, I almost lost my hopes but I am glad to see you were still on business :-)

Don't worry, I assume you were busy with some other things.

Do you already have any download link to see the new version? Or it's still on testing?

Any new features or only bug fixing?

BTW, the idea about the in-app store is great! But can't help you with that thing...

Cheers!

Kitty Hello


kanonet

Ok, i use this old thread.;)

I downloaded today and found this bug:


[attachment deleted by admin]
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