Messages

16

Off Topic / Re: Starbound - indie game beta launch Terraria clone sells ridiculously well

« on: 2013-Dec-06 »

Multiplayer works after some configuration with port forwarding and whatnot. Right now there is basic mining, farming, building, crafting and exploration, none of which are as much fun as Terraria yet. Give it a year and there could be lots more content and perhaps more of a overall purpose to what you do in-game.

17

GLBasic - en / Re: Polyvector instead of Usescreen

« on: 2013-Dec-06 »

Yes, its a little difficult but its worth it.

It takes some work to accustomed to and is more complicated than the super-easy sprite commands in GLB. However, once you get used to it you'll probably do everything using polyvectors. If you're drawing a lot of sprites it can be faster than sprite commands in GLB because you will tend to use the same texture to draw multiple sprites in the same draw call.

It can be used to replace the stretchsprite / usescreen method. I'm not sure how much faster or slower it is without making a test program but it looks better.

There are examples of how people have made screen scaling here on the forum, like Z-Project.

You may want to get your hands on a texture packer and write your own importing routine to speed things along. I use a commercial texture packer and wrote a little proggy to import the sprites into GLB by generating code to name the sprites I can paste straight into my apps. Its very quick that way.

18

Off Topic / Starbound - indie game beta launch Terraria clone sells ridiculously well

« on: 2013-Dec-06 »

Starbound was available on Steam from 4th Dec. If you don't know its a Terraria clone, sort of Terraria in space. Really its so similar to Terraria in its core mechanics and concept it could be an unofficial sequel imo. There has been a lot of hype about it for an indie game. I was amazed to see it reached the number one slot of the 'top sellers' on Steam yesterday and is still there, despite being a beta version. That's kind of amazing.  Am a little jealous. 

Anyone else get the game? As a huge Terraria nerd I had to.  Played it for 10 hours. Unsurprisingly it very much feels like a beta, kind of like a giant warehouse with more space than it can fill at the moment.

19

Announcements / Re: Chaos Rematch - WIP thread

« on: 2013-Dec-02 »

Yeah, I am intimidated by the fact this new Chaos game is being developed. Since its being created in Unity there might be a mobile version of Gollop's new game in the future too. The thing is, when I reflect on this, I can't imagine a realistic scenario where his re-boot of Chaos is to the detriment of what I'm doing. If I like a game I look for more of the same. That is a trend that works in gaming. Chances are there is a smallish number of people who care enough about the original Chaos to look for a re-boot. If 'Chaos Reborn' does well, that would actually be better for my game overall. The re-boot of XCOM was a big hit with me and that didn't diminish my interested in XCOM-like games.

Another thing I'm glad about is that the original Chaos is in the public domain, thanks to Gollop being such a decent bloke, so I doubt I'd have to deal with legal repercussions from any of this.

Tonight I've gotten a bit of a boost. It looks like the multiplayer problem I encountered before can be bypassed. I found I was calling a SOCK_SHUTDOWN command before NETDESTROYPLAYER and NETSHUTDOWN. This resulted in just one reply coming from NETGETQUITPLAYER where I needed two - one for the NET commands and (for reasons I don't understand and aren't documented) a ghost player that seems to be created if you use UDP sockets for broadcasting on LAN (or whatever you need it for) as well as NET commands for communicating with the server. It seems the NET commands create player IDs for more than just NET sockets. I won't bore people with the ins and outs of it, but I will update the thread reporting an error if I find something other people might need to know.

20

Announcements / Re: Chaos Rematch - WIP thread

« on: 2013-Dec-01 »

Oh, its nowhere near time to let it go yet in my estimation. I've only just got back on track! I need to adjust my expectations is all. I was hoping to get a prototype working by 19th December. Might be longer now. Tackling multiplayer today, when I get a chance. I had something partially working before but I discovered some bugs with the NET commands which basically made all my work with them up to that point worthless since my ability to host games properly was made practically impossible. I had to 'cut bait' with multiplayer at that point. Going to revisit the problem to see if the bugs are still present. If not I can speed this process up immensely. If so, I'll have to write code to host a server myself.

BTW the new game by Gollop is PC, Mac and Linux only. Also I'm sure it'll be very good but it will be considerably different to my game.

21

Announcements / Re: Chaos Rematch - WIP thread

« on: 2013-Dec-01 »

I'm finding this is going to be slow going no matter what. Why? Because if I want to include multiplayer it kind of has to be working as multiplayer from the outset, even for a simplistic prototype before its made to look and sound pretty. I don't want to try to tag on multiplayer later after the single player experience is working since it would be much easier to build the whole thing around multiplayer early on.

Another challenge is the AI. I lost sleep over thinking about this last night. In the morning I realised my ideas were just too big to code efficiently. There is almost no end to the complexities you can add to AI for a turn-based strategy game like this. The trouble is I don't want to spend forever making the AI. I'll have to settle for good enough. By that I mean it has to do a decent job of providing a challenge and NOT have glaring AI problems that look like bugs.

22

Announcements / Re: Chaos Rematch - WIP thread

« on: 2013-Nov-29 »

Hahaha no doubt. I got blew up a lot of times.  It was Ragaril, Wampus or Fibble. I can't remember which one but those are the usual tags I go by.

23

Announcements / Re: Chaos Rematch - WIP thread

« on: 2013-Nov-29 »

Laser Squad Nemesis was a lot of fun. Played quite a bit of that back in the day.

Incidentally the control scheme for Chaos Mages (previously, Chaos Rematch) will be a bit like the recent XCOM games.

Although I want to keep it simple I think I have to build even the basic prototype with multiplayer working from the outset. Adding it later will be much harder otherwise.

24

Announcements / Re: 3d particle engine is in!

« on: 2013-Nov-27 »

That is totally awesome of you. Thanks.

25

Announcements / Re: Chaos Rematch - WIP thread

« on: 2013-Nov-27 »

OK, so I've been thinking. I've let this project go into stasis for long enough. I think its time to get it done and let it go.

Part of what has been keeping me from progressing is I've built all these nice little routines for the game, i.e. particle engine, field of vision, scaling for any device with texture remapping, multiplayer, etc. However, I haven't got the basic gameplay worked out - how the thing will work - and doing that using the framework I've built would be a little slow. It adds a layer of complexity that has to be dealt with at every step. This is my solution to quick development: I'll build a prototype of the game for PC, concentrating on just the gameplay mechanics. I'll keep very simple graphics. Real simple. No fancy animation as such, no audio wizardry, etc. That way I can work out how the core game will work first - the creature stats, AI and menu system - tweaking it to sure its fun for single player / multi player. After that has been done, well then that's the time to put it into the framework I've built for the final thing. At least I'll know the game itself works then, before I make it pretty.

Feel like I'll finally make some real steps towards getting this available.

26

Announcements / Re: Galaxians Remake - only different...

« on: 2013-Nov-26 »

This is coming along nicely. The updated enemy movement is much better.

You're probably aware of this, but sometimes when a new wave of enemies come down for the start of the level the game stops there, with no control over the player character and no movement from the enemies.

27

Off Topic / Re: Sprite Lamp - dinamic light

« on: 2013-Nov-24 »

I wonder what performance would be like on mobile devices. Could conceivably do lighting similar to The Swapper? Will be curious to see how this develops.

28

Off Topic / Re: PixiTracker

« on: 2013-Nov-23 »

This looks like it would be quick to compose with. Useful for small games.

29

Off Topic / Re: BitCoin payments

« on: 2013-Nov-23 »

Everyone talks about bitcoins. So it seems.
But - is there a market for that? Would people use bitcoins to buy software?

What are your toughts about this new currency?

They might use bitcoin to buy software, if it was more widely available for purchase. I guess a trouble right now is its hard to find actual things to buy with bitcoin and people are keeping hold of it for speculation purposes too.

In principle bitcoin seems good to me, even with its bubble-like volatility and speculators. Bitcoin can't be counterfeited, has true scarcity and is very efficient as a payment mechanism. I don't know if it will exist for all that long, given that it could have unknown flaws to exploit and quantum computing could theoretically be used to break the encryption. Regardless I think cryptocurrency in general is here to stay. For example, Canada has its own cryptocurrency in the works.

I'd stick with standard currencies that are regulated by governments not nerds. Not that I have faith in governments, but I do have faith that nerds will find some way of hacking and bringing the whole bitcoin system down.

That could happen but there are risks with those standard currencies also. There are always risks. All the eggs in one basket, etc.

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GLBasic - en / Re: Android Black Screen [Media Copying on first run idea]

« on: 2013-Nov-22 »

Thanks for your guidance on Android spacefractal. It's *really* helpful.