PGD Annual 2006: Last Stage!

[Huehnerschaender]

Hi Athena!

Long time, no "read" ^^

Thanks for playing and reporting the bugs.

The two things you mentioned didn't occur on any system people played now. I guess about 15 people with different machine specs played it more than just five minutes and didn't find the issues ^^ So I will take a look at it this evening and hopefully find the reason for that strange behaviour.

How is it going with your project? Everything ready yet?

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Hi hon,

I've been uber busy with a new job (I now work for the people who started the company I used to work for... and in this new company, I'm doing what I did previously, plus my old bosses job, so I'm having to use skills that up until now have never been used in anger so to speak. As a result I'm finding (a) I'm staying at work later than normal because I'm thoroughly enjoying the job and the challenge and (b) I'm having to do a lot of out of hours reading to make sure I don't screw up.

Anyhow... back on topic :-)

The errors were weird. The rocket box that caused the problem was the one in the third vertical section (IIRC) of the training mission (I say IIRC because I think I went Up the screen, Down the screen, Up the screen). The gun problem occured shortly after that I believe... I was going upwards, the helicopter was around and I got to the top, a tank came in from the left, there was a gun straight ahead... I shot the tank (IIRC) and after that I couldn't fire the main gun as the explosions were literally in the center of my turret.

My machine specs are:- Athlon 800, 32MB GeForce 2 GTS, 1GB RAM. OS is Win2K Server. DirectX was latest version downloaded from MS at the start of the competition. If theres any debugging options I can enable (logging or whatever) and you want me to try and reproduce it, let me know hon and I'll have a go.

How is it going with your project? Everything ready yet?

[size=18px]LOL[/size]

Thats the best joke I've heard in a while :-D

I'm frantically trying to get the new engine to Stage 5 goals, let alone stage 6... still... nothing like a caffeine fuelled weekend of coding :-D The new engine is much cooler though... and we've got our final artwork from my brother, so it will at least look better. We've got sound fx working and music (kind of... can't afford to buy a sound library like Bass or fmod, so music is only in the menu using Media Player).

Heres a screenie of the new engine with the new graphics.



Even if we do finish, we may not be able to upload from home as our phoneline has a crossed line or something so our broadband is on the fritz... may have to drive to work (75 mile round trip) to get access to the web :?

To be honest, we're both looking forward to after the deadline so we can take our time with it... that said, personally I'm amazed how much I've managed to achieve in this short space of time. We've always wanted to make a client based game, but I've always felt it was completely beyond my capabilities... now I think differently :-)

Right... back to work :lol:

[Huehnerschaender]

Thank you Athena.... Gratulations for the new job!

One thing... are you sure you didn't change gunmode to AIR? In that case, what you call explosions (gunfire) is in the middle of the players tank, AND you can't hit ground enemys in that mode, because you shoot into the air...

If you have 1 minute left, could you please start the game (no matter what level), and press SPACE? This switches gun mode from ground to air. If you fire some rounds then, is this what you felt is a bug?

If so, then everything concerning this is ok. I didn't include instructions in the beta, so you may not have known there are 2 gunmodes for the main gun.

Sad to hear your project isn't finished yet. BUT what you have looks very good! Also the new graphics I do like very much! Respect to your brother!

Hopefully we'll see a complete game made with your engine some day.
I definetely will go on with the Tanx project, but after the compo without any deadlines in the neck (as I mentioned I am already at my personal limits!).

Concerning the rocket pickup I will investigate if "low" system specs may cause the problem. Your 800 Mhz PC may not do the calculations 45 times a second, which the game is designed for.
How much FPS did you get with your video card (the calculation speed is independed from FPS, this question is just because I am curious :lol: )?

Thanks again and best wishes! I have to go back tanxing now :?

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Hon,

A thousand apologies... I should pay more attention.

I've just spent a while playing... and here are my findings...

The 'bug' about firing and getting an explosion in my tank and not being able to fire... I'm guessing having played the game with my eyes open this time, that in fact I was being fired on by an enemy (the explosion in my tank) and that I wasn't firing is because I had run out of ammunition.

The 'never ending rocket ammo'... my initial report wasn't quite right, but there is potentially still an issue... its not rocket ammo. Its the repair box, but when I go over it 'Rocket Ammo' text is displayed. I guess its not using the repair box, because I'm that good, I don't get shot at ;-)

However, when I change from windowed to full screen (or back), I lose the keyboard. If I quit and restart without changing, its fine.

In terms of performance, its not too bad. I'm getting about 25-30fps windowed and a wildly varying 25-92fps in full screen.

Sorry for sending you on a wild goose chase hon, I hope you didn't waste too much time.

Thank you Athena.... Gratulations for the new job!

Thanks :-)

Sad to hear your project isn't finished yet. BUT what you have looks very good! Also the new graphics I do like very much! Respect to your brother!

Thanks :-) I'm not sad... I've learned a hell of a lot and had fun, what more could you want from a project like this. As for a finished game... The Outer Reaches - Rise of The Raiders will get finished... we want to play it too much, so theres no chance of it being consigned to history :-D

Good luck hon, see you on the flipside :-D

And finally, good luck to everyone else whos taking part in this years competition.

[aidave]

Athena, your energy bars look exactly like ours!
Did you stretch out two bitmaps? Thats what we did.

H, im on level 3 in tanx. It took me a long time to finish level1, I didnt understand the air/ground gun until I accidentally hit spacebar about the fourth time playing. hehe
Its a good game, and runs fine. I like it.

[Huehnerschaender]

I am glad to hear that the bugreports are "nearly" vanished without my doings *hehe*

Since the "repair kit" issue happens in the tutorial, it may come from that you are invulnarable in the tutorial ^^ You didn't realize that? Its said in the briefing. So thats why you won't need a repairkit there and I am wondering if I really placed one in the training mission. I will investigate this. Normally there should be rockets to shoot the cracky wall. Strange that you see a repair kit and the text says rocket ammo..... Let me just play the tutorial and I will take a close look to every pickup chest in it...

I'll be back ^^

[Huehnerschaender]

Muhahaha... You are completely right. There IS a repair kit and of course it cannot be picked up because you got no damage. AND it displays Rocket Ammo Text when driving over it. I guess the text spawn needs an additional statement in it's spawncode. Until thursday or so, all pickups were taken, no matter if you need it or not. Now, that I let the pickups stay until you really need them, the pickup stays on the ground, but the zooming pickup text still appears with the last message it got, in this case rocket ammo!

Thanks for finding this bug! I will fix it now.

[Huehnerschaender]

aidave, thanks for your comment ^^

In the final entry you will get instructions of course ^^ But because I know that noone reads documents, I made the tutorial. There you learn the usage of air-gunmode ^^

Level 3 is quite hard, but level 4 is harder *hehe*

I included an option now to set level difficulty at briefing screen. I didn't finish level 2 of my own game at "Hell on earth" setting now *lol*

5 minutes ago I finished another feature.... destroyed enemys randomly drop pickups with a fair chance when they explode.

*back tanxing*

[Huehnerschaender]

The 'never ending rocket ammo'... my initial report wasn't quite right, but there is potentially still an issue... its not rocket ammo. Its the repair box, but when I go over it 'Rocket Ammo' text is displayed. I guess its not using the repair box, because I'm that good, I don't get shot at ;-)

Fixed that.

However, when I change from windowed to full screen (or back), I lose the keyboard. If I quit and restart without changing, its fine.

I realized that before but didn't take too much notice to it. Now I finally fixed it. Thanks!

In terms of performance, its not too bad. I'm getting about 25-30fps windowed and a wildly varying 25-92fps in full screen.

Wow. This is quite good for your machine specs. I would have guessed the FPS is much lower... wonderful... that makes me happy ^^ (as far as I remember one judge has a 800 Mhz machine, too...)

Sorry for sending you on a wild goose chase hon, I hope you didn't waste too much time.

Hey, you can send me to anything as long as we stay in contact :lol:
I did not waste any time. I finally fixed bugs I probably wouldn't have fixed if you didn't play the game! Thanks for that.

[Huehnerschaender]

For anyone who is interested:

http://www.dino-it.de/TanxBoss.zip

Improvements:

- 3 selectable difficulties for each level at briefing screen
- killed enemys drop pickups randomly (no tank extensions, only ammo and repair kits)
- keyboard will not be loosed when changing screen resolution
- fixed artifact in title screen
- fixed wrong appearance of pickup texts
- finishing the tutorial caused the ending scene to appear *lol*
- fixed artifact of gunfire when firing on smoke particles
- all 4 levels available in this beta to play around with
- several unnoticable bugs fixed

Tomorrow I will review my levels and change or redesign them.
So the levels in this release are again just for playing around with all engine features.

Greetings,
Dirk