PGDmC - Unknown Name

[code_glitch]

Indeed it is a platformer... And one in the style of super smash bros / early tekken remixes. So it really just a platformer shoot em' up, blow the living daylights of anything that moves style game... Hence emphasis on multiplayer

[Traveler]

Sounds interesting. And a lot of work too. I hope you can pull it off.

[code_glitch]

I hope so too... My first 'issue' is the fact my game and attacks heavily rely on a particle effect system. Now how do you check whether 5,000 particles are hitting each player every frame... Hmm. I'm thinking of filtering it by angle then distance instead of re-calculating particle positions and then trying to match them.

The networking (ironically) is the easiest part: for each play to move, it must be sent a record of data. Each player has its own movement thread. In a human instance, this is done via the keyboard, for the AI it sends key codes. Simply, all you do is send off a packet of movement info over TCP to the destination IP and tell the network thread what player thread it should pipe the info to. simples. Sdl_Net comes in handy here - I had a go with the recently drafted Prometheus Data Transmission Format and Prometheus_Net but it is simply too buggy to be usable. Also its a tad slow for me likes since it has yet to be written in its optimized form for each OS

So its a fair amount of work, but aside from a few minor instances nothing I haven't done before. In other words, theres little POC code to go wrong. And did I mention: 3 days or so from beta?! (no networking yet so don't get your hopes up too high. Just a test for performance on other peoples systems. VMs only do so much)

[WILL]

Sounds like a lot is going into this. Just don't overstretch yourself trying to do something one way. In programming; if at first you don't succeed, cheat and make them think it's done the other way.

[Ñuño Martínez]

Hi. Did you start coding?

[Ingemar]

It is always fun with a screenshot, even if in an early stage.

[code_glitch]

@Nuno: Although I don't want to admit it with the lack of stuff that I can check as finalized, coding started on day 3 so its well underway (clocking 1.2k lines or so now in total - 3k if you include Prometheus and other libs). Now its content generation, content format standardization and the player interface that just need to be finalized before I can call it a game. The menu system gave me a few nasty aches but its all but done at last. The beta will most likely be Monday and then its the content content content sprint till the 8th where its beta 2 - any killer bugs I missed, fix and upload...

@Ingemar: Screenshots was going to happen, but due to the themes of each section being on the abstract side, I thought against it (shame TBH). Reminds me: I've alwaya wanted to have a hack at the particle system and improve rotation for particles. Maybe if have a bit of time tonight.

@General Public: Since Prometheus is a gaming library, the custom version I've been rocking for my game devs will be released as version 1.0 along with 100% completed docs for that version around the 28th - about time right? Well, at last it seems to be bug free as tested by games, fast as tested by games, cross platform and once X11, WIN32 spec code is in place you get another 10% speed increase whene it goes bare gl for video. Audio will be late july hopefully once codec wars end. The target min spec for prometheus is 3.1mb ram, 22mhz cpu, 16mb HDD and Opengl > 2.0 with 'legacy' support via 1.x extensions: gma 945 crowd, that is you so yay. Active OSes are Win32, Win64, Lin32, Lin64 on X86 (and yes ARM 7/9 is under the feasibility test). Chances are it works on OS X but its never been tested although chances with SDL powered revisions are quite strong.

Oh and for those that like more control, I am looking into a function based language that shares the prometheus codebase so instead of image.rotate(x) you can dest := rotateimage(image, x)... And its all inter-operable! YAA!

Of course, for bare bones performance go ZenGl, but I am looking into the performance gap and have a few tests getting close to the theoretical max speeds of my HW (OK, it chows up 1.1ghz cpu and 300mb ram ATM, but the concept delivery 80% of it can be crammed in 8mb ram and 200mhz cpu) with leaps there along with a new data type for dealing with VERY large images: compress the text data with bzip or similar and decompress areas needed on the fly... Slow but faster than page file

[code_glitch]

This new architecture is super awesome - in 180 lines I have ported 350 lines of the old beta with a 40% performance boost (mem + cpu)... Now tweaking some physics and playability, drafting the AI and writing the threaded input control system Should be 1 map playable once I get a basic tileset etc done. I lovez this new gamedev approach

[paul_nicholls]

I hope so too... My first 'issue' is the fact my game and attacks heavily rely on a particle effect system. Now how do you check whether 5,000 particles are hitting each player every frame... Hmm. I'm thinking of filtering it by angle then distance instead of re-calculating particle positions and then trying to match them.

You could use a spatial collision algorithm - put each particle into a 2d grid 'slot' by it's location, and then when you check the player, see which 2d slots the player is covering and only look in those slots for particle collisions.

This will speed things up lots!!

cheers,
Paul

[Ingemar]

You could use a spatial collision algorithm - put each particle into a 2d grid 'slot' by it's location, and then when you check the player, see which 2d slots the player is covering and only look in those slots for particle collisions.

This will speed things up lots!!

I agree. You can use a regular grid, or a quadtree/octree, or an axis aligned BSP tree. Any of them will help. If the distribution is fairly regular, if you know that the density is at some level, then a regular is a quick and easy solution.