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Firlefanz
02-04-2004, 09:28 PM
Hello,

I finished my game 'TombClimber', made with the Delphi Sanctuary's Omega headers for Delphi.

Anybody interested can take a look :D

http://www.ericbehme.de/tombclimber.html

Firle :D

Alimonster
02-04-2004, 11:54 PM
I like that map artwork! I'll try out the game some time over the weekend (there is a shareware version, yeah?) and will give you my opinion.

Firlefanz
03-04-2004, 06:43 AM
Hi Alimonster,

thanks for the reply. I am just uploading Version 1.1 with minor bugfixes. I am very anxious to hear if you like it :D

Frile

WiZz
03-04-2004, 07:35 AM
i will try it when i will be at home, after few hours.
P.S. Screenshots looks cool :)

WiZz
03-04-2004, 01:23 PM
well, it is good game, but it is very slow :)

Traveler
04-04-2004, 02:04 PM
Hi Firlefanz,

Probably like many others, I too was quite interested in your game when you first mentioned it some time ago. Needless to say I was quite pleased to see the eagerly awaited words "TombClimber finished" :D Great job!

Anyway, on to the actual game. The logo and intro are pretty nice. However, I wanted to skip them after the third time and tried to click out of the logo animation when the game suddenly minimized. You might want to fix that.

Because I was already playing some mp3's (quite loud I might add) I wanted to shut down the background music.
You definitely need to change the way you handle your options. For instance the sound. Because I didn't knew how the change worked (I exepected a slider or something) I clicked on the word sound and suddenly the bar next to it displayed 0. Clicking another 60 times to get a decent volume is not what you want your players to do. Especially If you need to click another 50 times to eliminate background music.

Then the game itself. Somehow, the game is very slow. I think because of the alpha fading that is happening all over the place. The level screens and texts fade away way too slow. I understand that the fading my be a nice effect but you dont want it to affect the gameplay. Everything is nearly going in slowmotion especially when the character is shooting.

Speaking of shooting. You really need to spice this up a bit. The reloading takes way too long. At some points it actually hinders hasty retreats when for instance shooting a bat with a fireball also coming towards me. Also I'd really to see a few more weapons. Perhaps give the enemies a few more hitpoints and give the player an uzi or something.

The ropes are a nice change to the usual stairs in games like these. But having bats flying near most of them takes a lot of the action away, since you need to wait for the bat to come up for you to shoot it, before you can make your way down. If you happen to miss, like I did in the beginning, you really wish you had a granade or something to throw to the bat. Also I missed the option to jump off a rope. There was one time were I was going down one and noticed a bat flying up. I could have jumped off of it savely to a floor next to the rope, but instead I had to climb up again in order to save a life.

There are quite a few things that could be done to improve the game, apart from the problems with the options and minimize bug I noted.
At the moment the game lacks action. It runs slow and takes a lot of time to finish, where the actual reward of a level in general is very little. In my opinion the time it takes to end a level is currently too high in relation to the action you find. Take Diablo for example. Levels are enormous, but there's action at every step the player takes. I'm missing that in this game. Add variation and challange the player. One shot one kill does not do that. It has no difficulty, gives no satisfaction.

I hope I didn't sound to negative. Again, my hopes at the beginning were high, also due to the screenshots I had seen earlier. But screenshots don't tell a thing about gameplay and thats what's really missing. Fix that, and you have a great game.

Firlefanz
05-04-2004, 10:24 AM
Hello,

@WIZz: Slow: Take a look at the manual, perhaps you should change something with the config-tool, color depths or VSync or ZBuffer? The game requires some Direct3D features, so on older cards it could be slow, perhaps try changing the detail. :D

@Traveler: Wow, that was a very long statement.
I will think about these bugs, and the alphablending thing.

But this game is not just an action game, it requiers some timing and some thinking. Perhaps new weapons would be a good idea, but reloading should take some time because shooting should not always be the only possibility. And the ropes with thos bats on it should stay like they are, I like them. In later levels, there are also worms and scorpions climbing up thos ropes.

TombClimber was not mend to be an action game only, it is some 'Find your way out and collect some treasures' game, and no shooter. A shooter I will do next I think :)

thanks for the feedback
Firle

WILL
05-04-2004, 08:31 PM
Hey, I can't get it to run. :(

Any way to get a minimum requirements list?

My only restriction that I can think of is that my video card is an ATI Rage Mobility-1 with only 8 megs physical and AGP x2 resized to 64 megs.

I have had issues mostly with programs that try to load way too much data into texture memory. Then again could be something else.

The Rest of my system's specs:

NEC VERSA SXi Laptop w/
Pentium III 800MHZ
512MB SDRAM
Maestro ESS, etc.. soundcard (Not Creative Labs, but It's pretty good ;))

Looks like a pretty neat game though...

Firlefanz
06-04-2004, 06:09 AM
Hi Will,

must be the grafic card. Perhaps you could try the Config.exe, setting the resolution to 800x600x16 bpp instead 32 bpp. This helped on my notebook. If it is not working then, I think it won't run on your grafic card, sorry :cry:

Firle

WILL
06-04-2004, 08:06 AM
Hey... that did it actually. As you can probably tell. But only barely it runs extreemly slow, which isn't so good since I have run Deus Ex, Gothic, etc and they run pretty well at low-end settings. But I'm sure it'll run nice enough on a P4 though.

Really fun game I must say though. I love the concept. And I do miss playing the good 'old platform games.

Sorry to say, but a really annoying thing happened just as as I exited the game. Some error dialog poped up, but instead of switching to Windows to view it, I was stuck in the same graphics mode for the game, yet my controls were able to manipulate my desktop. You might want to make a fix for this if you haven't already(I've only installed the original when your first 'Finished' post was made).

Keep up the good work. Hopefully your next release will be a bit more optimized and have improved graphics engine too. Pretty darn good for non-commercial development team. ;)

Firlefanz
06-04-2004, 08:23 AM
Hey Will,

sounds good, thank you :D
And I saw you made it into the online-highscorelist. :wink:

Because of your error: There should be a file 'Errorlog.txt' in the tombclimber directory, what does it say?

And about the grafix: There is a lot of alphablending in the game, maybe I'll make an extra option to switch it off, then it should be much faster.

You could also try to change the detail in the options, maybe it is faster then, too.

Thank you!

Firle

Alimonster
07-04-2004, 11:48 AM
I tried the game - nicely polished (except for the initial settings screen, which had the ok button off the window so I had to scroll?). I especially liked the music.

However, I agree that jumping off ropes might be good, plus I'd prefer the speed to be upped a bit (but that's mainly personal preference because I'm an adrenaline junkie). Oh, and the grunts with the footsteps made the lead character sound like a dirty old man. ;)

The game itself ran fine on my monster system, like you'd expect - the alpha blending seemed to pose no speed problem (but that's on a Radeon 9800 Pro). Nice polish throughout.

Firlefanz
07-04-2004, 11:56 AM
Hi Alimonster,

thanks a lot, good to hear that. That scrolling problem is strange, did not appear on other PCs I've heard off. I'll keep an ear on it. :wink:

That grunts and footsteps are ment to be this way :D

Perhaps I should make an option for gamespeed, I'll think about that.

Thanks for the feedback

Firle

Firlefanz
13-04-2004, 07:08 AM
Hi Alimonster,

that spped thing was such a good idea, in my config tool you can choose 'Faster' or 'Turbo' now, you just need a strong PC. Playing in Turbo is fun, but it is very hard! Thanks for the idea...
:D
Firle