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Huehnerschaender
18-03-2005, 07:45 AM
Hello people,

since I haven't had the time to finish my little game for the dogfight compo, I am now in a decision if I make this game complete and build some kind of Gauntlet-style game out of it. The ones who know Gauntlet from good old C64 know what I am talking about. It was one of my favourite games and I wasted half of my youth with it :lol:

So what I wanted to do here is to show you what I have at the moment and get an general opinion if I should use this to make a complete game or if most of you think I should start from scratch again.

So here is the link to get a "playable" version without enemys:

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

Here some short instructions:

Arrows - move
shift - run (keep your endurance in mind)
space - pickup
a - throw weapon
s - cast spell
y - use item (potion or eye)

in menu use arrow keys to go up/down and to select character.
press enter to access Options (not much in there yet)
press enter to start lan server or join a game - this is only available when server is active and configured right (see below)

d - die

There are many issues in this because its not ready yet. If you have two computers, you can take a look at multiplayer game. Just configure the Server-IP in warnrog.ini (on the computer which shall act as client) and start the lan server on the computer with that IP. In menu there should appear something like "Server found at: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" and then you can choose to join a game.

Ok, I would be very pleased if some people play araound with it and tell me what they think about it.

Greetings,
Dirk

Forgot to mention required system specs:

3D-Card
DirectX 9.0c installed
Soundcard installed properly

A laptop Pentium 4 1.0 Ghz with GeForce 2 Go! ran it smooth full VSync'd FPS.

Traveler
18-03-2005, 08:54 AM
Looks like a pretty solid base to me for a Gauntlet like game. There's definitely no need to restart it all. (unless of course your code is a complete mess and you're already getting lost (I haven't seen it so I can't comment on that myself))

It's been years since I played Gauntlet (although not on a C64, but on a 8088), but from what I can remember, you could play this with 4 players at the time and you had to fight many hordes of enemies.

For that to be possible in your version, especially the last part about the hordes, I would cut down the size of every sprite in half (at least). The advantages are quite numerous, not only does your game take less space on my HD it also allow you to create smoother animations.

At the moment I have little more to say about it. Like I said IMO its a good start. It ran great on my pc although I expected no less with my specs. (3ghz, 1mb ram, 6800GT gfx card)

Huehnerschaender
18-03-2005, 09:34 AM
unless of course your code is a complete mess and you're already getting lost (I haven't seen it so I can't comment on that myself)

No I'm not lost. I have to rewrite some parts. I did some things in a real hurry because of the deadline, but this is not too much.


you could play this with 4 players at the time and you had to fight many hordes of enemies.

I was thinking about 2 player game only. I don't think that more than 2 players are coming together to play my game :lol: But if so, it should be no problem to update 4 player gaming when 2 player gaming is done and working.


For that to be possible in your version, especially the last part about the hordes, I would cut down the size of every sprite in half (at least). The advantages are quite numerous, not only does your game take less space on my HD it also allow you to create smoother animations.

Concerning smoother animations: I have cut down animations to half amount of frames because of size limit of the dogfight compo. The animations were more than smooth in the beginning :lol: 30 frames per motion. But this was meant to be only for 1 vs 1 gaming, so you are right. If there are hordes of enemys, I have to size characters down. Otherwise it will become much too hard to get an overview of the current situation in the game.


At the moment I have little more to say about it. Like I said IMO its a good start. It ran great on my pc although I expected no less with my specs. (3ghz, 1mb ram, 6800GT gfx card)#

Thats good to know :lol: I expected nothing else on such a system.
But maybe you should upgrade your RAM a little... 1 MB is quite low for your system :lol:

I have nearly the same except the graphics card... no nVidia card, but ATI X800 Pro.

Thank you very much for your comments!

Greetings,
Dirk

Traveler
18-03-2005, 09:41 AM
1 MB is quite low for your system

Oops :oops:
That should've been 1Gb,... but I guess you already knew :wink:

Huehnerschaender
18-03-2005, 10:10 AM
sure :lol:

savage
18-03-2005, 10:48 AM
Hi Dirk,
What can I say, A very impressive start! It really is a pity that you could not get it finished in time for the competition.

Assuming your code base is relatively clean and well structured, I think the engine has a lot of potential. It runs very smoothly on my laptop and main desktop machine.

I hope I can suggest some slight usability changes ( of course it is up to you whether you think they are good ideas or not ).
1. Use *standard* FPS keys for player movement ( W A S D ).
2. Mouse for aiming. This allows for the player to be running/moving in one direction while firing over his shoulder. Of course you will need to change your model slightly so that the upper torso moves independently to the the legs.
3. Use left mouse click for throwing and for close combat ( aka slashing ) it should be left click+left ctrl key.
4. right click casts the spell
5. q or e to use and item (potion or eye)
6. Space and Shift keys remain the same.
7. Any chance that the demo will be ported to Linux and MacOS X via FreePascal if you switch from DirectX to OpenGL?

As I said, your demo is a great start, I look forward to seeing it progress and evenually getting a commercial release :D.

Huehnerschaender
18-03-2005, 11:36 AM
Hi savage,

thank you very much for this positive reply.

I was thinking about ALL of your points before, so it's good to know that I am not alone with this :lol:
The steering of the character was only implemented while programming without taking care of playability. I would have redesigned it anyway.

The independence of body and legs is a very important thing I was thinking about 2 weeks ago. This would make gameplay more thrilling and smooth the motion of the game. At the moment the character has to stop when firing. But because of lack of time I let it this way for the compo, but was thinking about changing it later on. I already started doing some character animations for only the legs and only the body. Looks quite nice in a first test when laying them above each other.

The only thing I unfortunately will not be able to do is porting it to Linux. I use Asphyre for the hardware-acceleration and since this is only available for DirectX I am stuck with this.

Your machine specs are the ones you posted in the judges specs?
This is a really important point for me to know, because I don't want to make a game which only runs on high-end-machines.


I look forward to seeing it progress and evenually getting a commercial release

Oh, you are very optimistic :lol:
Thanks for your trust :wink:

Greetings,
Dirk

savage
18-03-2005, 12:34 PM
Your machine specs are the ones you posted in the judges specs?

Yes it is.

I forgot to add one more item to my list of suggestions.

8. It would be great if the players could swim in the river, therefore they could hide under the bridge and wait for a player to walk over the bridge and then ambush them. Maybe with some dripping water particles when they step out of the river :).

Huehnerschaender
18-03-2005, 01:03 PM
Hehe, good idea :lol:

Swimming is always a good thing :wink: I will think about how I can bring this into the game, since the game will of course have another gameplay, because what you said is only useful for deathmatch... or maybe if AI-enemys are patroulling over the bridge...

But I guess I will surely implement some kind of seas into the game and it would be nice if the characters could swim through them.
I keep this in mind!

Greetings,
Dirk

savage
18-03-2005, 07:25 PM
The enemies could also use the under the bridge technique for ambushing :)

Huehnerschaender
18-03-2005, 07:48 PM
Yep, right!

And in addition to this, they could ambush from under the trees. The bird-view is excellent for such ambush-techniques...

savage
25-03-2005, 09:00 PM
So how's it all going? I hope your are still motivated and still working on the game :).

AV alert : If you hold down H until you run out of health, the demo crashes and hangs. Needs the TaskManager to kill it.

Huehnerschaender
26-03-2005, 10:39 AM
Hi

I am just playing around with the player-class and implemented the independend movement of torso and legs. Works quite good I think.

I will upload a little demo of the "improved movement" without any other thinks like surroundings, items etc.

Why? Because then you can tell me if it's ok the way I am doing :lol:

If so, I will implement the movement changes to the War 'n Rog source.

Be patient... I need one or two more days to do the rest of the graphics...

I also made changes to the players graphics. Now the animation for each movement fits in a 256*256 Texture. So I get 16 frames per movement (walk, run, throw, etc.) Thats enough for a character size of 64*64 to look smooth. This makes things more easy to control.

Ok, thats it for now... I am on it, but will fly to Miami for 10 days next week. So there will be a little delay with further improvements, cause I have to do some work for another project I need in the USA.

Greetings,
Dirk

Huehnerschaender
26-03-2005, 10:44 AM
@savage:

Good to know... the "h" key will be deleted anyway. It was just for testing the health bar display. I think I forgot something like

health := max(0,health);

But thanks for the info.


Yes, I am still motivated, but the problem is always the same....

Job, Kids, girlfriend, other projects etc... it's a pitty that one is not able to do what he wants (in this case me!) :)

Oh and there is another big factor which kills my spare time.... the factor is called world of warcraft :lol:

Greetings,

Dirk

savage
21-04-2005, 10:04 PM
Thought you might gain some inspiration from this game. It is a Playstaion Portable game called Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade. Got to this page...
http://www.us.playstation.com/games.aspx?id=ULUS-10003
and click on the "Media for this game" link and watch the movies.

JSoftware
22-04-2005, 11:41 AM
that looks just f-in amazing!

savage
23-04-2005, 07:56 PM
Here's another game which is more like a real-time strategy D&D game that is really cool. Just played the Single player demo. It's claimed features are...


* Control any of three different armies: The Empire (knights, wizards, elves), The Beast (ogres, trolls, lizardmen), and The Fallen (dark elves, fallen knights and creatures of the deep).
* Wage war on two fronts simultaneously ?¢_" above and below the surface ?¢_" with a unique dual layered map system.
* Stunning 3D visuals bring the characters and environments to life.
* Immerse yourself in a fully interactive world: Blow up bridges, create avalanches to take out your enemies, cause subterranean lava flows to erupt aboveground, and dig tunnels from the surface into the caverns below.
* Engage the enemy with an army of up to 200 units for massive real time battles.
* Change the landscape of both the surface and underground by deploying units, such as Miners, and casting spells, such as Earthquake and Volcano.
* Single-player includes a three part campaign and skirmish mode to battle computer-controlled players.
* Go online and play in one of four multiplayer modes: Melee, King of the Hill, Mission, and Free-for-all.

But all of these are not in the Single Player demo. Anyway the game is called Armies of Exigo (http://www.eagames.com/official/armiesofexigo/armiesofexigo/us/home.jsp)

The interesting thing is that even though this game is 3D, it really is awaste of CPU. This game would sell just as well if it was 2D and there would be more people buying it cause it would require a lower spec machine. Anyway, I really hope these couple of posts inspire you to keep working on your game. I'm sure yours can be alot better.

savage
17-05-2005, 11:30 AM
Dirk, is everything ok? You seem to have disappeared.

Huehnerschaender
24-10-2005, 10:09 AM
Hi there,

I just wanted to tell you all that I am still alive :shock:

I had several things to do in the past, was kinda busy, so I didn't had any time to go on with my Delphi-Projects and so, the War'n Rog Project stopped too.

But as Sascha already said, the rainy days are coming, and I guess that I am coming back to screen now :wink:

What I want to mention is, that the War'n Rog Project was developed with Asphyre (not Pro). At the moment I am waiting for Asphyre Extreme to get new possibilities to bring features into the game. This means, I am not coding on it, since Asphyre Extreme will not be backward compatible. I have some ideas for the game which really need 3D-Support and so I am very excited of the first release of Asphyre Extreme.

Lifepower and his crew do a great job out there and I hardly can wait to get my Asphyre Extreme.

Cheers,
Dirk

savage
24-10-2005, 08:24 PM
WoW, Great to hear that everything is ok. Had me worried.

Huehnerschaender
25-10-2005, 08:49 AM
Don't worry about me savage, as you know, bad people live long :lol:

LP
25-10-2005, 02:01 PM
Huehnerschaender, actually I think the new version *will be* backward compatible to some degree. In fact, it comes with few tools to convert old VTDb to new format, for instance :)

There is a catch though: for some reason, Delphi *extremely hates* opening projects using Asphyre Pro, when you have Asphyre eXtreme installed. It says "Stream read error" and fails to load DFM file (so you have to edit it manually and remove all properties from any Asphyre components).

It may take a while to finish Asphyre eXtreme, since I'm re-writing GUI engine (AsphyreGUI) now and also writing documentation. When I got to write documentation, I realized *how many components* Asphyre has (21 in total). Only 5 are documented so far (and the simplest ones) :?

Huehnerschaender
26-10-2005, 11:21 AM
Thats good news Lifepower.
I always loved your work, but what I missed was the documentation in all versions of Asphyre. So I am very glad to hear, that you will release Asphyre extreme with a complete documentation.
I can hardly wait to experiment with the new features and I think you provide a great environment for anyone who wants to make games with Delphi.

I think the War'n Rog project will be the first thing I try to get running with Asphyre extreme when it comes out. But since then I don't want to spend too much time with it (convert from Asphyre to Pro), because I don't really know how much effort will be necessary to convert it once more (from Pro to Extreme).

By the way, will there be any support for animations of characters in extreme version (like Quake-Models or something)? All I can see in the Pro version is support fA¼r static meshes, or am I wrong?

Greetings,

Dirk

PS: It's a good feeling to be back in this forum, I missed all the information and discussions with you guys.

LP
27-10-2005, 01:45 AM
By the way, will there be any support for animations of characters in extreme version (like Quake-Models or something)? All I can see in the Pro version is support fA¼r static meshes, or am I wrong?
No, you're completely right. The lack of animation support was simply because we had no knowledge on how to extract such information from 3D model file format.
As much as I wanted to improve 3D support in Asphyre eXtreme package, the amount of work seemed too extensive (since Soulhab left the team, I'm the only programmer left) and not just to code but also to document. Although I can't say for sure, it's most likely that 3D support will remain the same as in Asphyre Pro.

savage
16-11-2005, 10:25 AM
Are we there yet? Now that the new version is out :).

Huehnerschaender
19-11-2005, 07:22 PM
Hi Savage,

yes indeed. We got Asphyre eXtreme and I am very happy about this. I spent the last few days in a Gamdev contest. You can see the result in this thread (Babyrace). Even if I did not use any 3D components in this little "game", my intention was to become familiar with the new Asphyre release. Lifepower did a great job again.

When I am familiar with the coding of 3D in Apshyre, I will start to convert War'nRog to Asphyre eXtreme version as it is.

Next step will be to build in 3D surroundings, like trees, statues, buildings etc. As Asphyre does not support 3D animations, I have to let the player "sprites" 2D as they are. But I think the visual appearance will strongly improve of the 3D elements.

I cannot say anything about when I will start or finish, cause I don't know how much time I will have in the near future. Childs, job, girlfriend, all this needs time, too....

I'll keep you updated when there is something new to tell 8)

Greetings,
Dirk

savage
05-01-2006, 10:14 PM
Hi Dirk,
will you be taking part in this year's competition?

Huehnerschaender
02-02-2006, 01:36 PM
Hi Savage,

I just recognized the competition, had much to do at office, my job kills me atm. I think it's too late for me to register, isn't it? All the people have done great things already and I don't think I can get into the "Stage plan" anymore. I don't believe that I can achieve the first goals until 11th of February. Was there any deadline for register?

Greetings,
Dirk

savage
02-02-2006, 01:54 PM
There is no deadline to register, as far as I am aware. Some people are not going for any deadlines and are just trying to have something finished for the end of the competition. It's up to you.

Huehnerschaender
02-02-2006, 05:09 PM
Hi savage,

I registered today, just to be sure I have something to do in my sparetime the next weeks :-)

Maybe I will get something playable at the end of the contest, let's see.

I asked about a deadline, because the circumstance, that there are several "stages" bind on deadlines made me think that also the registration is bind to a deadline, because someone who enters late has no chance to get the score for the first stages.

I already have a concept in my head. Maybe I can bring out something useful the next days.

Greetings,
Dirk

I start working now :twisted: