PGD Annual 2006: Last Stage!

[WILL]

Well this is it ladies and gents, the last stage of the 2006 PGD Annual competition! :D

I have seen some hard work go into some of these entries and I am sure that everyone is anxious to complete them in the next few weeks. Good work to all! ;)

Judging on stage 5 has begun. I would hope that everyone gets a chance to resolve any major issues before the May 7th deadline. Judges have been asked to score the entries in order of submission, but if there are any major issues from past stages that have not been resolved I'd ask that those get attended to first.

This is the last kick at the cat so be sure to make it count for the final judging. Other judged categories will be; 'Graphics', 'Music & Sound', 'Game Stability' and of course 'Innovation & Fun'.

Those games that scored highest in Graphics, Sound, Time Management and Innovation & Fun will win one of the 'Best Of' categories! Our new spin on the honourable mention for this year.


Good luck everyone, have fun and happy coding! ;)

[Robert Kosek]

W00T! I can't wait!

And wouldn't you know it, I just happen to be moving this week and unpacking the next...

[Traveler]

Good luck everyone, have fun and happy coding! :wink:

I second this! All the best to all competitors. (and a bit more to myself :twisted: )

[Huehnerschaender]

Yep. I also wish everyone the best. Give all you have! I will do so :lol:

And there is very much work for the last run. I think this will be the hardest stage of all to me.

Happy coding, designing, testing and whatever.

Dirk

[cairnswm]

Only got 4 items left on the requirements list to complete.

Music and Sound - And everyone knows how much I love sound stuff!
Proper ending sequence - somesort of cut sequence should do
Mini Bosses - Just need graphics for
Credits screen

I also want to do some work on making missions - ie sequences of levels that get progressivly harder :)

Nearly done :) - Good luck to everyone - especially me

[aidave]

Looking forward to finishing.
cant wait to have completed games to play!

8)

[Huehnerschaender]

I have a big wish to the judges. If it is possible in any way, could you please try to judge stage 5 fast? This is "the last run" and we have no further chance to fix things you don't like or things that don't work on your computers.

The earlier we get comments, the better are our chances to get bugs fixed or gameplay changed in some kind.

As already mentioned, this is just a request. It would be very nice if we have the chance to give our best in the end.
And it would be sad to loose points in some way just because things are working on our machines and on yours they don't.

Kind regards,
Dirk

[technomage]

I have the day off work today, I will try and do the stage 5 entries ttoday or tomorrow. (Like WILL says I do them in batches :) )

[Huehnerschaender]

Great! Thank you very much.

[WILL]

4 days remain. How is everyone doing so far? Anyone have their final entry ready yet? :)

[Huehnerschaender]

Not really.
My endboss is finished 90%. Then I have to test him out and balance him.

Ending sequence is still missing.

Everything else is ready to go. I hope I have the time to design some new levels with raising difficulty to get the player a feeling of forthcoming and achieving things. But I also have to take a look about the time the judges are willing to play my game, so I think the first levels will be much easier than I would have designed them normally.

How is everyone else doing?

[WILL]

I wouldn't worry about judges having time to play you games. There are no more stages after this one, this is it. The judges will play each one carefully and thuroughly to 1st) find all the completed goals, and 2nd) get an honest opinion about each of the 4 categories that your game will be judged on.

But if you are worrying about going overboard, notice I put a minimum or 3 levels? It's meant to really be a demo of what your full game would be. Akin to a commercial game's demo where you try out the engine and the gameplay to see if you like it. Same deal, only there is no full game. ;)

Yet... there is still the IGF for that lucky winner that wins the top prize. And a chance to take your game/game engine to the big leagues in front of all those publishers, other indie developers and software houses all drooling for the next John Carmack or Erik Chachi. (Sorry, I've been on this Another World/Flashback high for the last few days :lol:)

[Traveler]

How is everyone doing so far?

Its going to be a loong weekend. I really hope there aren't any surprises waiting for me. :)

[(nearly)offtopic rant]
But, if I may answer that from another perspective:
It really saddens me that there are so few of the competitors displaying work, talking about it or commenting on that of others. I haven't been in many competitions yet, it's in fact my fourth. But of all, this one has got to be the most depressing one, in a general spirit kind of way.
I mean, it is that we have a big logo on the frontpage telling there's a competition going on, or else noone would know about it. I posted a screenshot a couple days ago, none but Huehnerschaender cared to comment. And thats only the most recent example. Now I ask you, what is that about? Why is it that of all competitors, only a handfull have posted here during the entire competition?

If there's ever going to be a new PGD competition (and judging by the current I honestly have my doubts about that) I would make it a rule that everyone has to display at least one screenshot per stage.
[/(nearly)offtopic rant]

[aidave]

Our entry is submittable now.
There are a few things to spruce up,
but every major component is finished.

The final Blocked BOSS is so BIG and BAD, you wouldnt believe it if I described it. 8)
So we will release a video of it soon! ;)

I have a question about the final submissions.
Will they be released for all to download at some point?

[WILL]

The final submission from each team will be posted on PGD, yes. :)

[cairnswm]

@traveller

Yeah I agree about the lack of input and feedback - and I am guilty of it too :) - unfortunatly PGD isn;t a site that gives a lot of feedback on any of the members projects - I believe this is because of all the sites I know PGD seems to have the most people actually doing some work on making games instead of just talking about it. Also the average age here is a lot higher than on most other game dev sites - and older = more responsibilities.

My look and feel has not changed since Stage 2 of the contest. All the happenings are in the background - getting AI working etc - so new screen shots would have been meaningless.

I find a contest of 3 months WAY too long. I lost interest in my entry about 2 months ago :( - now I have to force myself to finish it.

[Huehnerschaender]

cairnswm,

you lost interest? That's sad, because I don't think a good game can be made in only one month. The contest surely is very long, but this gives us time to make great things which counldn't be done in one week or even one month.
When I take a look at what other competitors published of (screenshots and videos), I must say that I have never seen a contest of such high quality results.
And personally I am quite happy about the long time we had, because I needed every minute real life left me to work on my entry. And as it seems, this will be my first "completed" game. Plus, I am overwhelmed myself from what I achieved in the last three months all alone. No artist, no modeler, no sound freak, nothing. And what I have atm feels like a real game when played. I never thought I'd been able to do this game alone. Everything works like I "dreamed" of when I started.

The only thing I am sad about is, that over 40 teams started and only a few left in the end. But the teams that stayed the course seem to have very good entrys I am curious about. And thats what counts. We are showing that we as Pascal programmers CAN MAkE games, even games of high quality (compared to other hobby game makers).

[technomage]

Lack of feedback can be a problem here, but it is true allot of people here are working on things rather than talking about them and every moment is needed to work on those projects. That is something I am guilty of.

With regards to the competition, as a Judge I am impressed by all of the entries, but I have purposefully kept my comments limited to the competition pages in an attempt not to favour on entry over another.

We have learnt allot this year with regards to posting comments and feedback from the judges this will only improve things next year (and I hope there will be a competition next year, I might actually enter this time :wink:)

Keep up the good work people, all of you have done remarkable things in the last 3 months :D

[Traveler]

I believe this is because of all the sites I know PGD seems to have the most people actually doing some work on making games instead of just talking about it.

If that is true, how come we dont see any evidence of it. I mean we all know the benefit of showing work to others.
The way I see it is that noone bothers post because they dont expect any feedback anyway. It could be seen as a waste of time. (and yes please do prove to me that I'm wrong :))
I can understand that judges aren't commenting on work other than what has been submitted for deadlines. But surely everyone else has a few moments to spare to write something?


My look and feel has not changed since Stage 2 of the contest. All the happenings are in the background - getting AI working etc - so new screen shots would have been meaningless.


Now there's an argument I can live with. I've had the same thing for quite some time as well. In fact, up until right after the 5th stage my entry hasn't change a whole lot, graphically speaking.


I find a contest of 3 months WAY too long. I lost interest in my entry about 2 months ago :( - now I have to force myself to finish it.

No offence but, I find it odd that you blame the level of interest in your entry to the timeframe of the contest. Three months to work on a game is not a whole lot in general. Especially if you only have a couple evenings and the weekends to work on it.

I'm sorry for being so negative in my last 2 posts, but I kinda hoped this contest would have been a good starting point to increase activity on PGD, but that didn't happen. I really fear the worst for the coming months. With summer being on our doorsteps and the end of the competition this sunday, I'm afraid we're entering an even darker period of PGD.

[cairnswm]

No offence but, I find it odd that you blame the level of interest in your entry to the timeframe of the contest. Three months to work on a game is not a whole lot in general. Especially if you only have a couple evenings and the weekends to work on it.

It is however true. When I work on a game for a month I enjoy all the time spent on it. Games that take more than a month of my time start stealing time from other things I want to do.


The way I see it is that noone bothers post because they dont expect any feedback anyway. It could be seen as a waste of time. (and yes please do prove to me that I'm wrong )


Every single game I develop I post onto PGD. Sometimes I get no feedback but I post each and every one. I realise my games are really really simple. But they are complete finished games being posted - often with source code. Very few people comment on them (Savage and Traveller being stand out exceptions) - but I continue to post. And only once have I recieved a comment on my source and the logic in my code.

I seldom get a chance to download a game. I download when at home with a 56K modem connected at about 40k - anything bigger than 1MB takes forever :( I try and comment on screenshots when available to make up for it.

I dont think your comments were too negative. They were unfortunatly true. As I said in my previous post also - the average age here is higher. A large number of members on this board have kids. Not many other game dev boards can say the same thing. So when I do have time - I'd rather work on my game than download someone elses :( (Sorry for that). And when I dont want to work on my game I'll probably watch a movie with my wife also in preference... And I think this applies to a large number of people here.

The contest has brought more members to the site - while maybe not all active more members is good anyway.

[aidave]

I read this board alot but dont post too much ... one reason is time!

The other factor is this competition ... I want to win, so I didnt post too many shots and videos, because that might give my opponents ideas etc. 8)

[aidave]

here is a video of our final boss in Blocked!
thought you might find this interesting:

Blocked - Big Bad Boss.wmv (http://www.sundrop.ca/files/Blocked-Cloudipede.wmv)
23mb
:spidey:

will post a series of level tutorials too,

cheers!
dave
ps. i got a cold so i sound funny

[Huehnerschaender]

Jesus!!! You guys are crazy ^^

How long does the whole fight take?

Muhahahaha!!!

Great job!

But one question, maybe I am wrong, but it seems that the endboss-fight really needs 20 minutes or so as far as I can see from the video. I mean, you really did a great job!!! But who wants to fight a single enemy that long?

Maybe you should adjust the fight a little in the left time in a way that it is done in maybe 5 mins or so.

Anyway, you have my cheers for this boss!

Greetings,
Dirk

PS: My endboss looks like a flee compared to yours :lol:

[Traveler]

Hahaha that was a great video!
I have still no idea what your game is about, but it looks like its fun.

Btw, I loved the way how you put up that console, typed in some stuff and blew the whole thing up :)

Thanks for sharing.

[aidave]

Thanks for the feedback.
the Cloudipede boss takes quite a while and effort to defeat...
He is the final boss tho!

We decided to divide his health by half,
so he's more fun to blow up!

[Huehnerschaender]

Yes... I finally got all goals done.

I dare to post my (nearly) entry here, and I am aware of outing all my ideas to all the competitors. But I know time is short and in the left 2 days I guess every competitor wants to polish his own entry instead of implementing things from others.

So all I want to know is if you find bugs which I can fix in the left time. I have some things on my ToDo-list and will do all I can to fix all issues I know, but I have family, the weather is fine and two childs want to be entertained at weekend. So I think this will be what I enter for stage 6. I surely will do some polish to leveldesign and maybe some minor changes here and there, but the game itself will stay the same.

I am proud of what I achieved alone in the last 3 months. And I hope everyone else is, too. This was my biggest challenge in game developement and 3 months of hard work are over now. My family suffered from my absence at night (especially my girlfriend :lol: ) and I am at the end of my rope. Sleeping only 4 hours a night is fun, you realize how long a day really is. But I really have to tell you, my real life suffered from this contest. So I don't know if I would do so hard work again "just for fun".

Ok, here we go. I just told you about my experiences because the upload was running and I was a little bored *lol*

But essentially this is what I think about the contest. I loved to be a part of it, I really enjoyed the hard work, I surely will try to take part in the follwoing competitions. But it really scrounged me.

I hope some people like what I have done for this contest:

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

This is about 20MB to download.

4 levels to play.

Cheers and the best wishes to all who submit stage 6 entrys! There are some "opponents" I really got a relationship to, like Traveler who was my "interlocutor" late at night. Hey, you really have to change your avatar! I already see this as a photo of yours!

[aidave]

YI am proud of what I achieved alone in the last 3 months. And I hope everyone else is, too. This was my biggest challenge in game developement and 3 months of hard work are over now. My family suffered from my absence at night (especially my girlfriend :lol: ) and I am at the end of my rope. Sleeping only 4 hours a night is fun, you realize how long a day really is. But I really have to tell you, my real life suffered from this contest. So I don't know if I would do so hard work again "just for fun".

I know exactly how you feel! :wink:
After this weekend, back into party mode for me! 8)

I'm going to try your game tonight.
thx

[Huehnerschaender]

Oh, forgot to post the controls:

AWSD = steer tank (AZERTY supported)
R = fire rocket (needs rocketlaucher and ammo)
SPACE = change gun mode (Air/Ground)
X = start Bombdrone (need to pick up one)
SPACE = drop bomb from drone (when steering drone)
left mousebutton = fire cannon
right mousebutton = fire machine gun
Mousewheel = Zoom in/out
M = ingame Map
ESC = Options ingame / Pause game
P = Screenshot

@aidave
Oh yeah... party would be nice... If the distance wouldn't be that big, I would suggest all competitors making a party together after the contest :lol:

[Traveler]

I am proud of what I achieved alone in the last 3 months. And I hope everyone else is, too. This was my biggest challenge in game developement and 3 months of hard work are over now. My family suffered from my absence at night (especially my girlfriend Laughing ) and I am at the end of my rope. Sleeping only 4 hours a night is fun, you realize how long a day really is. But I really have to tell you, my real life suffered from this contest. So I don't know if I would do so hard work again "just for fun".

I think we can all relate to that. I too have my share of friends who say: "You really shouldn't work so hard, go do something fun. Life is not all about work you know..." :D


Cheers and the best wishes to all who submit stage 6 entrys! There are some "opponents" I really got a relationship to, like Traveler who was my "interlocutor" late at night. Hey, you really have to change your avatar! I already see this as a photo of yours!

Thanks! And also for your PMs. :D
My avatar will probably be changed in a month or so. It was actually a part of the competition logo, but in the end something else was used instead.

Anyway, for those who, like me, need to do crunch time: all the best & good luck!

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Dirk,

Just played Tanx... WOW... its awesome, nice job.

I did get a couple of errors... on the training mission, there was a box of rockets that I picked up, but they stayed there... then everytime I went over them, I got the rocket ammo message, but no fx, didn't see whether or not I got more ammo.

The other, main issue related to my main gun. I fired it at something, but from that point on, whenever I fired, the explosion came from inside my tank and I couldn't damage anything with it.

Apart from those two issues, it was great.

[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?

LOL

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.

http://www.soft-answer.demon.co.uk/pgd2006/rotr_06052006.gif

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

[AthenaOfDelphi]

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.

Hi aidave,

No, I opted to render them using the canvas property of a direct draw surface (I'm using unDelphiX), I get the option then of changing their colours in script without adding additional baggage to the games media.

The only things that are drawn from bitmaps are the tiles themselves... everything else is done with combinations of lines, fills and alpha fills.

[aidave]

HELP!

When I try to upload our entry, I keep getting a message:

"Couldnt upload your file."

[aidave]

I've tried uploading 3 times... each time:

"Couldnt upload your file."

[aidave]

Since we cant upload it, and the competition is over... we posted our file in the Events forum. So judges and everyone can play.

http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3230

thanks for the contest!

im spent :fuzzy:
gonna go relax now :drunk:

[technomage]

Not sure what the problem is, I don't have access to that area. Hopefully WILL or savage will spot the problem.

I think we can safely say no one is going to be kicked off the contest for not uploading :wink:. Just post on this thread that you are ready to go (or start a new thread with a link to you own hosted area as other have done).

Dean

[Huehnerschaender]

My entry was uploading for 30 minutes or so... quite too long, and finally I got the error message, too... :evil:

Now I upload it on my personal webspace where I always uploaded my videos etc.

I don't know how long I will stay awake today, so this will be my entry then.

I will not do any changes to that file from 0:00 tonight.

In my opinion, it is a little sad that no one is online who can take a look at the problem. The entrants for stage 6 worked very hard for over three months. The initiators of the contest are aware of the problem, that nearly on EVERY stage there were questions or problems uploading the entrys. I wonder why they are not here, even if just to take a look if everything is working well. This is a thing PGD staff should take a look at for further contests... I found myself lost sometimes, left alone with the problems I was not responsible for. In this case, technomage as a judge gives me some "secure feeling" of using my webspace, but in fact this is against the rules and I have a bad feeling with it.

[savage]

Please see my post on the Stage 6 Feedback thread (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3229&highlight=).

[WILL]

So... can anyone upload yet? Has anyone tried since Dom 'fixed' the issue...???

I've only read 1 confirmation so far...

[WILL]

Alright here's what we're gonna do. I realize that alot of people are probably a bit miffed today. So because of your little boo-boo I'm gonna go into the DB right now and we're gonna give you all 24hrs more to submit you entries.

savage has apparently fixed the 20MB limit problem. (this is not handled by the scripts, but the server configuration it's self) You may not upload to a limit of 40MB from what I read of his efforts.

If you already submitted, resubmit with all the goodies that you originally wanted. This is our mistake and you should not pay for it.


I realize that uploading has been a big pain in the butt each stage deadline, but half of that was out of our control and we always came up with a (--I think--) fair solution.


So one more kick at the can guys(and ladies... ;))! But PLEASE give us a CONFORMATION that you have successfully uploaded or have NOT successfuly uploaded your desired file under 40MB. We need to know to make sure it's resolved.

[michalis]

Talk to me about frenzy coding like a madman. During the last week I was essentially sitting all day long, then the night, then the next day etc. and trying to finish everything that I wanted. Such madness became more-or-less standard for me before each competition stage. I *did* work on the game all the time, but still when the deadline of each stage came near I always realized that I spent most of the time on *polishing things done for the previous stage* instead of pushing things for the next stage. Well, for this final stage I think that I achieved the peak of my frenzy-coding ability. I don't *believe* that I'm able to code faster.

I even stopped reading this thread "PGD Annual 2006: Last Stage!" after around Friday.. I just decided that with such competition I can't spend any more time on reading the forum :) BTW "Blocked" movie was looking great, I'll surely check the game out when I'll find time next week. Same goes to Huehnerschaender.

Believe it not, I was ready to submit final entry literally an hour before the deadline. At first I wanted to freeze the code for the weekend, then just for Sunday, then just for a few hours, then for *two* hours... finally I finished all (not really all, but *essentials*) and *barely* tested an hour before the deadline. And by *barely* I mean literally only two runs over the game under Windows, after a lot of recent code being tested only under Linux. Although this is OpenGL and OpenAL and FreePascal and everything is (in theory) perfectly portable, but no I still don't trust that my game will not crash under Windows if it doesn't crash under Linux. (well, the other way around is true as well. So at least *this* time I didn't really mean to bash Windows. :)

Anyway, it was a nice surprise to see on the upload page that I actually have additional 24 hours... With so much bonus time maybe I could even make yet another game ? :) But let me have some sleep first :)

Anyway, what I wrote above is probably not really understandable, because I'm writing this after 14 hours of coding. So here's a summary: This contest was a great fun, and thank you all for this. And I'm quite proud of what I achieved, and for sure it will be continued after competition.

I uploaded 0.6.0 version of my entry to PGD (33 MB and uploaded without problems --- so I guess that the recent issue is solved now). I will probably use another 24 hours only for some testing and fixes, so I will probably upload another version tomorrow, for PGD and on my webpage. I will post some announcement here then.

[Imp5]

Oh! My god!
I’ve lost my team password =(
So, new team has been created. (Imp7 instead of Imp5)

[Huehnerschaender]

Oh! My god!
I’ve lost my team password =(


ROFL!!!!!! :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[Huehnerschaender]

WILL:

Hope you don't take me wrong! I don't wanted to blame someone personal!

I was a little miffed, yes. But that results from working too much, trying to make everything perfect, and then after one very very hard week not being able to submit what I have done and finding no one I could ask because I was the only registered user in the forum most of the time.

Do you understand?

Now I got some sleep and I slept well, knowing that there is no more deadline. No more frightening EMail -> Hey I found a little bug! -> which acutally was little thing, but needed hours to fix :lol:

Just want to say that if I said something, someone personally was annoyed by, I excuse myself here as kindly as I can.

I am not the kind of guy that blames other persons for anything.


Just a question. My level editor didn't change much since stage 5. There are only some additional "enemys" which can be placed on the scene. So is it necessary to upload my whole entry again just to include the level editor which is not affected from stage goals? I would rather do some bugfixing to it and post it later on seperately on the forums. It actually uses same graphics for different enemys due to lack of time and some other issues still exist.

[aidave]

ahhhhhhhh
its finally over

can relax and create tunes :thelion:
hopefully our entry gets bonus points for using our own music
*cross fingz*

Thanks for the running the contest PGD!
without it, i doubt we would have been spurred to make the game we did.
we're very happy with what we've accomplished.

+~~

dave k

[Zenophran]

I must echo aidave's sentiments, thanks for running the competition.

Our team has been talking about making a game for a couple of years ( or more :-) and thanks to this, we've finally got something off the ground.

I wish everyone involved well. Now this is all over and I've got time to think, I'll try to be a little more active in the forums.

Z

[WILL]

Everyone should read the latest news post. ;)