Snooker & Pool is released

[cleogames]

We have finally finished writing our first game, Snooker&Pool. It can be found at our website www.cleogames.com. The game was written in Delphi using the glScene library for the graphics and alphaskins for the GUI.

Snooker&Pool is a billiards game for Windows with rules for english pool, US pool and snooker. Play can be against the computer or across a LAN or the internet. The basic download is free to play and swap although we do ask that people register to support CleoGames. This will allow access to our server so people across the internet can be played easily.

We loved using Delphi. It made the networked aspect of the game very easy and gives us a single exe without having to support any DLLs.

We hope you enjoy the game.

Matt.

[tanffn]

Congratulations and welcome to PGD forum :)

I haven’t tried your game yet but the screenshots look very nice.

[WILL]

Welcome to PGD! :)

Game looks very eligant. Nice clean work. Love the avatar feature, creative!

You guys should create your own Icon though... why not use the cat on your index page? ;)

[savage]

Well done on completing the game. So what other things will you be working on now?

Btw, I see you guys are on GameTrove already.

[czar]

Could I suggest you create an icon for your product so that the std delphi 7 icon is not visible.

[Traveler]

I had the opportunity to play your game today.
It's really quite nice! I actually thought AI was a bit too easy though. It took me about 30 mins to beat all levels. I also thought the friction was just a bit too high, compared to the real thing. However, once you take that into account, it plays pretty well.

Something you should really consider is a fullscreen option. I found it sometimes hard to see which balls were mine. Another thing I noticed is that once you place the cue stick, you can't undo that to place it somewhere else.

In all, its a nice game :)

[cleogames]

Hello again. Thankyou for your comments.

Releasing the cue. Thats a good point. It is (was) possible to release the cue by leaving the top touching the cue ball. But it wasnt obvious. So I've now put in a taget marker which changes colour depending.

Challenge. Gosh, you're much better than me. I've never managed to beat snooker beyond level 4. I was thinking its too hard! If you do want a challenge, give a copy to a person and play them. Its the networking that I'm most proud of.

Icon. Now this is where I'm worried. All the machines I've installed onto show the cat icon, the same as the installer. I've applied an icon ripper, and it doesn't show a Delphi icon in the exe. In fact it was written in Delphi 6, so if the default icon is different between 6 and 7 then that would explain a few things. Can you try downloading again please and see if it is different?

Thankyou very much,

Matt.

[cleogames]

Oh, for full screen, just maximise the window.

Friction. You might be right about the physics. However its a bit late to change it now. It would cause problems if one person has a game with low friction and the other higher.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Hi Matt,

Great game, excellent office time eater :-)

I do have a couple of complaints/suggestions though... I agree with the comments about friction. The pool games are excellent, but when you switch to snooker, because of the table dimensions (I think) some of the balls (pink, reds and black mainly) just don't seem to be in the right space.

I have also spotted a couple of issues with the game logic for the snooker. unless I'm much mistaken, during normal match play snooker, after you have potted the last red, you go for a colour, then you move onto he ordered colour clearup. The fact that after the last red you drop straight onto the yellow has cost me a couple of games. The second issue is that of ball placement when their spots are covered. On several occasions I have had the black or pink placed on the blue spot, whilst the blue ball was still there. I'm also not sure that it is a foul in snooker if you pot more than 1 red ball at the same time. Theres also the issue of touching ball and what to do when a foul is committed, because obviously, under certain conditions (a miss I believe), the player who made the foul can be made to take the shot again. You may already be aware of these, but just in case.

My only other concern is that the AI player just doesn't seem to get phased if you like. Once you're up into the high levels it very rarely makes a mistake. Now in pool, thats not such an issue because at most you have to sit there and watch it clear up in 8 shots, but in snooker, if its totally on it, then at the worst case, you're sat there for say 37 shots which can be a bit boring, so it could do with making the odd mistake every now and again.

I may have found a bug whilst playing snooker, but after my initial... thats definitely a bug... I'm no longer convinced. It could be I simply wasn't paying attention, so I'm going to play some more (don't I have work to do????) and see if there really is a problem or not.

Despite these issues (which are pretty minor really, although I suspect implementing some of the finer points of snooker rules would be a nightmare), as I say, its a great little office time eater. Nice job :-)

Just one other suggestion.... could you provide players the option of customising the rules for pool, because I've never played it where you have to hit a cushion or pot a ball and that cost me some games too.