2006 PGD Annual: Stage 5 feedback

[michalis]

First of all, thanks for testing my game ! Now, to address the issues (BTW should we move this to some other topic on this forum?):

But then, I started the game. I waited 10 minutes (!) before I had to turn off the computer by hardware power switch (nothing else was possible, no task manager, nothing).

The after the reboot, I gave it a second try, because I activated shadows and you display a warning when doing this. So I started the game with disabled shadows.

The loading sequence took 5 minutes(!) loading creatures.

Then the game appeared. It was impossible to steer for me. I moved the mouse one millimeter, which was enough to look from sky onto the ground. Much too sensitive mouselook as it seems. After I died without seeing something I pressed escape as mentioned on the screen. Screen turned black and computer rebooted!

My game shouldn't be even able to block your task manager, or reboot your computer. Two things come to mind: 1. You have 256 MB memory, while the game practically requires 512 MB (currently loaded game takes up about 260 MB, summing it up with other system processes means that you definitely need > 256 MB). This can explain such ridiculous long loading times. 2. ATI Radeon-specific problems. More on this later.

As for screen going black and rebooting Windows, I guess that I can blame only Windows and ATI drivers for performing poorly on an overloaded system. But in any case you wouldn't be able to play anyway --- you would get awfully low FPS.

On my current system, the whole loading time is 16 seconds. Most of these as spend within "Loading creatures". 16 seconds is still long, but it's done only once per running the game. So if you do "New Game", then die, then do "New Game" again, "Loading creatures" will not be triggered again and the game will load instantly --- you noticed it in later post.

Mouse controls were very fast for me as well. But I was able to correct it with the mouse control options in the menu. Something odd there as every changable option is well above 1.0 at first, but as soon as you change it, it becomes a value between 0.1 and 1.0.

By default "Mouse horizontal sensitivity" and "Mouse vertical sensitivity" should be 0.09, and their allowed range is between 0.01 and 3.0. If you initially had something bigger (you can test it by deleting castle.conf file and starting the game again) then this explains why mouse control was too fast initially, and this means that I have some problem in loading values from config file.

It appears as if nothing is happening when you hit it, but eventually it died anyway. A sound or some kind or a visible indication that you've hit it (bloodstains?) might help.

Yes, blood is planned. I can only hope that I manage to implement it within the time.

I am trying out the game on my laptop now. All I can say at the moment is, that again I am stuck on the loading screen for 5 minutes now. Still waiting and drinking coffee ^^

What are you doing while loading Michalis? What takes so long to laod?

btw. The laptop also has an ATI video card (Radeon 9000 mobility). Maybe there is a problem with ATI cards?

It seems so... Traveler's screenshots comparing radeon and geforce confirm this. And since your laptop has 512 MB memory, the memory can't be the problem this time. That's alarming --- I will have to find somewhere some computer with ATI Radeon card and test my game there. Until now I tested it only on various nVidia cards --- that's what I have and all my friends have... But the game should be absolutely portable to every OpenGL implementation, it doesn't even use too many OpenGL extensions, and none of them are nVidia-specific.

What I'm doing while loading ? The most (time- and memory-) consuming process there is "Loading creatures" when creature's animations are prepared. This means loading VRML files, creating intermediate animation frames by interpolating between two models, and then creating a display list for each animation frame. The last part, "creating a display list for each animation frame", is the place where your graphic card comes to play, and I guess that there is some problem.

Maybe ATI Radeon is not able to create too many display list ? That's the only explanation that comes to my mind. I uploaded 0.5.6 version on http://www.camelot.homedns.org/~michalis/castle.php, it checks all glGenLists results (something that I often forgot to do) and if the OpenGL can't allocate more display lists, you should see error box like "Exception EOpenGLNoMoreDisplayLists : No more OpenGL display lists available ....". If I can ask you to spend more time testing my entry,
1. could you download and try this new version, 0.5.6 ?
2. The second thing: 0.5.6 allows you to change "Creature animation smoothness", this should reduce "Loading creatures" time and the amount of display lists needed. Can you check if reducing this to minimum helps ?

I went upstairs and was "caught" in the fog, seeing nothing. I just tried to run further into it (about 10 seconds), seeing nothing and suddenly the level was finished.

You mean the "black fog" inside the gate ? Once you enter it, you should be transferred to the next level. The fact that game seemingly stopped there for 10 seconds could be caused by the same problems with Radeon.

The enemys in the game seem to be too easy. I never died once I managed the controls.

Things should get more difficult in the next levels. If time will allow I'll try to make the first levels also more difficult.

the enemys seem a little "robotic", but if you made them yourself this is ok. I know how hard it is to bring realistic motion into models.

Alien and werewolf models were downloaded from internet but I animated them myself. Yeah, I'm not entirely satisfied with it either...

Maybe some texture would be nice! Or is it another problem of my videocards that they are untextured (the ghosts were textured!)?

Hmm, ghost is not textured actually Alien and werewolf are also not textured. My engine allows me to texture them freely, but I just couldn't texture alien and werewolf right. New creatures on next levels should be textured.

I did not need the flying scrolls. What are they for?

You don't need them in the first 2 levels. But you can play with them and see how flying works, that's their sole purpose

I've added a screenshot with some artifacts as well.

This clearly shows problems with blending and alpha-testing of 2D controls on Radeon. Hmmm..

Something else I noticed is that changed controls are not loaded properly again when restarting the game. I think you are converting values incorrectly.

Once you change the keys assignment, it should stay that way. They are saved in config file. Can you describe exactly which control you changed, from/to what value, and how was it incorrect ? If the controls are not properly restored after game restart, then I could also use the copy of your castle.conf file.

Summing it up, great thanks guys for putting work into testing my entry. And if you have time, I would appreciate testing 0.5.6 version, and playing with "Creature animation smoothness" --- maybe this will explain some problems with Radeon. (I say "if you have time", since I understand that you have your own game entries and time is running short for all of us . Once again, many thanks. I'll try to contact my friends today, maybe someone wil be able to let me test it on Radeon. Update: I just got one report that on Linux with Radeon it works OK. No Windows, though.