Zenith - a development inspired by The Sentinel (Crammond)

[compsci]

...I think you should add a tutorial mode of some kind.

It has a fairly basic tutorial in the form of a hints box that delivers messages. You're given the first actions: "Hint: drag the mouse to look around, [B] creates a boulder at the cursor, [R] creates a robot, [A] absorbs objects for energy."

Thereafter, hints are given when you perform actions, e.g. on creating a boulder, you are told what you can do with it.



A random hint is shown at the start of every landscape. Press [F1] for another random hint at any time.

When you're an experienced player, you can turn off hints with [F4].

[tanffn]

But from those messages the user don’t know his final objective and from what to be aware of.
Maybe you can prerecord a game and play it with some commentary, that will instantly show the principals of the game

[compsci]

I see what you're getting at now: make it playable without having the player read anything that looks like instructions!
I'll see if some captioned self-playing games are viable - it'll take a lot of code.

[compsci]

v0.9.9. Now with 3D sound (which was the most common feature requested). User-controllable game tweaks, some new animations, and other enhancements.

Zenith home page

I'm using OpenAL (no freeware or commercial restrictions). I'm investigating a possible instability in the sound API (game freeze and processor hog at high priority, when starting to play a buffered sound?) - I've only experienced it once. News/support on OpenAL for pascal/Delphi is hard to find.

Next: Adaptive EAX environments, a more complete sound palette, and music (in-game adaptive mood music and effects, and out-of-game music).

Soon after: Re-factoring parts of the game to enable rolling demos and tutorials, optional graphics textures etc for those who want more than the lit polygon look.

[compsci]

Small tweaks are improving this game. However, I've had some users report application errors on Vista and XP SP2. No clues as yet, as I can't reproduce the bug on four different machines myself.

Anyone have any knowledge of OpenAL's reliability, or workarounds with Delphi 6? I've ensured that all capabilities are tested, that sound is not used when it can not be initialized, and where it is used, it's safely wrapped with exception handlers. Problem is, I think it's crashing in the OpenAL module.

This post is relevant to Zenith 0.9.9.r3, with the current test being 0.9.9.r5.

[compsci]

Some users experienced 'Unexpected Exception' errors as the game started. Thankfully, this has been resolved without changing any of the code.

Downloading the latest OpenAL support from Creative lets people play the game without errors.

http://developer.creative.com/articl...&top=38&aid=46