GUNS - Reloaded

[jasonf]

I took it a little easy last night, too manu 2:30 am coding nights followed by 9:00am work in the morning can really take it out of a person..

So instead I worked on some graphics for a container ship. This is for an ocean based level. On this level, the only safe platforms are the container ships themselves. Your tanks will die if they go into the ocean so it's important to keep at least one container ship afloat... oh yes.. you'll be able to sink them. They'll basically behave like a normal scene object, you can blow holes in them etc.. however, they will be made from different layers and have objects which can be destroyed built into them.. cranes, crates. (destroying these won't affect the integrity of the ship) If the hull takes too much damage, it'll start to sink... incurring massive civilian penalties for the team responsible. Oh, and there'll be sailors to kill.

I'm also going to allow more than 2 teams per level.. in fact, on later levels, all 5 teams will compete against one another.

[jasonf]

More progress this week.

A few minor bug fixes, some tweaking here and there.
The biggest success has been the MacOSX build. After a lot of searching, tweaking and shouting, (mostly shouting), We've got a MacOSX build using Free Pascal. We've got some performance issues to iron out, FPC appears to create slower code than Delphi but I'm confident that we'll be able to get something close to the Delphi compiled performance with some tweaking. It's really cool seeing something written for a completely different platform running on a Mac. Hail Jedi-SDL, Hail FPC.

I've made a start on the Tactics screen. It's a very simple screen where you choose which Wave your guy is on and which entry protocol to use. I'll post a screenshot soon.

The rules for waves will be...

Wave1 occurrs when the mission starts. The first wave is sent to the Home Location. Fixed for each map.

Once Wave1 has appeared in the map, an icon is displayed saying that new next wave is ready to use.
The player moves the camera to the place where Wave2 should appear and presses "W"

Wave2 appears at the top of the mission at the center of the screenX and falls depending on the Entry protocol (If you're over water and you choose a fast entry, there's a good chance that your newly requested wave will just fall right into the water and die.. so you have to be careful)
An Icon appears to say Wave3 is ready....

and so on...

If there are no tanks assigned to a wave, then that wave will skip proceeding to the next wave. You won't have to press "W" a bunch of times.

Once all waves have been used, the icon dissappears.

Each Icon will be different to show the Wave number.


I am unsure what to do If your tanks in play are destroyed and you have tanks in waves which have not yet been called.

Either I can put up a 5 second countdown so that the player can move the screen to the position where they want the next wave to come from (pressing "W" cancels the countdown) once the countdown expires or has been cancelled, the next wave is called to the current location.

Or, I can immediately call the wave to the 1st wave's position (the Home location)

Or, I can immediately call the wave to the Last Selected Tanks position.

Or, The player is defeated. This is a little harsh though I think.


I think this will help to get around the "Too many tanks on screen" issue and add an element of stratergy to the game.


Comments, Suggestions?

[savage]

Re : compiling on MacOS X. Here is a message from Jonas Maebe, who I think worked on the MacOS X port...

Make sure they are using register variables when compiling a release
build (-O1r on 2.0.4, -O2 on 2.1.1), as that makes a huge difference
on PPC (less so on x86, since it barely has any registers in the
first place).

I asked some questions and posted a link to the Guns screen shot on the MacPascal list ( mac-pascal@listman.sonic.net ), so you may want to send a message to that list if you have any more questions.

Btw, did you guys compile it using Lazarus or via the command line?

[jasonf]

OK Progress report time again.. It's been a little while

Things have been moving along at a fair pace, but it's been one of those "Not much to see" times.. lots of work with seemingly little or no reward. It's times like these where a lot of people (myself included) give up feeling like no amount of work is making a dent in the seemingly endless amount of work remaining. Just got to keep it all in my head and not forget anything.

Anyway.

here's what we have now.

I'm making the Tutorial levels at the moment and although there's not much to see, there is the makings of a Mothership hangar. It's very shiny, perhaps I need to tone that down a little. I'm also going to fill it with some clutter and ambient stuff to make it come alive a bit more.




Then there's the Mission information screen. There's more stuff in here now. Like a multi page info window. The icons for the type of information and the Guy talking to you can change per page. There'll also be a facility to add a voice over too.




I've also improved the performance quite a bit, including ridding myself of an AWFUL bottleneck when the level starts (Billy, you'll be pleased to know) so now I get respectable frame rates on my machine.

I've also added a Frame limiter which appears to be working, more testing will be required though on this.

There seems like a never ending list of things to do, but I'm confident that now the feature list has settled, it will come together to make a fine product ..

(Note to the site guys: The add image feature seems to be borked in the latest maintenance.. I've had to copy these URL's from another forum which uses postimage.. just so you know)

[billy1380]

I have just received my new MacBook Pro and the PowerBook is going on sale quite soon... so send me the new code and I will do another build see how it fairs against the old build... this might be the last PPC build we see! :cry:

PS: nice work with the new stuff... like the intro...

[WILL]

(Note to the site guys: The add image feature seems to be borked in the latest maintenance.. I've had to copy these URL's from another forum which uses postimage.. just so you know)

Hmmm seems fine for me. :?

BTW, I've also found a great place where you can host video files and ]www.zippyvideos.com[/url] They resize and compress them a bit though.

Love the Tutorial! I think an area of the game where you can 'train' at various levels would be important especially with the unique type of gameplay.


Levels and new menus look absolutely beautiful! :thumbup:

[jasonf]

Cheers Guys,

Glad you like the pics, the Mothership level isn't finished.. Nor is the intro screen.. The Teacher picture obscures some detail, the Font isn't perfect, The multiline Label misses words off the end sometimes and the button texts are in bad positions. No GUI Editor makes this stuff quite slow going.

There will be all sorts of stuff to add to make the environment more interesting.. Ships flying outside, Ships inside being refueled/repaired.. Shield pods being recharged, Fuel cargo ships being refueled, Fuel canisters, mechanics, a MonoRail, Cranes..

It's gonna be busy

I also want to have a Voice Over.


Will, that link to the video place isn't a Hint now is it? LOL

Billy, it's a shame you're selling the Mac, We're going to need one for PPC builds, Testing, Optimising..

Might have to invest in one i guess.

[savage]

Mac, We're going to need one for PPC builds, Testing, Optimising..

Might have to invest in one i guess.

I may be wrong, but I thought that MacOSX 10.4 allowed you to create "Universal Binaries" that worked on both PPS and Intel.

[jasonf]

Well, I don't have any Mac Knowledge really and I know nothing about these Universal Binaries (why do I get images of Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme?)

We'll still need a test PC. Perhaps they'll be going cheap if people are generally buying Intel Macs... Anyway, I wouldn't feel at all comfortable releasing something I've not had tested to death.

[technomage]

Jason if you want to produce PPC binaries youcould try running Mac OSX under Pear PC. it's a ppc virtual machine. It wont run in real time but it should be able to produce binaries for you.