Drop Fighter (WIP)

Community Forums/Showcase/Drop Fighter (WIP)

gburgess(Posted 2004) [#1]
Well, finally, the end is in sight. I'm waiting on graphics to make the levels with, so I figured I'd use the time to clean the game up and get some feedback on how she handles. So, if anyone's interested, I would be most curious to hear what people think. The four levels with the game currently are unfinished, and mainly in there for testing features, but they are completable. When the mission select screen comes up, the top-left level is probably the most intensive in engine terms, I'd be curious to know what sort of chug factor there is on that level, and what sort of hardware has the most problem with it.

When the game is run, if the sea gets bright towards the horizon, and the title text is in an opaque square, try reducing the number of texture layers and the draw distance in the Settings.

http://www.optibrain.co.uk/dropfighter/downloads/dropfighter.exe
The download's about 11mb.

Screenshots:




Lumivel(Posted 2004) [#2]
This looks pretty awesome. I like the ship models a lot, they give a kind of stealh bomber meets star wars feeling. The GUI is simple and nice too. Only thing I'm not liking is the terrain... The colors sorta clash witht the ships. It just seems like if they have ships like that, they'd have a lot of colonies. I just see it more over a city or a red planet kinda thing... just me though?

Nice.


gburgess(Posted 2004) [#3]
There'll be more varied terrains in the final game. Thanks for checking it out, I appreciate your time :)


Kanati(Posted 2004) [#4]
I really don't like the control scheme. I went to the mouse for control after not liking the keyboard, but I think it's the design of the control itself I don't care for. Which is a shame because it looks like I'd like the game itself a lot if I could control it better. Other than the control I can't really say there's anything I dislike.


Kanati(Posted 2004) [#5]
Oh, and I did notice that once, I got an MAV after finishing a level (in which I didn't really do anything)... and on another mission I launched and before I were able to do anything, a viper crashed into me and destroyed me.


gburgess(Posted 2004) [#6]
Kanati: There's a keyboard sensitivity option in there which some people have found useful. As for the MAV, I'm uploading a new version now that fixes that (someone else spotted it too :D ). There's also a new default keyboard layout that may or may not help you in combination with the sensitivity setting. Thanks for checking it out! :)


Lumivel(Posted 2004) [#7]
I wish it worked with a joystick. Maybe it does? I didn't touch any options.


Rob(Posted 2004) [#8]
would be nice if it worked with my analogue joypad.


gburgess(Posted 2004) [#9]
It absolutely should work with joysticks and analogue pads. It's under "settings". It works with mine, at any rate.


Kanati(Posted 2004) [#10]
I didn't have joystick listed but that might be because my batteries are dead in my wireless. I'll have to check that out.


gburgess(Posted 2004) [#11]
Hmmm, could be. Does it show up in the windows control pads list in the control panel?


Beaker(Posted 2004) [#12]
Hi Glenny-boy

Nice demo. I had a few issues tho:

On the menu screen (and on the island campaigns some of the time) there seemed to be a lot of alpha textured objects (including the text) not being drawn properly, ie. not alpha'd at all. On the island campaign it was intermittent and happened to icons and particles as well. It might be due to the use of terrains, dont ask me why/how tho.

The menu screen seems to be sluggish, possibly cos there is so much going on (the spinning logo look quite hi-poly). The actually game seemed relatively smooth.

I found the plane hard to fathom control-wise, particularly in space but also when I was upside down on the island parts. I was using keyboard.

Also, I noticed the sky go all white at one point, altho this might be related to above alpha issues.

Nice work tho, feels quite polished.


gburgess(Posted 2004) [#13]
Thank you. To take a few of your points:

The failing alpha: reduce the draw distance, and put your texture layers to 2 in the settings screen. This should fix the problem. Many MX cards seem to stumble on this.

The spinning logo is fairly high-poly, although I thought a GF4MX would be okay with it. I think I even tested on one. You should see a speed increase when you take down the texture layers.

I'm going to work on a better camera for the aircraft, one that doesn't stay level with the horizon (although I do prefer that).

The sky thing is my poor sky code, probably. To get the effect I wanted in the distance, I basically put a blue plane above the clouds. You can just fly through it for now. This will be sorted. :D

Thanks for trying it out. I'm also heartened to see that gameplay was smooth on an AMD1300, that's the slowest yet that this has been run on.


Andy(Posted 2004) [#14]
The game is looking good... Something i'd want to play!

-joystick is reacting too fast
-consider allowing thrust to be mapped to joy throttle, possibly with speedbrake as a button.
-sometimes the fighter doesn't pitch or roll smoothly...
-There is some slowdown on the control screen... you are propably not using rendertweening there, so the logo changes speed!

Celeron 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM, Geforce DDR 32MB, WinME

Andy


gburgess(Posted 2004) [#15]
Thank you very much. That's always good to hear!

-I'm gonna work on toning down the fighter, it seems too flighty for everyone.
-Hmmm.... not sure about that, but you aren't the first person to mention. I'll think on that one.
-I've not come across this yet. It might actually be more an effect of the camera. I know the ship judders under joystick control, which is a camera issue.
-I don't use rendertweening, I don't like it. It doesn't help when the framerate drops below a minimum. I'm using time-based movement control, so whatever the framerate, things move at a constant rate. The logo shouldn't change speed, but it may appear to jump. Certainly, older graphics cards will start to stutter when there's a lot of menu options on screen. Trying (and failing) to think of ways to optimise that.


Andy(Posted 2004) [#16]
>I know the ship judders under joystick control, which is a
>camera issue.

That's propably what I experienced!

>I'm using time-based movement control, so whatever the
>framerate, things move at a constant rate. The logo
>shouldn't change speed, but it may appear to jump.

I'll take another look!

Andy


angel martinez(Posted 2004) [#17]
Good work! I like the general design of your game.
how did you make that nice sea effect?


gburgess(Posted 2004) [#18]
Thank you very much!

The sea effect to a bit of thinking to figure out, and it really needs a better texture artist than me, but it's fairly simple.

First, make the terrain from a relief map. Then, add the water as a plain. Texture both on the first layer appropriately.

For the second and third layers of the sea texture, I scaled up a big, blurry texture that is actually very close to black. With the blending set correctly, the non-black parts show up as a gentle grey. I drew it a little stripy, like ripples. The third layer is scaled to be a mirror of the second, and they are then scrolled in opposite directions.

Finally, the last layer of the water is the cunning transparency effect near the coastline. For this, make a copy of the relief map for the terrain, invert the colours, and then through use of contrast and dilate tools, expand the dark area of the land on this new texture and tighten it up a little. Use this as an alpha mask to make the sea layers transparent towards the island. I don't have my code handy right now, so this last texture might actually need to be the "bottom" one in terms of layers.

Sorry, that's a poor explanation. I can be more precise if necessary.


angel martinez(Posted 2004) [#19]
Thanks, but can you be more precise?
Do you use only one plane for the sea? and how many layers of textures on it?


gburgess(Posted 2004) [#20]
Yes, just one plane for the sea with four layers of textures on it.

Tell you what, I'll cut out the part with the water getting transparent close to terrain. Let's just focus on that moving effect (I assume that's what you're interested in?).

Create a plane. Set it's entity blend mode to 1.

Below is the base water texture. This goes on the plane as layer zero.


The next two below go on layers 1 and 2. They look black but look carefully, they're just really dark.



Set the texture blend mode to 3 for these last two textures.

I scaled these textures up to suit my game world. This might be too big for you, but I'll say what I used to give you an idea of their relative sizes.

The base water texture was scaled to 1500,1500. The other two were scaled to 10000,10000.

You'll notice the last two textures are identical. One can just be a copy of the other, rather than loading two in. I just havn't done optimising Drop Fighter yet :D

After all that, just use positiontexture with an increasing offset to keep moving the two similar textures in opposite directions. Also, make the two more different in some way, just to break it up more.

I've gone through my code and picked out the salient parts, I don't htink I missed anything. Tinker round with it, you'll get it to work.


angel martinez(Posted 2004) [#21]
Thank you very much!