Tommy Tronic
Community Forums/Showcase/Tommy Tronic
| ||
| Well I've been busy adding more stuff to TT. no new exe yet but lots of loose ends tied up. Menu is fully functional now - you can also adjust the rate at which some functions are called and help improve frame rate on slower machines. You can now set your own keys too - also the game defaults to your maximum resolution if the 1280x1024 doesn't work...anti-alias is now gone as the command is useless. Entity system is now 'create and kill' as opposed to 'hide show' which caused me no end of troubles to fit into the old code but it really does gain about 10 extra frames a sec which is pretty good by my reckoning. I'm rewriting the collisions too..simple box collions are fast and good enough for this type of game I've decided - means I can scrap NG collisions which are proving to be a real cpu hugger with a few enemies on screen at once. Been working on the under-water enemies too. Here's a shot to compensate for the lack of a new test exe...just in case you were expecting one! You can see the boundaries I've added to the enemies in debug mode.  |
| ||
| Invalid zip? EDIT: Tried it in winrar instead and it opened. But it doesn't run. Says invalid graphics mode and closes again. |
| ||
| Thanks for trying...yes I quickly renamed the rar to zip because I was having problems with my website admin not seeing the rar file - I should have mentioned this. Now there is a new and proper zip file. Sybixsus - the default res is set to 1280x1024 32 bit do you have that set up already? ( damn - I knew that high res was a mistake )..I think I'll upload a new file if you can't get it to work. |
| ||
| No, I have an lcd and 1024x768 is the highest res it does. |
| ||
| I'm uploading another - 640x480 default version...you can set the res in the menu and then restart the game...but don't set it to 1280x1024!! The menu is only half finished! |
| ||
| Was keen to test this (per your request in the other thread about slow-ish machines), but I downloaded, unzipped the single .exe file, double-clicked and... nothing. :o( I'll try redownloading just in case. There's only supposed to be the single .exe file in the .zip (entirely possible)? |
| ||
| OK Ran it in XP Home SP2 800x600 on my Laptop which is 2.8GHz P4 with 512MB RAM and a built in crappy video card (sis M650) and it gives 60 fps (which is the LCD refresh rate) and occasionally slows down a bit, one point it shows 40fps. Some graphics glitches: At the start, shooting doesn't fire a bullet, a weird poygonal mess appears at a random place on the screen. Also there appeared to be invisible objects I was picking up. The grass has a brown flickery horiz line in it. Some of the boulders in the solid background flicker round them. I think that's it. [edit] just remembered another thing the water kept disappearing and reappearing depending on where I was on the screen. Also press crouch and across, this juddery movement is weird. PLus one of my pet hates in a platformer is when the guys legs don't move in sync with his walking speed, but your character would have hyper legs if you did that. Anyway it looks really nice and could be a way cool game. Menu is nice and music is fine. Loading takes a long time with no visual clues. Maybe it's decompressing the 6Mb file or something? |
| ||
| Lovely graphics - especially at 1280 X 1024. My refresh is set to 60 (Flatscreen) and the frame rate mantained that rate. I hope you'll look at improving the jumping from platform to platform in the final release though (especially moving platforms). I found it almost impossible to jump on the moving platform because the jump seemed to require a pixel perfect jump and the jump animation needs a lot of improvement - he quickly jerks himself into the air rather than smoothly jumping in a slower arc. I know you said don't be too picky but it's a small thing to address and if you can get the gameplay to match the nice graphics you should do well. Pentium 3.2Ghz, 1024Mb RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb. |
| ||
| Works lovely here. Excellent graphics. Love the water and character animations. Are the characters full 3D models, or pre-rendered? Blitz 3D? |
| ||
| Runs at 75 fps (vsync) on my rig. I switched it to 1280 res but i think after restarting the menus were higher res but the game was stuck at 640? My rig is p4 2.6ghz 1gb ram gf5600 128 mb. I'll take it to my 8 year old brothers PC which is i think P3 on 800 with an onboard SIS gfx card or something. Will see how it runs there and if he likes it as he might be your customer! :) |
| ||
| Very nice gfx. I hope you finish this. And it runs well on my athlon 1800xp and radeon 9600. |
| ||
| hey i like the look of this, it reminds me of an old game with a kid as the hero, they took so long to make it... heart of darkness? |
| ||
| Runs very well on mine. Really nice visual style - the character is excellent! |
| ||
| Very nice. No performance problems here either. Some points. 1) I think the movement speed for the main player is much too fast and a bit too loose. I don't get much control over the jump in mid air, which is needed to make sure I land where I'm aiming. If he moved slower, his animation speed could match his movment speed too. 2) Shooting the Mutant Space Hoppers is trickier than it should be for me. It takes a long time to get down and shoot at them. If it were faster to crouch and shoot, this wouldn't be a problem. Otherwise, it's great. Really nice graphics, good level designs, and with a few tweaks here and there it could be a great game. |
| ||
| Alrighty, clearly I'm in the minority. Does it take so long to start that I should be waiting for any significant amount of time before giving up? I get an hourglass for half a second or so when running the .exe, but it goes away with nary a flicker of gaming goodness. |
| ||
| Thanks for taking the time to give it a try for me everybody. I'm glad to see that that it has some sort of success rate. Grey - your laptop seems to be having sorting problems..Did you try to zoom out using the right ctrl key? Can you test it on a full pc setup? Bummer on it not working Lineof7's - Is the zip you downloaded named 'tom_640x480.zip'? If not then re-download. If it still doesn't work can you tell me are those the specs in you sig? I take the point on the jumping - it really will take a bit of tweaking and isn't too pleasing in its current state. Did anybody bother to zoom out using the right control key? I think the speed will not be too much of an issue then as you get a good few meteres more advance warning on those tomatoes. Well, they are the only enemy right now and won't be so prevalent so i think crouching for the odd enemy won't be too much of a bitch...I was thinking of doing some big slugs too so crouching to shoot them would be a neccessity too - it'll just be one of those things you'll get much quicker at as the game progresses. The best way to get rid of annoying tomatoes and not have to shoot or crouch is to wait for them to come to you and jump straight up into the air so you can land on them - do it twice and they die. It is quite hard to do with some of the faster tomatoes though. Oh yes Falken - they are all b3d's in the game..except for a few alpha-mapped flats. Well anyhow thank you all - I'll get back to you with a few improvements soon I hope - I'm going to have to think about this jump. Lenn - right now after you've altered the res in the menu - you have to go back into the game by pressing begin and once there quit out by hitting ESC...then the change will take place next time you load up. Sorry it's got a lot of loose ends right now. |
| ||
| Ah Lineof7's I'm wondering now what your problem might be. Are you running MS XP?... it should start in about 10 seconds at the max according to my machines. I tested this on an 800mhz duron with gf2 mx 32mb and it ran at about 25 fps which wasn't too hot to be honest..i got an email from a freind who ran it on a 500 pentium with 32 meg ATI and only got 1 frame per second!! I'm wondering what the trouble could be. |
| ||
| Grey - i just re-read your post and you definitely have z sorting problems there. Can you tweak your sis parameters at all? The brown line you're seeing in the grass is the actual top of the brownish rock that the map is composed of. I know there are on or two areas on the test map I'll be addressing to help iron out these problems but if the actual water keeps disappearing then it's definitely a clumsy sorting system at work. It seem anything static that isn't welded isn't getting sorted 100 percent perfectly - and I don't know how to fix this without welding everything which in itself might give unwanted smoothing and look ugly in lots of places. As for loading times - I think it's machine specific again. You have a laptop and I bet the harddisk is 5800rpm or something like that - I know my laptop takes longer to load than my desktop which is about 2-3seconds...and yes the exe is a compressed 12 meg file. I fixed the crouch and across stuttering now - thanks. |
| ||
| The game ran at a very smooth 85 fps (vsync) and 140 fps in 1024,768 mode on my 1800XP (1.5ghz) Geforce4 TI4600 system. The game looks very promising and could be great with some tweaking which I`m sure will follow shortly. Just out of interest could you tell us which tools were used to create this great looking game as its very well done. I especially liked the animations, loved the underwater ones, very fluid. Jason. |
| ||
| Hujiklo: Yessir, I'm running XP, and yessir, those are my specs in my sig. I checked the .zip and it's 'Tom_640x480.zip' and it expands out to 'Tom_640x480.exe' 6.12MB in size. [edit] Hrmm. On a whim, I tried it in 'Win98 Compatibility Mode' and it worked. 60-75fps (75=refresh) in 640x480, and 37-55fps in 1024x768. Definitely doesn't work without compatibility turned on though. I think I might put that in the Weird File™ for now. [/edit] |
| ||
| I'm glad you got it working at last LO7's - but I'm perplexed as to why it would only run in compatability mode. What's your default desktop colour depth? I think looking at it anything less than a 1 - 1.5 gig pentium or athlon xp is not going to run satisfactorily. Thanks for trying. Quicksilva - tools are mainly and old copy of Max pre-5.0 with B3D pipeline, Photoshop, Promotion (not much though), B3D tweak, Braineditor Pro, Audacity, Wavcleaner ( this is one awesome little ap)...anims are standard bones anims in max. That's it really. |
| ||
| Desktop colour depth is 32-bit. 'Satisfactorily'? Actually, I was going to make comment that it was moving *too* quickly, and it was well-and-truly 'smooth enough' (and not remarkably different-looking) in 640x480 mode, so unless you have some outstandingly chuggy and gameplay-compulsory graphical effects lined up for future development, I'd not write us povs off just yet! :oP I'm hopeful that for no reason in particular any future betas (if any) will run without having to be in compatibility mode. Never had it happen before for anything Blitzy - well done! ;o) |
| ||
| Heres my specs Win98SE color depth 16-bit 600mhz 128MB RAM 11MB GFX card The game refused to run because I think its in 32-bit graphics mode. |
| ||
| yep - sorry Slenkar. The next test I will check all graphic modes and automatically pick the best suitable at startup. But an 11mb GFX card? How so? I do not think it will run on that machine unfortnately - there are too many 3d graphics and textures :( |
| ||
| Nice! Worked 95 fps on 1024x768, anialiased! No vsync though ;-) I should point out that sometimes you can get out of the water throught the ground and then stay in the swim mode forever! Shooting is a bit tricky... Graphics are the best I've seen in an amateur game so far! Good job! |
| ||
| Thanks for testing it Anatoly - for the water I was playing around with changing the shape of the player's collision radius for when he is horizontal or vertical - BAD IDEA! I took this out but forgot to update the code in my 'exe_only' folder and so you sort of have old controls code in your exe. You have a 3 gig machine and it only ran at 95fps with no v-synch? That's pretty slow. I've pegged my machine back to a 1.6 gig athlon xp with a GF4 128mb card and it runs at about 90-130. I wonder if it's your FX card? EDIT: OOPS! I noticed you said you had AA on...I didn't know this was functioning yet - I'm going to check now. |
| ||
| OK, tested on my Tower PC now. XP Home SP2, P4 3.2GHz, 1Gb RAM, Radeon 9800XT. 800x600 gives 75fps (my refresh rate) and I get the same rate in 1280x1024 although to be honest it looks just as good in 800x600 because the graphics are so nice. I would say a good default is 800x600 and higher is OTT. No funny artifacts or anything and now I can see all the fruit and coins which were invisible on the Laptop. The laptop SiS card is not 3D so it's crap basically but you wanna bear this in mind for min specs. The Laptop CPU and RAM were fine but the video card just couldn't handle it, which is fair enough. Noticed that if you stand a fire continuously, the 2nd shot is lower than the first then the 3rd shot is higher and then it stays moreless steady but you have made the starting Y position slightly vary up and down, right? Also it is above the gun barrel which doesn't look so good. When crouching a similar thing occurs, first few shows vary a lot in Y direction then it steadies out but still varies. Jumping: It seems you cannot jump as high on a standing jump as a diagonal one. So if you stand at the edge of a platform and try to standing jump and press across at the last minute you won't make it. You have to run back and do a runing jump. This is non-intuitive imho. Again: The graphics are great, reminds me of a graphically superior version of Pademonium or something. |
| ||
| OK some stats: Running game with IE and Avast in background, with AA on and VSync off in Catalyst Control Centre: 600x480 and 800x600 both give 371fps just standing still at start. 1024x768 and 1280x1024 both give 335fps (which seems pretty good). Odd that both sets of modes should give same result. Maybe this gives a clue as to the card's architecture. Loads a lot quicker on the PC, couple of secs, it wasn't that long on the laptop maybe 5, it's just that there was no visual signal and I think it's important for the user to see something. You could have a mini.exe that shows a splash screen whilst launching the main one, or have a non compressed.exe with data files but I guess you were trying to avoid this. |
| ||
| Yep - grey. I have a bit of a dilemma with bullets. I think I will have to make the tween to the shot pose instantaneous as the stand to crouch will have to be too. These are just to important to gameplay...the other problem is the timing the bullet shots to the recoil of the gun - I fudged it by tweaking the bullet creation point on the Y a little bit randomly. Again I'll have to think about it, as it also doesn't look right the bullets appearing perfectly in the same place each shot while the gun is somewhere else on the recoil. As for AA - i'm not sure if it's implemented yet - is it? I can't rememeber off hand. |
| ||
| Very nice! I like the polish and style! |
| ||
| Very clean and good animation. Great title name too. Works well on my PC (60FPS all the way): P4 3.6Ghz * 768Mb Ram * ATI X600Pro 128Mb graphics |
| ||
| I've just installed the latest drivers for my card... Got 10 more fps! And yes, antialiasing is not working... |
| ||
| you want min specs? i'll give you min specs! how about this? 13 fps on intro screen, after clicking begin just black screen, no response, had to minimise to ctrl-alt-del it. k6-500mhz,trident 8400 7.5mb!, win98se. and now, a normal machine! 30-60 fps average, <15 when collect stuff, fps drops little bit with tomato appear, water vanish when zoom out, ok in close, water mesh clipped at points, shadows under rocks disappear if zoom out, stars invisible. duron-1.1ghz,ati radeon 32mb,win98se. phew, so do i get the money now or when its done? |
| ||
| Running fine on P4 1.8 with ti4200. Had to use Sync or I got dreadful bars appearing all over the place. 300 FPS on opening screen (menu) and 150 fps in game. This at 1280x1024 with AA (and AA did seem to be on) Very cute little game you got there and very tidy appearance. Looking forward to seeing more of it, and this is really saying somethign from a serious sim nut! ;O) Keep it up! |
| ||
| verrry, verrrrrrrrry nice HJ... and i'm not a fan of these side scrollers... no performance issues here... great job on the character animation... boy can that lil guy swim... does he ever run outta air... also, is this a full 3D side scroller... neat... --Mike |
| ||
| 640x480 mode...perfect, maintained 75 fps highest resolution ran at 53 fps (no real noticeable slowdown though), however the water took a few seconds to "pop in", I was floating in air for a little while. 1ghz P3, 64mb radeon |
| ||
| somethingfunky's "nomral" machine sounded like the same thing I got on the laptop. |
| ||
| Somethingfunky, you definitely run away with the prize of lowest spec machine! You're a wicked whipmeister for shovelling all that exe down your poor old K6's gullet - ha ha! I'm surprised it didn't puke binary all over the place! Those stars and pickups that don't appear are cube mapped so maybe your card doesn't support that properly? Do any Gems and coins appear? Or is just the fruit. I feel like anything under 60fps isn't really playable but some people here don't seem to mind 50fps - maybe I can set this spec at an advised 1 gig with a 64 meg card minimum as I notice the 32 meg cards are falling short. Some performance improvements are on the way - right now the map mesh is one big mesh - I'll break it up into smaller parts and let blitz do a bounding box cull, this could save about 10,000+ poly's a second which might help on slower comps. Also the water is composed of very large polygons ( which might explain the 'pop in' problem )I think I'll tessellate it a little and making children of the parts - I figure this could really help with the slower cards as Blitz will automatically cull the water mesh. Apart from that right now I load all scenery props in at run time and then hide and show them using a window around the player - I'm wondering if creating and deleting them would save memory and perhaps make it a bit quicker on slow machines. Anybody know about this? Does it make sense? Also, all characters are boned and vertex tweened. I think I could simplify some enemies by just saving different poses as children and hide and show them to get the animations and perhaps save a lot of cpu time too. I think the tomatoes only really need 3 frames and don't need to be tweened. Mike - this is just a test of my different code and stuff nestled together in one place and interacting - the game will be much more fascinating I promise! Right now Tommy just doesn't die (well he won't in the game either as it's all in his own dream world while he sleeps, he'll simply awaken) so right now he can swim his heart out under water! The game will just be a 2d platformer. I had a two pronged attack on this one and the 2d won out as it became more feasible to finish single-handed and part-time....though a full 3d version is also on the table - just later on. After a sniff around the forums I've learned that the AA command doesn't work properly at all which explains the uneven results. To enable it it must be set in the display properties of your GFX card ....sigh. What a freaking bummer - this should have been fixed over two yeare ago judging by the first bug reports. Thanks for the feedback people. |
| ||
| no, no gems or coins either, just the fruit. the slowest was collecting anything, gems, fruit, etc. collecting lots at a time just sunk my fps to <5. yes, hide/show systems are slow, they fill up memory and slow down the RAM, a create/delete system is much better! and leave the tomatoes alone damit! :-) |
| ||
| Somethingfunky what sound set up do you have on your machine? Collecting pickups plays a sound each time - I'm wondering if your sound card is getting bogged down somehow. The other thing, ironically for you, is that when you get a pickup I create a new type for the little flash animation! Creating these could be slowing your machine down to a halt especially if your ram is already maxed out....however if I did this with every object then your ram would be spared the burden of all the world's objects at once and you could see a speed up ( I hope so)....we'll see with the next test. |
| ||
| Can't start the exe, the cursor shows some activity for a second, but then...nothing. This is Win Xp. |
| ||
| Ha! It wasn't just me!! ;o) Roboto: See if it works in 'Win98 Compatibility Mode', just for fun. If it doesn't, it'll be even weirderer. |
| ||
| Those stars and pickups that don't appear are cube mapped so maybe your card doesn't support that properly? Do any Gems and coins appear? Or is just the fruit. Of course, you can check if the system supports those. I dont see a need for cubemapping in this TBH, Spheremap would do, surely? :) I'll be trying this a bit later on. |
| ||
| Cant download, I get a 404 :( |
| ||
| Sorry folks - the file is gone now. I only get a gig bandwidth a month and it's nearly all gone and so I had to pull it. Cygnus - I orignally wanted env mapping but the effect on such small and low poly objects was really lack-lustre so I opted for the cube which looked much nicer....and yes I'll do a check first to sort out all GFX mode problems. ROBOTO - what specs do you have? |
| ||
| Hujiklo, p4 2.4, radeon 9800, 1 gig ram. My desktop runs at 1600 x 1200, but I don't think that should be an issue. |
| ||
| ROBOTO - did you try LO7's trick and right click the exe and change the compatability settings to win98se? I'll be honest I have no idea what could be preventing you from running this game - it's probably something I shouldn't be doing in my code at startup. |
| ||
| Hujiklo, if you email the file to steve@... I'll host it for you. |
| ||
| yeah, please, i really want to try this game out. It look awsome. |
| ||
| Sorry Deux - that exe is long gone and my code is going through some changes - there won't be another exe until I've done some major improvements now. Steve Thinking about it, I'd rather that last exe not be hosted anywhere right now - I really don't want various dis-jointed versions floating around. I'm planning on getting some more feedback when I've made some more progress having refined and embroidered the game some more. However - you could email your exe to Deux if you still have it? ..And Deux - don't get your hopes up! It really isn't much of a game at all at the moment. Thanks. |
| ||
| Ok Hujiklo. I don't have a copy for Deux though - I gave my feedback and deleted it - like you said it's not much of a game yet (even though it looks promising). |
| ||
| I found a bug I think. After I was in the water I could swim in the entire level. Dont know how, I jumped in the water and when I left I keept swiming. It was easy to collect coins, gems and fruit when swimming. This must be a bug. Othervise a very good looking game. |
| ||
| Yep - thanks TGD. It was a problem that was fixed but not included in the exe. |
| ||
| well, i looked at it again and i cant really see a drop in fps with the tomatoes now. if i just stand and shoot fps drops from 50 to 30. if i just run left and right fps stays at 50. i have a soundblaster live! card. also, sometimes the bullets are invisible. |
| ||
| Somethingfunky - it seems to be you're getting extreme slow-down where ever a new type is created and a mesh copied. There are only two instances where I create new objects these are the bullets and the pickups which are both the times when your system starts to chug. How much ram do you have in your machine? |
| ||
| not quite, it also chugs around the start area. anyway, its 384 mb ram (if it makes any difference). |
| ||
| Many laptops don't have a right control or number pad, people. Quit making the flipping right control do cool things, then distributing without source. It's bad etiquette plus, it makes me mad. '60% of the time, it works all the time!' |
| ||
| Unfortunately I've been trimming my code down - and now all the moves,jumps and actions are controlled by just the right control key :D - it makes sense to me - Fwibblebibble! Anyhow - when it's ready you'll be able to set your own keys. Somethingfunky - I've managed to squeeze out about a 30-40% speed increase on the game and so I think you'll be able to run the next test with no slow-downs...I'll also switch off Cube maps if the card doesn't support them...and resolutions are now checked for compatability. |
| ||
| sounds good Hujiklo. i also had time to test your last demo on a p3 (500) with 128mb sd ram rage card. it was perdy sluggish to be somewhat blunt. :-O the p3 took a while to warm up, but even then fps at the start area was <10. once i moved away from there fps picked up to a nearly-playable 15-20. with your new super-enhanced alpha/beta demo deluxe edition volume 1.223 it may even play on the p3 with any luck! *dribbles a little bit* :-} |
| ||
| Sorry for the late reply S-funky I've not been around lately. I'll have a new test in about another two weeks...you can tell me then how well it runs on the p3 with the new CPU tweaker turned low in the menu. |
| ||
| Uh, sorry for digging this thread up, i had these screenshots sitting on my USB stick, forgot to show them to you Hujiklo. These are screenshots from my little bros P3 with some 256 mb ram, and a video card Trident Blade3D 8MB! Well the good news is it ran, and he liked playing it even tho he had trouble understanding he has to duck to shoot the tomatos. It was about 18 fps average.   |
| ||
| Wow! Yuck!! Tell your brother I'm sorry but I don't think this game is not going to fit his system Lenn :( The GFX ram so far is comming in at 23mb while the game is running - an 8 mb card - well it's a brave 8mb card if it tries to run this game! The menu has me puzzled..why the verts are are jumbled is beyond me. I think it maybe to do with Z order (some verts in the pic look like they're plotted behind the camera) and the 'camera projectmode' I'm using as this virtually flattens the world - it's all I can think of. I can't really get around that either. Well the next demo I upload should run a lot faster as it's been pretty well optimized and now has a few options for relieving the cpu and GFX card of strain. I notice Tommy's Z-order is to pot as well :( |
| ||
| Those vert problems were introduced in an earlier version of B3D they should be fixed now. |
| ||
| No i think this has nothing to do with blitz. Its probably that there is a huge messup because of the card running out of memory. If you give us another level we might try it out! Now he got an upgrade... to a 16MB card, but at least its ATI. It sux when your parents try to discourage you from playing games when youre young, and try give you the worst junk hardware they can find. I'm also not allowed to buy him gaming presents :( |
   |