Updated Aerial Antics Demo
Community Forums/Showcase/Updated Aerial Antics Demo
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| I've updated the Aerial Antics Demo with 5 diversified levels. They all still take place in the first locale but hopefully solve one complaint against our demo which has been that it doesn't show enough of what you can do in the game. The game has been through numerous upgrades at this point but I'm still looking for a solution to really increase it's sales potential. Any new feedback on this demo would be much appreciated. Anyone who has never played the demo or has played the demo but wasn't sold on the gameplay I welcome your support! MAKE SURE TO DELETE ANY OLD AERIAL ANTICS FOLDERS! |
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| ive tried a few times in the past to download and run this demo after some very good reports, but i never get it to work i always get an "input not supported" right after the logo, i hear a bit of funky music then just a black screen :( radeon 9700, win xp, 1 gb mem |
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| Did you try this latest one? If you still get that error then I'll have to get to the root of the problem. Thanks for letting me know though. |
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| yep, tried the latest download and get the same error :( |
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| MAV here :(. |
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| Jeremy: Prior to downloading your new demo today i've never played AA, so i thought i'd give it a go. In no particular order :- - The splash screen displayed fine, but the default screen res that the game chose for me (1152 x ?) caused my Philips LCD to split the screen horizontally at about two thirds of the way down - (so the bottom third of the screen showed the top of the game area, etc). This was cured by chosing a different screen res in the game menu (a bit tricky with the mouse flitting between top / bottom half of the screen). The overall style and presentation are excellent, and are exactly like the promotional screenshots, certainly made me want to continue rather than thinking, oh another shareware rip-off. I found the controls easy to pick up, but then i have played fps's so the keyboard mouse combo is the norm, i wonder how many of your intended audience play these type of games though ? (My dad would be completely stuffed!) The selection of areas and tasks to complete were excellent, i felt like i'd had a real good sample of what the full game had to offer. To be honest with you this wouldn't be the sort of game i would normally choose to buy. Personal preference is for more realistic gaming situations. I'd love to see a variation of this title, perhaps with a different graphical style (more realism ?), with tasks such as rescuing people from burning buildings, etc. The gameplay was very similar to a model helicopter sim i played about a year ago for quite a while. Your title is very entertaining and has a 'just one more go' element to it. In summary i really like it, but not enough to buy it i'm afraid. (But then i wouldn't take too much notice of my personal preferences since my current project involves sailing a three wheeled trolley around a car-park, each to their own eh ?). cheers, Funky Frank |
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| Will try it out as well. Thats a good thing you included more levels, i thought you should do that as well. And like previous poster i can also already tell you that more realism is probably cooler because the whole flying thing is much more spectacular when you get into it rather than feeling like youre in a cartoon. Cos in cartoons everythings possibly, not if its realistic, then it looks "wow". BUT.... i KNOW how much more times it takes to make realistic art, esp. textures and esp. if you aren't photosourcing by yourself, etc. Would need much much more memory as well i asume. Still, consider it. Make a prototype with full art if you want, for AA2, and have me test it :) Otherwise as i said previously, neat idea. |
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| MAV :\ Logo, dark screen, music begins, MAV. P4 2.6 ghz, GForce 6800 gt, 1gb ram, Mandrake 9.1 (jk winxp). I deleted all previous files i had including a folder "Aerial Antics" which was next to the "Aerial Antics Demo" folder. The first one only had some "levels" file in it, i looked before deleting because it looked odd to have such a dir in my Program Files... Fix it. |
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| ..working fine here... P4, 2.8GHz, 4Gigz RAM, nVidia A310, 256 MB VRAM,WinXP pro |
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| Grr... so 3 out of 5 people get a MAV? What the heck! Alright that's it. I'm redoing the profiler and I'm going to remove some .dll calls which might be causing the issue. Post back in a bit! |
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| Jeremy: I've only ever seen 'input not supported' when a monitor is receiving a signal at a res it cannot display - is the game starting up at too high a res ? (after the splash screen) Cheers, Funky Frank |
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| Yeah could be. I've gone ahead and made the profiler more modest and I've removed all .dlls. It should work for more people now. Everyone that had issues please have another look for me ... I appreciate it! Just remember to get rid of all previous builds. |
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| Before I download, what res does it start up in? Anything above 800x600 and my monitor tries to eat itself. :) |
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| It depends on how much video memory you've got. It also checks to make sure the res is supported by the card ... but I know some monitors have issues. Right now the highest it will start up in is 1024 X 768 (was 1152 X 864 before). You can modify the user options.aat file if it comes out fugly in the game and you can't change it normally. |
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| OK, just to let you know this works fine on my PC. It started in 800x600 mode straight out of the box. :) win98SE, Athlon 1Ghz, GeForce2 GTS. I'll go and actually have a play now and report back. :) [edit] The game ran very smoothly, even on my modest rig. The graphics are good but nothing "wow!" about them, IMO. The music in the demo, too, is good but not very inspiring to me. I found the controls a little tricky to get used to (I don't play FPS games) and, as has already been said, I think this aspect alone would put off some players; especially casual gamers. Some specific nit-picking: - The triangle mouse cursor used in the front end tends to get in the way when trying to choose a new screen res, etc. - The screen showing the game's controls is somewhat obscured by the info bubble/cloud thing. This may not happen in resolutions above 800x600, I don't know. - After finishing a level, there's a big "buy now" button in the corner, but no mouse cursor to click on it with. - The level info displayed at the start of each level is a bit weedy, IMO. I'd have liked to have seen a bigger, fun-er font used. The same applies to the name input routine. This also has a too short a repeat delay period, I think - it's easy to accidentally type 2 or more same characters. That all sounds pretty negative, I guess but, on the whole, AA is a very good, polished game. Well done. :) |
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| still got "input not supported error" desktop goes lores then the logo then music then error |
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| Did adjust the screen resolution in the User Options.aat file? Try to lower that to something your monitor can use. Apparently that can be an issue. If it is I will have to back the game off to only go as high as 800 X 600 by default. |
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| ahhhhh ha i forgot to delete the download from this morning :/ new download works, will play later :) |
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| Friggin' sweet! Ok so I probably just increased the odds that the game will work big time. 4 out of 6 people couldn't play it and now they all seem to work. I guess between those .dll's and that resolution working with many video cards but not monitors I was excluding a lot of people. Now I just have to go through and fix more of the niggles people have. I'm going to get this game selling 1% at least if it's the last thing I do!!! |
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| @big10p: Nice to see your setup handling something ;-) Downloading... |
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| @big10p: Nice to see your setup handling something ;-) Leave it! :) |
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| 1152 X 864 lol, of course i got a mav . This is an amazing resolution^^ my geforce can't handle, however the monitor can do that :) or the other way :\. |
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| I still get a MAV. I went to the directory, clicked on Uninstall, but it didnt delete nearly anything (i think only the uninstall file was deleted) so i manually deleted the Aerial Antics demo folder. I installed the new one. Ran it and got a MAV. The user options.aat file shows the res my screen perfectly supports 1024x768x32... Is it possible there is something in the registry? Because i installed AA a long time ago, the first demo, maybe somethings getting messed up cause of that, if there is such a possibility? I'd really like to help you solve this Jeremy, so i can try new levels. |
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| This was my first exposure to AA. Thoughts... Nice cartoony graphics. I was a bit lost as to what my 'goals' were... some 'hint arrows' showing where to go next might be useful - or some balloons with suggested stunts to try ?? After I had a bounce on the first platform I amused myself by trying to decapitate myself on the rotors and drag my feet in the lake (nice reflections btw.) I was trying this on a laptop with trackpad - so I didn't get very far with it. The demo mode shows it has potential, but the tutorial needs more guidance |
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| @ Lenn I think you need to use the Uninstall from the start menu ... not sure but I haven't had an issue. It's supposed to delete the whole directory. Other than that and the resolution there's one issue I'm working on with someone which involves the "appdir". I added that in and I'm having someone check a new .exe that doesn't call the setdir(systemproperty("appdir")) or whatever it is. I've noticed that many times there have been some people's Blitz executables that don't work on my machine and no matter what they removed it wouldn't run. |
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| Theres nothing in my Start menu, i'm pretty sure the Uninstall removed the group. Still wouldnt run as you know. |
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| The demo doesnīt work with a Geforce 6800GT and last Nvidia drivers because the power of two problem with the textures. I think it is that 3d card (Direct X 9.0c problem) (the textures have to be 64x64,128x128,256x256...) |
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| I'd be surprised if Jeremy wasn't using pow2 textures. I thought everybody did. The game ran fine on my ancient GeForce 2, anyway. :) |
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| Blitz resizes the texutures automagically. At least that's what Mark said a long time ago. Otherwise I'm sure it'd crash on many more systems. |
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| Blitz resizes the texutures automagically. At least that's what Mark said a long time ago. Otherwise I'm sure it'd crash on many more systems. Maybe though on some systems it doesn't do it ... is that what you're saying? Guess when I do Aerial Antics Reboost I'll go ahead and re-size all the textures manually. |
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| Yes, I had a Geforce 5900XT and have no problem with the textures size(power of two) but I upgraded to Geforce 6800GT and the problem appeared, my own project Starburner(Freehunter) didnīt run (the error is: Memory access violation) I had to convert all my textures to a power of two manually! and it works now. I think it is a problem with pure DirectX 9.0c cards like Geforce 6800 and Blitz3d or perhaps (pretty sure) the bad drivers from Nvidia... |
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| Thanks for the tip! |
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| Seems to run great, although I couldn't figure out what to do on the ball-bouncing level. I'm using Intel Extreme on a laptop here, and it still runs very nicely. |
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| So will you convert textures to power of 2, Jeremy? Tell me when you do so i can try it. AA was one of the demos that stayed on my PC for more than a few months tho i didnt really play it more than once i didnt want to delete it either. |
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| Yeah going through and converting all ... I'm also adjusting a lot of the other niggles people had. One big thing I'm doing is reducing the overall speed of the game so that people with slower reflexes can enjoy it. I have very quick reflexes and the game was tuned to what I can do ... it was hard for me to see but by slowing the overall game logic down by 1/2 my mother was able to play the game without getting stressed out ... except on the last ball level of the demo which she did beat and wasn't all that stressed about. Needless to say she doesn't play many games though. |
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| OH please.... Dont make it like that game plobb, that was so slow you could fall asleep, altho everything else was good about it. I assume you are not insane and will leave an option to choose between "Slow motha#####r mode" and "l337 g4m3rz mode" ? |
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| Yes I was thinking about it ;) It's not that slow though ... now the original looks like it's in hyper mode. I'm going to try it out like this at any rate and see what the response is. Overall people have all complained that it's too hard to control and that's mostly because it's pretty fast. I don't think the new one is too slow but we'll see. The biggest issue is that right now I've just got done readjusting the bonus times for the levels because of course it now takes longer to beat them. If I go and add two modes then I need two sets of bonus times etc... If I start digging into it that much then I'm more than tempted to add it to the rewrite along with multiplayer and maybe some other stuff. At this point I'm still trying to get the original material to be enjoyable by the majority of people. |
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| Jeremy, I played the first demo when the game went comercial. I remember it was fun but I think the problem is that the game needs to be in stores too .... ... if I were you I think I would add 2 or 3 more levels along the game and will try to get the game in stores by any publisher ... don't know but for me the best way to start on the market is with the "help" of a publisher and then becoming independent, I mean, they really know how and where to market a game.... just a thought... |
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| Really nice ,polished & fun game - love the opening funky bass line ! Really deserves commercial success. Perhaps could gain wider appeal by changing the central character to somthing more "animated" - he is a bit bland and doesn't have many animated or vocal reactions. Having some crazy rabbit or weird alien type character could perhaps fit in more with the cartoon like environment which is very impressive. Give him some funny animations when things go wrong etc - make him shout at you when you collide etc. |
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