LEGO Builder Bots
Community Forums/Showcase/LEGO Builder Bots
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| It's finally been released! Here's that game I've been hinting about... the one I worked on from the middle of may until the end of September: http://www.lego.com/eng/premiumgames/default.aspx I don't know why the screenshots are so small, but there's a demo for you to download. Programmed entirely in Blitzplus using my BOB system. |
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| Wow.. hosted by LEGO.com!!! It looks really nice! Downloading now... |
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| Please excuse that annoying music for the last bot remaining. I had no control over that. |
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| "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." :( Blimey, what did all these other people do? Nice to see the programmer gets last billing. :/ Credits: LEGO Builder Bots was created by the following people: Peter Hobolt Jensen Gabriel Walsh Kevin Larson Norm Dwyer Joe Nevares Jonathan Knipping David Sutherland Juan Gomez Ken Holewczynski Matthew Lamothe Eugene Qahhaar Julia Rothman Clarence Fraher James Bohnert Rafael Nieves Mike Boeh Shawn Swift |
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| It looks very nice, but I will not purchase a program that installs blindly on the System drive without asking like the demo does. Does the purchased version do the same thing? |
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| Big10: What did they do? I wasn't told, and even if I knew I wouldn't be allowed to tell you because of a confidentiality agreement I signed. Dragon: I don't know, I didn't wrap it with that install program. If you want to show support by buying the game, I was only a contractor, so you'd be better off licensing one of my systems instead. |
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| Oh and Big10, what sort of system do you have and how much ram/vram? Seems odd it would crash, it was tested a lot. But there was one bug in Blitzplus's LoadAnimImage function that I told Mark about and he never got back to me on. I don't know if that bug is intemittent or what. |
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| Worked nicely here, and pretty clever gameplay to boot. Well done on getting the job for such a well-known license! |
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| Congrats on the game/license! I found an easter egg by holding down the Tab key. :) |
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| The first 2 times I ran it, it crashed - cited USER.DLL as the cause. The 3rd time I ran it, it worked. Specs: 1Ghz Athlon, GeForce 2 GTS 32MB, 256MB RAM, win98SE What is the bug with LoadAnimImage in Blitzplus? Do you know if the bug exists in Blitz3D, too? BTW, congrats on the game. :) [edit] Actually, it might have been USER.EXE that was the problem - whatever that does. |
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| Relies on colours, so I'm boned, but it's a cool game until the other colours are introduced :) Also - this suffers from the bug in B3d that prevents it from starting on a Tablet PC unless you tick 'disable advanced text services for this program' in the compatibility tab. Can that setting be carried in a zip? |
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| Lego doesn't like me. I once picked up a piece of Lego - it looked at me and screamed 'Lego'. So, I let it go. Had to make do with a block of wood. |
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| Big10: I don't know what the bug in it IS, but there is a bug in it, because I was getting intermittent crashes, and I narrowed it down to the exact line the crash occured at, which was a specific call to LoadAnimImage. This bug began occuring late in the project and kept recurring at random. The game could not get past the loading screen, it would crash in the middle. The only way to "fix" it was to recompile the program with a few uncessesary lines here or there commented out till it worked. Warpy: Color blind eh? You can't tell the colors apart by variations in shade? I guess the catcher might not display the same shade of the color though... hm... Well the bricks at least spin different ways depending on color so if you got the color right once you could maybe guess it. :-) No idea on the tablet PC thing. |
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| Just did a quick test in Windows XP with RegMon, checking the "disable advanced text services for this program" option in the Properties -> Compatibility tab for an executable, and it seems that you can disable the 'Advanced Text Services' for a given program in this Registry key: "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers" You create a string value with the full path as its name (eg. C:\Program Files\MyApp\myapp.exe), and enter DISABLECICERO as its value. On [a http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;822656&Product=winxp]this page[/a], Microsoft refer people to their "program vendor" for software that doesn't implement "Cicero Unaware Application Support (CUAS)", but if you [a http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-19,GGLG:en&q=%22Cicero+Unaware+Application+Support%22]Google it up[/a], there's almost no information available on CUAS, described as "a feature of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system that provides support for Advanced Text Services." |
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| Shawn - how did you get to do a Lego game? I had an idea for a Lego game a few years back and still want to make it. I did approach them and was sent a mutual non-disclosure agreement and asked to send it in, but it wasn't a fully formed design at the time and I ended up putting it on the shelf. Did you approach them? Or did they commission you? I know you've signed a confidentiality agreement, but any info outside of that agreement would help me think about my idea's potential... Especially interesting that it was written in Blitz :) |
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| Congrats. I'm sure I've heard of Mike Boeh, is he a forum member? |
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| I see Mike managed to get his hands on it :D, shame you don't have a logo to show Shawn. I like this, took me a little while to figure it out but my 6 year old (5 & 3/4) daughter figured it straight away - did play a bit to fast for her though. @Grey, Mike is "Retro64" |
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| The Credits in the game show what everyone did. I'm curious. Was the 'easter egg' a forgotten bit of code to remove? |
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| Indie: ah Retro64, of course, thanks. sswift. Neat. Why does the catcher move with momentum/delay, is it to make the game more difficult? i.e. would an ordinary mouse movement have been too easy? |
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| you are full of suprises swift, what's next? |
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| Mrtricks: I didn't approach them with a design. It's very hard to get a license for any product or property. I think the only way you'd relaisitcally be able to do that is if you had millions of dollars and/or a whole team of people with a good track record. Of course, I could be wrong, and that wouldn't stop me from asking if I was determined. WolRon: The "easter egg" is simply an FPS and video memory display. Grey: The catcher moves with momentum because it makes the game more fun and makes it feel like the catcher has mass. But I think they increased the momentum after I sent them the game because it seems hard to control now. You could say it adds difficulty, but I think it's a balancing act, and the scales were tipped too far on the difficulty side. Btw, you may not have noticed, but each of the powerups also has mass and pushes the catcher down when caught. Maximo: Ice Cream Showdown which I akready announced here, of course. :-) |
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| >Ice Cream Showdown which I akready announced here, of course. :-) you are on the rooooleee swift, one cool dude! :) btw you said: "I didn't approach them with a design." then who approached who, how did you got into this? you left that out, also did you get payed one large sum or are you going to get royalties for every sale? more details on that if you can give would be interesting! :) |
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| sswift: "scales were tipped too far on the difficulty side" I agree, too hard for kids (and me! well sorta). I loved the way the bricks flew off when they hit the side of the catcher. Also I'll back maximo up on the "more details" if you are feeling generous. |
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| Maximo: I don't know who approached who, and I'm not allowed to give specifics on what I was paid. I also don't know what others working on the project were paid. Let's just say that as a sub sub sub contractor, I'd have earned more bagging groceries, but I took the job because it was more fun than bagging groceries, and I've now got another game to add to my resume. Grey: "Also I'll back maximo up on the "more details" if you are feeling generous." Unfortunately I'm not allowed to reveal much. If you want more information, talk to Mike, but he's the one that asked me not reveal those details in the first place. Publishers generally make everyone that works for them sign NDA's which restricts what you can tell people about a project. If you're hoping to get a contract to develop a game for Lego or any other company, it's not likely to happen unless you have a well established company already. That is, if you want to do it directly for them. If you want to work on a game for a company like that though, then it might be possible to do some sort of sub sub contracting work like this. But I was just lucky because I happened to know someone who needed the work done. If you want to do something like this yourself, you'd still probably have to have a proven track record of some kind so they'll know you're capable of and will complete the work. That's the best advice I can offer. I'm not privy to any secret tricks to getting these sorts of contracts, and even if I wanted to take on another one, I wouldn't know where to go to do it. |
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| OK, thanks for the "limited" info. So what "other" games have you got on your resume then! Links! |
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| Grey: For Irrational Games: System Shock 2 For Sunstorm Interactive: Duke 3D: Duke it out in D.C. (addon for Duke 3D) Duke 3D: Duke Extreme (addon for Duke 3D) Blood: Cryptic Passage (addon for Blood) Deer Hunter Indoor Sports (Budget game with air hockey, darts, bowling, etc.) Fisherman's Paradise Board Game Classics For myself: Poker Solitaire Bunny Blast (interactive screensaver more than a game) You can find both of those here: http://lightning.prohosting.com/~sswift/ I'm sure there's more I've forgotten. There was a Quake addon which was sold on the web that I can't remember the name of by a group called "The Coven" that I did textures for. Most of the stuff above I didn't program, I did art and level design. I got a job as a C programmer fresh out of high school for the company that made the SpaceOrb 360 game controller, and when I left there I decided I didn't want to program for a living and started doing art. I only got back into programming after I left Irrational and started using Dark Basic to try to develop my own games. I didn't get much done with Dark Basic though. Too slow. Bunny Blast was written in DB though. You can see for yourself how slow it is if you can even get it to run. DB wasn't very stable. I actually had a webmaster write me a nasty letter for submitting it to his site, calling it a peice of crap because it would crash and ran slow. Of course it ran acceptably on my own system, but just barely. :-) |
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| For Irrational Games: System Shock 2 One of the best FPS ever made IMO. I wish EA would get off their a$$ and do something new with the SS license. Well done with your Lego project Swift :) |
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| Shawn - how did you get to do a Lego game? I had an idea for a Lego game a few years back and still want to make it. If your game is FREE, you shouldn't have an issue, as long as trademarks are properly displayed. I have never had a problem getting written permission from the Lego folks to make a free "Lego" themed game. We are currently working on a Lego themed strategy game, which is the fourth "Lego" game I have done over the years. |
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| sswift: I like it! Once I got used to it, the gameplay was pretty fun and addicting. The whole game has an extremely professional feel (of course). Very very well done. :) |
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| >which is the fourth "Lego" game I have done over the years. can you show us the games then? |
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| can you show us the games then? If you live in the USA, you can apply for beta testing.A fellow community member was also granted permission for his Lego project. This is pretty standard practice from Lego. |
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| I think he meant the other 3 games. |
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| Ah, well sorry but all of my Ti99 4/A, C64 & DOS software is no longer available. |
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| Got a crash :( --------------------------- BuilderBots.exe - Application Error --------------------------- The instruction at "0x0092027c" referenced memory at "0x00000000". The memory could not be "written". Click on OK to terminate the program Click on CANCEL to debug the program --------------------------- OK Cancel --------------------------- Tried a restart, and still got the message. Debugging it brings me to the splash screen and then it crashed instantly. (Which means that the part that displays the splash screen is fine). Athlon XP 2500+ 1.8 gHz, 1.28 Mb RAM, Windows XP Pro, Radeon 9600 Pro, DirectX 9.0c. :( |
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| Congrats - this is not only good for you, but also for Blitz and for all of us. So thanks! |
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| Mr Pickelsworth: Well there's yer problem! 1.28 Mb ram. I think my C64 had more than 1.28 megabits of ram! Well, maybe not. :-) Sorry, no idea what's causing the crash. |
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| I think my C64 had more than 1.28 megabits of ram! A commodore 64 had a whopping 64KB, which is 0.5 megabits. |
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| no it isn't, it's 1/16th of a megabyte. So pooh to you :P |
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| The C64's memory is 0.000061 megabytes, wow. Which is 0.000488 megabits. Thing is with kilobits, is they were normally used to describe transfer rates on modems and thus actually you needed a start and stop bit thus a 56kbit modem didn't yield 7K a second (56/8) it only yielded 5.6k sec absolute max (56/10). btw System Shock 2 was brilliant, fancy being associated with that sswift! Only problem was I started to play it coop with a friend of mine on two PCs but when you got nano parts (or whatever) only one of you could upgrade, how naff was that! So I played it sinlge player in the end, spooky! |
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| Thing is with kilobits, is they were normally used to describe transfer rates on modems and thus actually you needed a start and stop bit thus a 56kbit modem didn't yield 7K a second (56/8) it only yielded 5.6k sec absolute max (56/10). Less than that even, since FCC regulations on power transmissions put an effective absolute max of 53Kbit on a 56Kbit modem... You can only get the full 56Kbit on a private line that does not enter the public phone system. |
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| I used to get 5.3 and I that seemed to be the max, so you must be right! |
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| All this because I wrote a lower-case B? (Stupid Bits) |
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| No it's because your decimal place was in the wrong place! btw you've got a stinky amout of RAM for runing XP, how do you cope! |
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| Lol, it was a horrible typo, Grey Alien. I only noticed my lack of a 0 at the end when I was posting about my mysterious ability to run full HDR. I have 1280 MegaBytes of RAM. |
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| Oh OK. That's a funny amount, 1Gb + 256Mb. |
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