Ultimate Snowdown - My first game in B3D

Community Forums/Showcase/Ultimate Snowdown - My first game in B3D

AJirenius(Posted 2006) [#1]
So here's my first attempt making a game in Blitz3D. It's christmas and all so I figured you could actually enjoy a christmasgame. It's actually a demo of an entry for the Devcrunch Christmas Compo.
If you cannot see any snow on the ground I suggest you try to lower the bitdepth in the file: "resolution.dat"

This is a demoversion of 5 levels. The whole game can probably be found at Pjio when it starts up again.

Any comments are very welcome.

http://archon2160.pbwiki.com/f/USD-1.rar

Screen:



Genexi2(Posted 2006) [#2]
Not bad looking at all for a first game.


Btw, this forum automatically URLs up links and displays images, no need to tag them up.


Ross C(Posted 2006) [#3]
Hehehe, cool. I see you finally got the footsteps working then?


b32(Posted 2006) [#4]
Very nice game!


AJirenius(Posted 2006) [#5]
Thanks, anyone feels the christmas joy, throwing snowballs at one another :P


humanspacecraft(Posted 2006) [#6]
Thatīs cool!

I would prefer a control where the rotation of the character would be something like :"look towards the mousepointer". But maybe then it could become to easy.
P.S.: I īve send it to a child that i know...


AJirenius(Posted 2006) [#7]
Yes, I know the control could be a little tricky at start but people who has played it for a while says it really works great after the "learning phase".

I've had my 8yo son and 4yo daughther trying it out through the process and they are actually the best "testers" to see whether it's intuitive or not.
Some of the things I didn't have time to do though is to have an option where you could remove all the cursing they do on the field. :)


JoeRetro(Posted 2006) [#8]
Well done!

Especially for your first B3D game!

I'll have my 7 yo try it out once she gets home from school.


Fuller(Posted 2006) [#9]
Whoa. Lots of FootPrints. I was going to enter DevCrunch Christmas Compo too, but i looked at the file size limit. 8 mb or something like that.


humanspacecraft(Posted 2006) [#10]
Maybe it would be nice to make the footprints in a light grey, that it looks like walking in really dense(deep) snow.


AJirenius(Posted 2006) [#11]
Well I wanted to have this "first snow" look. Shouldn't be a problem to change though as the footsteps are just the "white texture" being masked and showing the texture beow (which is now green, brown and black)


AJirenius(Posted 2006) [#12]
I found out that some machines cannot render any snow no matter the bitdepth. Anyone in here has got the problem and can tell me what might be the problem??? :P


b32(Posted 2006) [#13]
What do they show instead? Maybe they have trouble with the transparency ?


AJirenius(Posted 2006) [#14]
They only show the texture below:
The simple technique I use to get the footprints (and the scraping, sliding and angelprints) is like this:


except for not using Alphachannel but just masking the "snowtexture" putting colour 0,0,0 where it will be masked.

But on the machines that doesnt show snow you can ONLY see the texture below (in this case the leafs and grass) making this a very very up to date game (as it seems like it will not be any snow this year). Not what I had in mind though :(

Anyone had similar problems with masking textures? Some machines solve this by changing the bitdepth of the resolution to 16 bits and voila they got snow. On other machines it doesn't even help. On my machine (and I hope somebody elses) it works perfectly on both 16 bits and 32 bits.


TomToad(Posted 2006) [#15]
I've noticed that your snow texture is 1024x1024. You might want to try lowering that to 512x512 and see if that works better. I know some cards have problems with high resolution textures.


AJirenius(Posted 2006) [#16]
TomToad: You could surely be right. Problem is that if you check the game (or the screenshot) the whole snowfield is just one texture and even if it's 1024*1024 you can clearly see how the footsteps are pixelated. Shrinking down to 512*512 would result in
1: even more pixelated footsteps
2: huge footsteps, scraping, angels unless I sit down and redo all the masking maps.

Damn you all, I wont do it! Go buy yourself some up to date graphic cards!! :P


Gabriel(Posted 2006) [#17]
There haven't been videocards which can't do 1024x1024 textures in about a decade. Even basic Geforce 2's can do 2048x2048. They're slow, sure, but they do it.

It's just two texture layers with Alpha Blending mode?


AJirenius(Posted 2006) [#18]
No, as I stated above, it's onemasked texture.


AJirenius(Posted 2007) [#19]
Hmm, can someone here confirm to me that masking textures and alphablending is the same thing (masking just brings alpha to 0 immidiatly).
Reason for some lack of snow could be that every branch on the pinetrees are masked and as there are many layers of branches some cards may not manage so many different alphalayers.. could it be the reason?


Cold Storage(Posted 2007) [#20]
Hmmmm... maybe one that doesn't say "fuck off" would be better for the kids? ;O)


sswift(Posted 2007) [#21]
Where's Chuck Norris and Optimus Prime?