Domino Toppler

Community Forums/Showcase/Domino Toppler

McSeb(Posted 2007) [#1]
Download: http://www.mcseb.ca/?page_id=4

This is the first complete release of my Domino Toppler. Essentially you place dominoes and other objects to construct complex structures and huge setups. The game is done in Blitzmax using MiniB3D and JV-ODE Wrapper.

You control the camera as you would in a RTS game, you can touch the sides of the screen, the WASD keys or the arrow keys to move around. Holding down the right mouse button lets you pivot the camera. Using the mousewheel you can zoom in and out.

Context help is shown at the bottom of the screen on how to use each tool.

Features:

- Realistic Real-Time Physics
- Two types of tables you can build on
- Simply draw a line of dominoes or draw them freeform
- Use four different domino designs or paint them custom colors
- Place bridge segments letting you build complex structures
- Add other objects like marbles and boxes
- Place devices that can be activated by triggers
- Play, pause or reset time to try out different possibilities
- Load and save your setups
- 3D Sound
- Three demo setups you can load
- IT'S FREE !!!


Screenshots:






Known Issues:
- More dominoes means more lag, going over a thousand on some systems can be demanding
- Scribbling a mess of dominoes one inside the other will eventually cause a crash
- Sound could use some work
- Physics can occur differently each time they happen
- Loading or saving when in fullscreen alt-tab's to the browse window and forgets to go back to the game, just repick it at the bottom. Haven't had time to look into a good solution for this

I've gotten into another project so I won't be applying much more time on it for now. It works, it seems stable and it's got plenty of stuff in it for now. The main goal of the project was to learn about 3D physics, I've learned a lot and am quite happy with the results. Pretty good for a solo project...

Download: http://www.mcseb.ca/?page_id=4


Warpy(Posted 2007) [#2]
Text appears as a white box on my PC, Windows Vista Business Edition.


Who was John Galt?(Posted 2007) [#3]
Brilliant game, McSeb! Works fine here on XP. I took the liberty of posting it on the list of completed Blitz games.


degac(Posted 2007) [#4]
Download it now!
[edit]
The game is marvellous! My parents (not very computer addicted...) are enthusiast, they want to play on my computer now...
Congrats!


Who was John Galt?(Posted 2007) [#5]
How do you set a cannon off i it has no button next to it?


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2007) [#6]
I love stuff like that.. reminds me of the wee quavers ant game.


Nathaniel(Posted 2007) [#7]
Loads of fun!! I really enjoy playing with physics engines. I suggest you make the Play/Pause/Reset/Stop menu always visible.


Genexi2(Posted 2007) [#8]
Great fun, anychance of an editor to allow us to use our own meshes and sounds?

Works fine and dandy here (actually thought it was in B3d until I noticed that the anti-aliasing option worked).

Just a note, unsure if yer aware of it. but some objects appear to be placed where their pivot point is at when using the move tool, which basically puts them halfway through the floor, as to which they'll either fall through or bounce upwards.


McSeb(Posted 2007) [#9]
@Warpy: Humm, very odd... Don't have Vista so I'm not to sure about this, I do have a friend with Vista Ultimate who says that Antialias makes everything pitch black. Ah Microsoft... I'll have a look but I'm not too sure what to do about it.

@Nomen luni: You can set off the cannon in two ways, firstly you can just place it and press play in the time controls.

Secondly you can place it and then add a pressure plate (in devices, the box with dominoes fallen on it) anywhere you want. After that use the wiring tool (in devices, the set of wire cutters), click the cannon then the pressure plate to link them (you should see a line between them). After that you can drop an object (domino, ball, box) on the pressure plate and the cannon will go off. Check out the Demo - Devices I included (pick load in tools) and you can see what you can create.

@Yavin: Never heard of it hehe.

@Bubble Boy: I was worried about screen clutter hence the hiding menu.

@Genexi2: The move tool needs some work but I've been working on this for 2 months straight and have had enough of dominoes hehe.

The sounds are stored in data/sounds/ , if you want to swap them with different wav files go ahead, it just looks for the filename.

The meshes are a different story, it would definitely be cool to make your own but I've been working more towards making it a game and the way it's built right now end users importing objects would be a bit tricky.



Thanks all for the positive feedback hehe, it's really motivating. I'll be getting back to it in a while, I've just had enough of dominoes for a while. This is really encouraging since this is my first try at 3D and at using physics. Blitz makes it pretty easy.


Blitzplotter(Posted 2007) [#10]
Great fun, my 7 year old was pretty impressed with it (;-)

Very good work.


Warpy(Posted 2007) [#11]
McSeb, if you're loading fonts from the \windows\fonts folder I think it's moved in vista, so I think that'd cause the problem.


chwaga(Posted 2007) [#12]
Very nice. lots of fun, I'd like to see the code from it, I could learn a lot.

by the way, how did you get anti-aliasing to work?! I just can't seem to get antialiasing to work. gah! (is it blitz 3d isolated, and functional on blitz max or something?


McSeb(Posted 2007) [#13]
In minib3d antialiasing is as simple as
AntiAlias 2


However, from what I've read it's done in software...