Taronoid - W.I.P
Community Forums/Showcase/Taronoid - W.I.P
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| Hi everyone, I'd like to present to you my first game ever, although it's still a work in progress. I've just bought BlitzMAX a little over two weeks ago and dove into it right away. When I saw the sample code's "breakout" I couldn't resist making it a bit more playable. Just a few hours later I had the first draft for my very first game ever! (I mean, i did write a few little things on the c-16 and later c-64, besides a whole bunch of intros and demos on the Amiga, but all of that is like...eh... 20 years ago?) I'd love to get some feedback, since I don't even know how a 2d breakout/arkanoid type game is received nowadays anyway, but I still love that stuff. I still can't believe I'm allowed to go crazy and try to put in everything I'd always wanted...or so...hehe. Makes me feel like a kid again. TARONOID LATEST BETA (i'll keep updating this one here!) INSTRUCTIONS: - left mousebutton = attract balls (magnet force) - right mousebutton = slowdown balls (brake force) Each force has only limited amount of energy. Replenish them by collecting falling energy resedue from destroyed bricks. Special containers have extra energy: - magenta brick = magnet force energy (debris needs to be collected) - cyan brick = brake force energy (debris needs to be collected) Here are some screenshots...     A little bit about me: I'm a developer on messiah:Studio, an animation and rendering tool. My focus is rendering/shading/particles and some animating tools. I've been mostly a visual effects artist for almost two decades, but started programming again about 7 years ago. That was all C, though, and I havn't touched any other language ever since. BlitzMax is really fun already, while I still know only very little. I'm hoping that this little showcase makes it at least a little bit interesting to help me out with one or two tips'n'tricks every now or then. What the game still needs: AUDIO! - i have not much of clue yet, within blitzMAX...just a tiny bit. Highscore - creating/saving/loading (I wished I could embedd it into the mainfile, too, but that scares the living crap out of me!) improved collisions - have some troubles with over 30 balls hitting a thin pipe, hehe. I'm using image collision and wrote a code that checks traces back the entry into the image, but somehow it doesn't always help. level codes - I want to write password access to levels. I believe it'll need it What I still want in the game: Loads of features/tricks/surprises and potentially some moving opponents, hehe! So, yeah, check it out, it's still early alpha, but I just want to know if it's any likable already or even at all. Thanks already for checking it out. |
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| Very cool, but also kinda wacky. :) Timing seems to be off, slight slow down, speed ups, etc. Are you using time based movement or frame based? What does the particle line next to the paddle do? Why would you want password protected levels? How would you solve world hunger? Only 2 weeks? I'd say you're well on your way to becoming a Bmax guru! |
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| You've got the visuals down quite brilliantly - looks fantastic! |
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| Wow, haha, thats funny, I decided on a breakout clone for my first real finished game with blitzmax too. Although i've been coding for a looong time, (dang i've got hardly anything finished to show for it :( except a huge pile of web designs on my harddrive. ) Although I didn't make mine as realistic physics wise as this one, did you use a physics engine? If so what one? here's my first "finished" game: http://blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=77421#869296 Looks great visually, and plays good too. My only complaint is the pint sized resolution, was this intended? Suggestions: - Replace the plain text with some fancy/old times looking font, right now it heavily clashes with the rest of the graphics - Make the ropes a restraint, rather than just a effect |
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| THANKS! OH GREAT, I can't believe there's already feedback! Thank you guys! I forgot to mention that I need to show Instructions as well. The speed-ups and slow-downs are features when you hit a magnet-force or a brake-force supply. -A magnet force piece (magenta) will pull all balls toward it, when hit by the ball. -A brake force piece (cyan) will put a brake force on all balls, when hit by the ball. This becomes an effectful feature in certain level designs. That's yet another thing it needs: MANY more levels, hehe! But those are still to come. So far there are 9 levels, but their design is very prototypish, of course. You may encounter problems, too, and it would be awesome, if you'd point those out! I don't even know whether any of this runs fluently on most machines. Thanks, Plash, I'm having a total riot designing it! I keep making improvements on it, too, as certain things outdate themselves during the refinement. It's too much fun, really! So thanks for the encouragment!!! |
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| Ah, Yahfree, haha...yeah, I'll have to figure out how to support different resolutions without ruining the design. I'm running a widescreen monitor and I don't want it to stretch in fullscreen. There are a lot of things I still need to learn! The big advantage, however, designing is very easy, haha! Small res...no efforts! ;) Is there an easy way to make the viewport at....I'll look into it, I think I know how I could make it! I really don't know much about anything in BM, yet. My brain's cooking from everything I've learned in the last 15 days, but I'm also addicted to the process! Can't download your zip, though... :{ HAHA, I have only a tiny bit different level design solution, using a two dimensional array only for having level index first and then the whole level as one array after with a tiny header to tell how many rows the level has. I design in within REM section and then just truncate it manually to fit in a one dimensional array... not really that tedious, but a level designer would be neat. I might try writing one... (dear god). so far it would look like that: level[num]=[header,pieces....] rem level 1 [header, piece, piece, piece, piece, piece piece, piece, piece, piece, piece piece, piece, piece, piece, piece piece, piece, piece, piece, piece] endrem ...or more realistically: level[1]=[10,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0,0,2,0,0,0,0,1,0,0] rem level 1 [10, 0,0,0,0,0, 0,1,1,1,0, 0,0,2,0,0, 0,0,1,0,0] endrem My code is a mild battlefield, that's for sure. I need to somehow defractment it a little at some point, hahaha! DOH! But it still kinda works... I mean, I'm not lost in it yet...completely. OH, by the way, I've invented a little spring system in it as well, which will be of significance later! I'll try to find some very neat ways of making use of it in the game. Initially I just wanted some balls dangle down from the top as targets, but during testing I just connected it to the paddle. Now I'm thinking it could really make a bizarre feature for later in the game. I'll keep it a surprise! :o) (It's still jittery, though, but the line drawing from spring to spring hides it a little, hehe) |
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| The rope thingy is an interesting effect. You should consider using a physics library, like Box2D. If I move my mouse up and down really fast it can shoot ball(s) through objects. I love the design, the brake and magnet thing is awesome. |
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| Yeah, it's really tough for me to figure out a fast solution for tricky collisions. If I could figure out a more efficient way to use rather the velocity of the balls for collision detection, I could avoid the trouble of fast balls skipping over them. I have already reduced the ballspeed, but I'm not sure if it's still fun, when it gets "too slow"...hmmm Uh, libraries...hmmm...I could look into that. I'm always a little afraid that physics simulations are too slow by their nature. I'm trying to reduce the computations to exactly what I need, normally. That's why I'm often having to reinvent the wheel, so to say, haha. I have no real comparison for my springs over any other, since I have never looked at any in depth. That's partially just because I was too lazy to search any deeper... tisk. :} I'm very happy you like the magnet and brake thing, too! I think it makes the game far more interactive, but it's an interesting challenge to keep it suspenseful with it, you know. I'm in the process of designing levels that would take more advantage of them. In order to master those levels, you'd have to load up on energy and economize the use then as well. I'm also thinking about putting in a self-destruct feature...or rather ball exploder. It might become yet another strategic tool to deal with certain levels. ...it's just all too damn much fun! By the way, does anyone know a way how to zoom an entire buffer efficiently for possible window resizing? ...just curious... |
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| Just released another update! (link is in first post) Tried to optimize a little, but couldn't quite solve the main slip problem. Added new features to skill modes. Gravity and top Ballspeed changes with choice. I don't think I could play it at expert level, haha. |
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| Haven't tried it but it looks neat. I would be nice if you replaced that default BlitzMax font with a proper one. |
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| Nice idea...hmmm....I'll see what I can find! :) THANX! I'm still struggling with some weird collision funk with masses of balls. Just a few balls don't have much trouble. I thought it might have been cluttered up collision masks, but resetting didn't help. Any hints are very welcome! Thanks in advance! |
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| Alright, new version with wackier font is uploaded! ;) Thanx, Grey Alien! Although I think I should probably go for a more readable font...but it's so pretty... lol |
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| Yes, nice idea. I like Breakout clones. The graphic style is nice too. |
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| Thanx, Blitz! There's a new version up, too! I found a perfect font, I think and I've changed levels 7&8, which previously were just junk from before. (makes me wonder if anyone has even tried to get that far?) |
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| "The speed-ups and slow-downs are features when you hit a magnet-force or a brake-force supply. " No.. the frame rate is slowing down, speeding up. Are you doing any time based logic or just using something like: ' frame based do cls x=x+1 flip loop 'delta time based do cls x=x+ (1*delta) flip loop |
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| I am seriously impressed with the high level of presentation on this one; even more so considering you've had Blitz for only a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, only the grey string on a grey background appears when I try it on my Vista laptop. I'm running the standard drivers, so maybe that's the problem. |
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| Oh damn... I have no idea about vista?! May be the openGL mode, I don't know... I'll see if I can find out anything. Thanks John! :) Hey MGE, I'm glad you wrote again, because I was gonna ask you to specify what kind of slowdown/speedup. I realized that on different machines it may have different performances. But the delta problem is really universal and very clever. I was thinking about checking for frames per second, but then got distracted. If you happen to have a tiny bit of code to get the delta (checking for time(fps) I havn't tried, yet.) I mean, I'm sure I could figure it out, but I would really appreciate it a lot! Thanks already! NEW VERSION is up, toO! (introducing: mavi mode) |
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| Hi Taron - Search on "delta timing" or copy and paste this link: :) http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/_search.php?bbs=BlitzMax&forum=&terms=delta+timing&method=simple&case=no&results=topic&user=&submit=Search Lots of good reading available. As you get more into game development, you'll want to use a good delta system. Grey Alien's framework has some excellent support for logic running at a constant high rate while your render loop runs as fast as possible. Very nice! |
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| "Unfortunately, only the grey string on a grey background appears when I try it on my Vista laptop." Is any other Blitzmax demos, games running on that system? |
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| Sweet! Thanks MGE! I've uploaded a new version. It has just as a test a little fps display in the lower corner. It's quite erratic, really. I have to see what's the best solution, since heavy delta changes could make the collision stuff even worse (than as I have it right now, lol). I thought about some funny ideas on how to improve collisions by stretching the ball's collision image according to it's speed and rotation, setting the handle to the location of the previous frame. Not sure how well that'll do, but I'm too time-greedy for the rotation calculation somehow... normalize motion vector, get radience and transform to degree...narf. Any tips there are welcome, too, of course! (nutch, nutch) 8) BUT THANKS first of all! I'm ten times as thrilled about it all already and I thought it couldn't get any worse, hahaha! Sweet! |
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| Alpha 0.93's up (light effect improved) (level progress corrected) |
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| Hey John, by the way, the grey string, is it also some weird diagonal stripes and all extremely sluggish? I've just tried it on my wife's laptop running winXP on an old HP-Pavilion DV4000. It totally doesn't work and shows something that reminds me of your description. Could be that that's a general BlitzMax GFX driver problem? I've tried default and openGL, but no difference...(unless that's both the same, lol) |
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| (makes me wonder if anyone has even tried to get that far?) I've played through all the levels, with 10000 lives.. ;)Playin with the new version now.. |
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| Nah its just a grey string, grey background and no text or anything showing. Seems to run fast enough. I wouldn't be overly concerned with problems specific to my setup. It's a work machine and god only knows what drivers it's running. |
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| Well, This is very very impresive indeed. proberbly the best Arkanoid game i have playd since the good old 486 age. but a few things i did noticed was: #1 When you finnish of a lvl, and the level starts to scroll up, the balls sometimes get stuck on the level devider and you lose the game, this is indeed very enoying. maybe you should freeze things,scroll up(without collisions), and then continue? #2 The -rod-(the thing you hit the balls with) feels a bit strange sometimes, several times i moved it to fast and it seemd to move trow the balls, smashing them down insted(losing it). and i also think that the collision and direction of the balls from the rod is to high, without the special -break- abilitys it is almost impossible to control the balls, i spent like 10 minuts trying to get the balls in the center on the first lvl(before i noticed the break abilitys) :P i know the idea is to use these abilitys of course, but it cinda suck to get stuck when you run out of them, and it just seems a bit to sensetive right now. anyway, thats about all i can remeber to mention right now, very nice game, very impressive work! nice graphics, and oh... love the Rope effect! :) keep up the good work :) |
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| Awesome, Xip! Fantastic feedback! #1 It looks really bad right now, because of the fluttering, but it's been purpose that you can only pass through the opening in the level devider. (opening up with blue energy beam, flattening the pipe). I'll have to make this cleaner as for all the collisions, but those are particularely bad. In my code i put the remark: '----son of a bitch collision crap------ I could, however, disable the collisions with level items, that's right! Thought about it already, but you brought it home! Thanks! ;) #2 There are some odd things happening with the paddle (-rod-), particularely after having used brake all the way (balls coming to a stop and going again afterwards). I can't figure out why that makes them pass through the paddle sometimes. But I also havn't used the collision image method on the paddle, only on ball against level items. So, yeah, definitely needs fixing. For a while I thought I'd pretend that the paddle is merely an energy field that repells the balls, occasionally letting them pass... LOL! #3 When I revisited the rountines for speed I eliminated a square root call, noticing that it could be redundant. I had it there to normalize only the X vector for the paddle to ball velocity transfer, to keep it easier to control. I think I might put it back in, because I can only confirm, it feels really tricky. Mouse is tough to control and the occasional fps slowdown hits don't make it any easier. That was some fantastic feedback, Xip, I really enjoy and appreciate it very much! I have no idea where I am at with all of this, since it is truely my first adventure into game development. Pure joy and a great learning experience already! PS: I can't wait to put the rope into action!!! I have plans! ;) |
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| New version is up! I've made a temporary "fix" for suspension of collisions on transition to the next level. I've also adjusted the ball-paddle behavior. Check it out and let me know if it feels a bit more controllable! ;) I'm contemplating to declare the pipeskipping of some balls of a large group of balls a...<caugh, caugh>...feature. Making it more appealing to maintain large groups of balls. I havn't encountered any troubles of that kind with only a few balls. Let me know, if you also believe that that's a ridiculous naughtiness of mine and should really rather fix it, hehe. 8} |
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| Delta timing is not the best method for a breakout clone because it's possible for the ball to pass through objects. Fixed Rate Logic would be a better solution. (Or delta time but with code to tracing the ball perfectly so it can't travel through things) |
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| I'm liking it already! However, I'd be thrilled to find out the reasons for the frequent timing variations in the first place! OS related? Blitz related? Anyone knows? I sure hope it's not simply a Blitz thing, actually...that would be a downer. I'd hate having to learn all the windows, gfx and audio coding from within MSVS... 8P |
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| OMG, OMG, OMG... I've just figured something out that makes my heart explode...and my head! Wasn't even that hard, but damn... I'm sure most of you know about tpixmap, grabpixmap, createpixmap,lockimage, readpixel,shr, writepixel,drawmap, right?! Holy hell...I thought I may figure this out one day, but I woke up after 4 hours of sleep and wholesome dreaming and thought, "hmmmm...let's give the whole pixmap another whirl." The help, although not exactly in your face, has much information. Enough to figure out the above functions including formats and the likes. Some experimentation does the rest. Unless you already can imagine what I'm up to, I'm pretty sure you're in for a treat! I know it is to me, but...wow...get's me all back into the deep 80s: I've got the power! LOL YES! THe joy... oh, I won't say a thing, while I think that some of you may already imagine what I'm talking about. What I'm doing now may already go into the next alpha release! 8))) |
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| "tpixmap, grabpixmap, createpixmap,lockimage, readpixel,shr, writepixel,drawmap" Not the fastest of routines, test on lower spec hardware before getting too excited. ;) |
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| Delta timing is not the best method for a breakout clone because it's possible for the ball to pass through objects. Fixed Rate Logic would be a better solution. I agree. There's not much worse than a bug which only occurs on some computers, and this is exactly the sort of game where you could very easily get that. With something like this you could probably get away with fixing the frame rate at 30fps, so even very modest machines should be able to keep up. |
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| yup, very true! And I may just keep it a little personal joy, but it's really amazing. Besides, on my machine it took so far very little of the frame rate. It's infact blazingly fast...but then...eh... 3Ghz 8core, haha...but Blitz ain't multithreaded for that one anyway... reminds me, does it multithread? I could look around, too, no worries. Thanks for the concern, though! It's really freaky to see what I'm doing run in realtime, haha! Very entertaining for sure! |
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| .but Blitz ain't multithreaded for that one anyway... reminds me, does it multithread? It wasn't when you bought it, but it is now ( or soon will be if you're not getting the updates from SVN. ) There are a few threads in the BlitzMax programming fora about the new threading features. |
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| WOW, REALLY? FANTASTIC! Because what i'm doing right now is very promissing for applications far beyond games...but then...although it's just my first, I'm totally addicted to writing games already! 8))) NEW VERSION UPLOADED! (but it's just a gimmik at this point! Try it out!) I'm very curious how horribly time taxing this gimmik is, really. On my machine it runs fairly smooth considering. I won't spoil anything, so you'll have to check it out...hehe! |
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| Nice game. I tryed it out for a few minutes and really enjoyed it. Nice effects and really high quality stuff. I noticed it a bit too dark for my lcd but maybe it's just my setting. Is it just my machine, or does it not have music yet? |
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| no audio, yet! That's something I'm planning to enjoy in great depth very soon! I hope I can wrap my mind around it just as well as the journey into Blitz so far! We shall s...hear! But I'll develop the game itself some more. Loads of ideas to get in there, because eventually I want this to play like a story, as silly as this may sound?! That one we'll see. ;) (...tiny update's up, too!) OH, and thank you very much, Jesse! That's the kind of fueling feedback I'm still shocked about, but that I can really use a lot, seriously! Thanks! And, yeah...it is a lil' dark, but it makes eventual transitions into much brighter areas all the more effectful!<nutch,nutch> ;) |
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| Very nice effect you added there, relly like it big time! to bad it is so slow, a bit supricing relly... the number of pixels changed in realtime dont seem to bad, so im guessing most of the slow-downs are math related, can it be optimized? in games like this, effects dont have to be 'correkt', some times a fake 'look good' solution might be to prefer. I dont see a framerate in the menu, but i would guess it is around 25-30. runs very slow and sluggerish. the rest of the game however is very smoth and i never noticed any fps drops in game, steddy 60+ fps. still, got to love the effect :D |
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| AH! I was quickly skimming the post to check for your machine's stats and -oh thank god- it's a 1.6Ghz.... whewwww... on 3ghz even the menu runs smoothly. Currently it's just a 50x50 ball, but I started off with 200x200 and it was running still fine, just that I thought it was too big and maybe too slow for some, hehe...dear god, that would've caused a riot, LOL! VERY good to know, though! Thanks a lot! I did have an agenda with this, since the general possibility of doing things like that opens up a whole new world of vfx applications for Blitz! This is realtime raytracing, even if somewhat simplified by the nature of it being 2d, hehe. But it still does all the same things. It can still be optimized, too, naturally...needless to mention the senseless waste of time with sin and cos on funny fading effects, but it was quick and pretty. GET THE UPDATE, I've added the fps counter to the menu and simplified the routine a tiny bit. Thanks, again, Xip! I don't even have any machine under 2.6ghz anymore, except my wife's laptop, that somehow can't even run the graphics properly to begin with (?!) why ever... :{ |
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| I must say that i think real raytracing is a bit overkill on a effect like this, not that im an expert on effects and algoritms or anything, but im sure you could make something that looks almost as good without raytracing. not to mention that -raytracing- dont mean much to most people who plays your game, and most of them (exect perhaps us programmers) wont notice much differens from som simple 'fake' variant. im not complaining tho, Raytracing is something i find very interesting, and i was working on a raytracing project my self in bmax a while back :) [edit] last version shows an Fps of 14 at menu :P i also notice it took a looong time to move from 0 fps, so can i assume it calculates an averate over a long period? after all, it dont seem to ever flicker from full 64fps ingame. |
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| @Taron if you are interested I have a lence effect in my link below that looks just like yours but should be somewhat faster. It works directly with pixmap manipulation so I don't know if you can find any use for it. Look under effects. Warning: the code is really ugly. |
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| WOO!!! CODING/CREATING IS FUN ISN'T IT!!!! I know the feeling, I've been coding a 3D-Block-Puzzle game and I haven't managed to totally screw it up like the other games, but each of them is/was/are/will be fun to make. Age 17 and counting Edit: btw I started with BlitzBasic that I got from a Game Programming For Teens book. It was only a demo, but it's what got me started in coding. Then I moved on to Blitz3D which is the EASIEST programming... program.. in the world :D Edit2: I suck at 2D lol |
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| Edit2: I suck at 2D lol Me 2 |
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| Hey Gia, that's awesome! I'm so happy to hear that the generation of coding frenzies isn't dead after all! Sometimes I felt that we were the first and last generation that truely had that urge to program! Needless to say I'm super happy to hear that you're into it! I'll have to go check out what you're doing. When I was 17 I was coding in assembler on the Amiga, which felt like a toy after having programmed in disassambler on the C64. I had to hurl myself into the guts of the Amiga1200 back then, since there was no documentation available on how to use any of the "fancy" hardware back then (GFX most of all). Those were the days... (hurl)...but still full of passion. I've just discovered 2d about two years ago, when I wrote my first (adobe) After Effects plugins (first a color correction filter, then ZbornToy!). Ever since I started feeling that there's still a powerful fun-potential in 2d, besides the ease! But then, if you've been drawing and painting all your life, then you have a certain understanding on just how cool 2d can be. Sorry for loading up the post with this..hehe...but yeah, it's also the first time I get to talk about this stuff! 8) |
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| I can understand how 2d can be cool but I am just not as good at 2d games I don't know why |
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| >Needless to say I'm super happy to hear that you're into it! I'll have to go check out what you're doing. if you are talking to me, i never published the raytraceing project, but the idea was to create an 2d isometric editor that would output old-school isometric pixel-art style graphics, and generate good looking 'realistic' shadows ammong other things, stuff that might be hard and take lots of time to dot out pixel-per-pixel, not to mention need lots of skillz. so i playd around allot with the idea about creating an renderer that took a buch of simple shapes, built them together like lego, and renderd it as close as possible to that classical old-school pixel art feeling :) anyway, i gave up on the project, it was way to much math for me... and i have a milion other projects i want to work on as well ;) anyway... back to topic xD |
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| UH, well, we can pick up on that anytime... it's silly math, actually, but painful, if you get tossed into -what looked like- a corner. To me the most hair-pulling, yet silly, problem is the Y axis flip from 2d concepts to 3d concepts. In my 3d tradition Y points upward... sounds ridiculous, but damn, that can throw you off. In orthographics there may be some extra level of pain, but then again you can just approach it exactly as 3d, but keep the camera rays parallel. That way you can still employ the three basic vector maneuvers to do it all: length, normalize, dot product and reflect. ...ok four... length, normalize, dot product, reflect and cross product... ok five... leng..you get the point. 8] Would be neat, though... but I think with those warcraft games and the likes there's already a very high quality arena for that evolution. I'm now rather curious just how far I can go with my Taronoid thingy. If I can manage to sort my ideas and keep attacking them one by one, things will be fine, BUT I SO DESPERATELY NEED TO CLEAN UP... it's getting ugly. My types are getting jam-packed with stuff that needs uncluttering. My logic has to meet consistency in order to keep any sort of overview. You know how it goes when you keep adding things here and there... in the beginning I had no idea how far I would take it, so I wasn't preparing it for this... ARGH... BUT it's still all peachy. Young enough to comb through gently! :P |
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| Hey Nate, do you mean making or playing? (sounds like a weird question, but I'm actually wondering!) |
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| The programming isn't really what I'm interested in, but the creation part I love. If I could make things (not just games) without the need to program it then I would. Actually, I want to make something that does just that. Of course that would be EXTREMELY hard to do because it involves tapping into t3h ub3r brain... which I don't know how to do lol. Also, I only know Blitz3D so that won't be enough... but I still would love to make it. |
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| @GIA I think you might be in the wrong forums then ;) and uhm... doing the wrong things in general? why do something you dont want to do? |
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| I started doing web stuff when I was like 10-11 - I'm 15 now and its still fun doing all of this stuff. (Programming, web design). I try to hide it at school so I don't look like a total know it all. But yeah I like 2d games more because I know my way around photoshop and can make decent looking graphics. But in 3d, the best thing I made was a wierd disformed-looking goblin. Its hard to deside what I like more, application/game programming(bmax, C++, java, C#, ect.) or web design/programming (php, html, css, mysql, JS). Anywho, back on topic, the game looks alot nicer with the text changes. |
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| @Xip I never said I didn't want to program, but if I could create what I wanted to create without having to program EVERYTHING then I would. What I am really wanting to make (which would have to be programmed) would be more like a dynamic "Think of what you want and then it happens" or "Your wish is my command" sort of thing. Edit: And I am in the exact right forums that I must be in to get where I want to be. |
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| Main menu doesn't even manage 1 frame a second. In game feels the same as last time. Still sluggish, fps goes from 20-50. "3Ghz 8core" Jeesh....enjoy your market potential of...1. :) lol.. God stuff though, very impressive!! |
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| MGE, hahahahahaha! Very nice feedback! Yeah, I'm spoiled. I havn't even thought of marketing it, really. It's for friends and myself most of all and I'm very happy to share it with everyone that can enjoy it, too. Fortunately pretty much everyone in my industry is running high powered machines like that, yet, even on 5 year old machines (2.6Ghz P4s) it performs decently, given that there's any reasonable GFX board in there. I have no illusions about it running on an iphone, hahahaha. But, yeah, it's sad that it is so tough on the processor. I wished I would be a better programmer in Blitz or anywhere for that matter, but give me a few more months. This is my 2.7 week mark with BlitzMax, I think, hehe...so I'll have to figure out the kinks. Do you have a decent benchmark for what runs smoothly on your machine? |
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| NEW VERSION is up! - new brick type (deadly stuff) - fps sensitive menu (I hope it works a little better for all of you!) - simplified rope (...for the same hope!) - slightly optimized collision stuff, but still sucky, damnit! - new cosmetic improvements (metal pipes around level...you'll see!) |
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| "I wished I would be a better programmer in Blitz.." You're doing awesome, we're all at the mercy of Blitzmax and DX7 on Windows. (I never use OpenGL on windows.) And yes, newer more powerful machines, or older machines with good GPU's can really spoil you. "Wow...10000 sprites, no slowdown!!! woo hoo!!!" But then you run the same demo/game on another system and you wonder why your Vic20 could handle more sprites on the screen in 1 vsync. ;) lol.. In probably 2 weeks time, I like you, was amazed with what could be done. Trouble is, I've spent the last year refining everything so my game engine can run ok on just about any system, in any resolution. (Having the game use it's own internal resolution, scaling with proper aspect ratio to the device resolution, is something you'll want to research soon.) Test high and low before you go. :) Your game's rendering performance is typical. It just seems the overall logic/rendering gets a bit coarse. Perhaps there's a need for "jitter correction" in your code. Search on that in the forums. ;) Keep at it, you're in the discovery phase which is seriously the funnest part of learning a new language. ;) |
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| Very cool, I'll be on the hunt then! Thanks, man! Have you checked out the latest, yet? |
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| Hey MGE, I'm looking into the tweening right now. It's kind of what I've expected. Very interesting! I hope this is not gonna steal my entire thunder right now (wind out of sails, you know), but I very much see the difference in smoothness. With my code, however, I think I'll have more catching up to do than slowing down to match the fps, haha. DOH! From a logical stand point I'll have to say:Thank you. From an emotional stand point I'll be cursing you for extended periods of times, haha! ;) Ode to the big loss: ...oh joyful bliss of innocent ignorance or least of all sustained and playful arrogance, why was it you who gave me power, when jitter shit turned others sour I miss you, yet, so bitterly and have you killed by MGE. Alrite..back to the grind! |
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| really nice, though I keep getting pawned, perhaps you can gain a life every level? (I lose 2 lives per level lol) |
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| Hehe..doh! Well, I still have to make some careful level design, too. That'll make things roll smoother, too. I thought about this funny concept of having an intro level, where you essentially collect your lifes for the game. I'm currently in the process of putting some tweening into it, but it's not as easy as it sounds, I guess. In some ways it's a total rewrite, I'm afraid. Anyway...I'll see what I can do. |
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| i think it is way bether if you collect lifes in each lvl somehow, rather than a pre 'life level' at first, it would beasicly mean that you would start the game over each time you feel you dident get all the lifes you needed. the lifes defenetly needs to be spread out somehow. also, latest version dident run as smoth as before, the menu was very slaggerish(in a pulsating way) and the raytracer effect was flickering very bad. |
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| LOL! :) "I'm looking into the tweening right now." I've never used tweening. Just run the logic at a fixed rate, the higher the better, (120hz, 200hz, etc..) and then render as often as possible. Ofcourse vsync is always on, so your frame rate will never be higher than monitor refresh rate unless vsync is turned off. I was using time based delta, which I still like and will use from time to time, depending on the project, but now I'm using the timing from Grey Aliens frame work. That's all I'm using from his framework (so far) because I developed my own game engine, but I'll tell you, his timing routines and his Vista ready file access handling are worth the price alone. ;) |
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| I'm trying, I'm trying! I just noticed that I have to reconstruct it all, put it in a stricter order. I have a few things at places where they don't belong, which makes it a bit harder to augment the whole thing with anything. Thank god it's still overall pretty primitve in terms of management. Title, Game, Gameover. Updates, some inbetween controls and drawings. It's those inbetweens that I have to put in a different order as well... CLEAN UP TIME... (the horror...the horror). I'd much rather understand the workings myself than using a framework, but I sense the temptation for sure! Eventually I may think the same way as you do. Let me get there first, though... (sweat) Hey Xip, did the previous version have the raytrace stuff already? I'm losing track a little... |
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| Raytrace have been in for the last 3 versions, the second last, and the one before that was the best to me. :) well, atleast... i think that is the version count, i think i downloaded all you released since i found the project. |
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| the 'raytrace' effect (why the heck are we calling it the raytrace effect?) is very laggy |
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| Because it's tracing rays, hehe! ;) Yeah, it's logically rather heavy, since it does not only deal with pixmaps, but also renders accurate lighting with specular highlights on top of reading the image underneath at vector offsets. In the last version I have an experimental check for FPS, should it go below 40 it switches to an image instead of the effect. Stupid, actually, since it may well go back and forth over the threshold, hehe... DUH! 8P I'll fix it... |
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| Or you follow my advice and dont use real raytrace, did you check out Jesse's lens effect? :) anyway, im looking forward for the next version :D keep up the good work Ps: and no, i have not forgot you ;) *wink* |
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| Tweening is best, that's what I use and swear by. but Grey Alien put a lot of effort in jitter control in his timing routines and the results are great. |
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| I'm still super shakey on all of that and can't really focus, since I have to fly to canada tomorrow and won't be back before next friday. However, I've made a quick "fix" for the menu, giving you a choice to toogle raytracing (press "r"). Believe it or not, I was even antialiasing to a small degree(4x4 convolve), but I took that off completely. Springs have only 20 links per rope... (suffer, my precious rope) I had to take out the other changes temporarily, where I've tried to already put the tweening in. But, yeah, see if that works any better. (some levels are different) Update's up! (alpha 0.99b) |
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| re: Tweening I still have never seen a 2d game (or a realistic demo with lots of moving objects) posted in these forums that uses tweening. |
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| Feels like trouble to me, too, but it could be interesting. As far as I've seen the word "tweening" used, it refers to relative shifts based on timing difference only on display, not on computing. Am I correct? So you happily compute your motion and only display the positions based on what time has elapsed to keep the current speed visually fluent?! |
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| By the way...I've uploaded an update, but it's really experimental. I decided to try controlling the mouse a bit more by just reading offsets from frame to frame and forcing the real mouse into the center. I have no clue how this will perform on a slower machine {SHIVER...bibber}. So let me know... oh...and tablet won't work that way. I may put a switch in there or find a totally different approach altogether. |
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| OH, I thought you guys were calling the string-following-the-mouse effect the raytrace effect....that makes sense :D |
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| On that one, I had the funnniest thing happening, I need that confirmed somehow, but on my machine the following happens on the menu: If I have raytraced on, it all runs smoothly, very smooth infact. If I have it off, it becomes choppy?! It actually jumps over the entire raytrace routine and still gets slower than if it was running it. Isn't that strange? |
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| what has happend on this? have been very silent lately? :S |
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| HAHA, JUST as I was about to write... New Update's up! I've just played around with flip syncing and measuring time on my own to force it into some kind of smoothness. I've managed to get the laptop going and even the 1.6Ghz Pentium M does a sufficient framerate so far. Well the menu with renderball brings it to its knees at 11 fps, but the game stays solid above 60. Except it does this damn twitch that I've seen before. It's almost like a 1 millisec difference twice a second... However, this update is mostly about smoothness. I've introduced the two evil bricks (temporary gravity increase and paddle shrink). Give it a whirl and let me know how it runs for you, please! :) Thanks in advance... |
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| New Version up (alpha 0.99f) (goto top of thread for download, just a reminder) - improved paddle collision (very reliable now, while still soft) - new level 2 |
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| New Version (alpha 0.99g) - experimenting with different paddle behaviors (I notice a slowdown with greater masses of balls...not sure if it's new?!) I currently can't tell if it starts to feel better or worse? |
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| New Version - testing the Ropes! Alrighty, the latest release is just a test for the ropes, but kinda fun to play with! In this experiment I've activated the ropes to bounce the balls back. Energy from the balls is transferred into the rope springs and vise-versa. That makes it actually fun to collect evil gravity and evil shrink! 8} Well, give it a whirl if you like. Later it will be a feature that activates the ropes for a given amount of time. I'll add some special effects to it, if they won't suck too much time. |
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| i still like my breakout game and think its fun to play but yours puts mine to shame. all i can think is 'WOW, very impressive'. keep up the good work. |
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| I hadn't seen this one before -- looks really nice! Great particle effects, professional looking graphics and animations, nice effect with the ropes and such. |
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| Uh hey, thanks to both of you! That's what I call proper fuel for my fun with this thing! :) I've got a... NEW VERSION! ...up, which has a MaxGui experiment and new rope effects. I have no idea how well this works with everyone, so...eh... all bets are off! :I |
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| Taronoid alpha 0.99l What's new: rope charged Left and right side are independently discharging, while a ball hit on the paddle charges them both. Four paddle hits result in one bounce on a rope. new designs Background bricks now start off at old basement style rockwalls, illustrating that we're moving through the structure from the cellar up. Rope charge meters show up on the left and right of the frame. new window code I finally bought the MAXgui to have some more control over the window, but still have some troubles with the focus, if I don't first run a conventional graphics window. Why? I have no clue, but any help is welcome. If I just open the new window gadget it somehow can't get the mouse into it? Obviously I'm doing something wrong, but - again - I have no clue what exactly. The cool part, however, is that I'm having a smaller gadget than the window, allowing me to have a frame around the whole game other than the shitty windows title. I wished I could control the outline of it with an alpha, but even that I couldn't figure out, yet. (I mean, I bought it yesterday, I think). My brain's cooking over... 8P random improvements I've done a number on improvements on collisions and some other smaller things. While it's all still a little flimsy, it's more and more becoming acceptable (hope,hope!?). |
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| Taronoid alpha 1.00 What's new: Backgrounds I've added a background scroller that exchanges tiles based on the levels. It's a first test with 4 different backgrounds. Ultimatively it will try to simulate the sense that you're climbing up a tower. Funny, though, since it introduces a game element that normally would be found in scroller games just as a background layer, but it's kinda fun. I'll flesh it out far more very soon! |
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| The game comes up not running in a window, looks very weird. I would suggest a window so you can minimize, close, etc. Be careful to check things on lower spec machines. I'm on a Intel 82845G, 2.9ghz, it's playable (and very nice looking!) but not as smooth as before. |
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| Added Titlebar and resize options for minimizing! (I can't recommend resizing at this point, LOL, because there are many more things I gotta figure out!) Hmmm, I wish I could control the look of the window frame a bit more or even replace it with my own gfx....hmmm. Need to learn so much more about it all! 2.9ghz and it's not fluent, hmmm, that's very weird. I checked it on 1.6ghz and it has a mild rhythmic hesitation. It's the Timertick that I rely on right now...guess that's not really reliable then... 8{ I'm currently trying to bring the content forward as much as I can, since I'm highly motivated right now, but everytime I can I will see to find better solutions for the fluidity of it before eventually focusing on it completely. However, I'm sure it'll bother me enough now to prioritize it a bit more... dangit. :P Thanx, MGE! (I was waiting for your feedback for a while, hehe! Terrifying, but very helpful!) |
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| MGE, QUESTION: What Hz is your monitor running at? |
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| 60hz.. It's not the CPU, it's the GPU. This intel 82845G can be a real pain in the ass to get things running nicely. That's why I stick with it as my main developer box, but I think in 2009 I'm going to upgrade my min spec developer box. I'd like to add more eye candy to my games so at some point you have to upgrade your minimum spec. ;) Yes, there's a ton of 82845G boxes in circulation. But I really don't know if it makes sense to worry about this GPU as much as I do. In 06-07, sure..but not so much anymore. ;) Resizing: Are you sure want to even worry about that one? ;) Millisecs() seems reliable enough. "Thanx, MGE! (I was waiting for your feedback for a while, hehe! Terrifying, but very helpful!) " lol.. Again, it's this frickin 82845G, but still, if it runs good on this box, chances are it will run fine on just about anything. ;) |
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| yikes! MEDIC!! I just ran your latest, and 2 instances of the game was in my task list, the mouse was stuck somewhere on the desktop, etc, etc. Very strange! |
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| Ooops... try it now! Hehehehe... had some struggling with the mouse offsets... |
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| Yeah, the two task thing <CAUGH CAUGH> that's something I'd really hope you could help me with! I'm using MGui now, but for some reason I must have a problem in my code layout or am missing something so that if I only went for the createWindow and createGadget way of opening my window the mouse can't get focus on the window. If I first start traditionally with setting the graphics I'm stuck with the extra window it automatically opens, but the new windowgadget gets the mouse fine. HELP! |
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| Bat's too close to the balls. Looks good other than that. |
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| Thanks, David! ;) I hope I'll be able to make sense of the movement freedom in the coming development. It'll have different degrees of difficulty, but I'll keep it in mind! |
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| By the way... by pure coincidence I've just stumbled into "Work logs" on the forum...hmmm. Guess that's where I should've posted this?! Ah well... guess we might as well continue here, unless there are objections?! Sorry about that... |
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| Taronoid alpha 1.02 What's new: Evil Bricks two new evil things dropping on you by means of... "evil power" - traps balls on ropes to drain their power and weakening magnet and brake influences until rope power is completely drained! "power drain" - drains all powers immediately Gadget Handling Initiated ways to resize the window and gadget automatically, but it's still inactive as of now. It's in the works...might cause performance hits later, though. |
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| Ofcourse you should continue posting updates here, i hardly ever watch the worklog, this is the place i look for all updates of projects i like :) I will check out your latest version tomorrow, now i relly badly need to go to beed :( |
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| Well, finnaly i tryd the new version, and i think its very nice. things seems to work as normal again, after it complitly got screwd up a few versions ago, and i have raytrace back on my menu. have you done any optimazions on the raytrace as well? it seemd a tiny bit faster to? but one thing i have been wondering for the last 2 versions, it is almost impossible to die right now, becus of the rope saving 90% of the balls, is this only for testing? btw, when did you implement those lightning thingys on the lines? anyway... its a relly nice effect, like it tons :) keep up the good work :) |
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| Hahaha, THANKS! Wow...what a relief! I'm really happy now! The game is getting a whole new twist real soon! One hint is this: Balls are currency! ;) It'll be a whole different beast, once I'll get to it directly again, but right now I'm trying to write the audio and audio creation for it. I'm actually writing a synthiziser that would let you create sounds, safe creation data and then load it into the game. The game code then has a simplified version of the synthi in it, creating the sounds based on the data. That way the file can stay tiny, while the sound can be grandious! However, I'm having a few troubles with 16bit sounds and desperately seek help, but I yet have to get any response to me questions on the other forum threads (Blitzmax/programming...). Here's a snapshot of the synth01 so far. It can already have arbitrary amount of markers to manipulate volume and pitch and works fantastically. BUT, although I'm using SF_MONO16BE the sample data is always integer 8bit as opposed to float or 16bit. No idea what the secret trick is there?  By the way, it's a pain in the bootey to write an editor. It's my first time and one wouldn't believe how many tricky things await one. Alone zooming and panning is challenging, let alone managing markers, creating and removing, sliding across each other, that's all manual labor to code, haha! Imagine how bummed out I am about the 16bit thing! |
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| GOT IT! Thanks to the heroic REDi and his mercy on my tortured brains! Although I ended up simply switching to SF_MONO16LE, but his byte pointer tip and example code saved my sanity! 16 BIT SOUND.... and a crazy synth to come! I'm so delighted, I'm gonna explode! ...gotta roast coffee beans for relaxation... 8P Sweet! What a glorious day! THANKS, REDi! |
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| So Taron...you're one of those braniac fellers ain't ya? ;) wow...Did YOU do all those graphics on your site? |
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| Ah, yep! :) I know, my smilies don't really reveal much of my abilities, haha! ;D Well, the brainiac thing is still more on the "wonnabe" side, but I'm working it! 8} I'm currently trying to hit the perfect system to do smooth pitch changes on sine waves, which is just a little more annoying than one would possibly think. I realized that 440 or a perfect A is actually a sine over 100 samples or sin(step*3.6). If I now adjust the frequency by multiplying the step * 100/pitch, it spits out the proper length of the complete sine wave, but without fraction. As a result the rounding error will be audible. I've just started dealing with it, but it's a really good example for why I'm not really a brainiac and can't even pretend to be just yet. (LOL) (let alone my failure to get Taronoids run smooth on slow machines, haha!) By the way, I've also done all the music that you can find on or through my site! ;) |
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| Woops, got it, HAHAHA, maybe I am a brainiac after all. pseudo code would be like: sin(step*100/floor(100/pitch)*3.6) The idea is to just quantize the pitch to fit the possible step amounts. Took a few minutes to think about... lol. |
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| (volume: red) (pitch: yellow)  |
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| Most intriguing things you've come up with :) Looking forward to your work, BTW excellent idea with the rope having a limit on the reflectiveness. |
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| "I'm actually writing a synthiziser that would let you create sounds, safe creation data and then load it into the game." Something like this? http://www.indiesfx.co.uk/engine1.php |
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| I don't see how they have their engine available to games, but I might just still be tired or HORRIFICALLY PISSED OFF at that MOUSE EVENT failing, not sure. My synth will have a pure engine source, which would get compiled with the game to create all the sounds from scratch at the beginning of the game. This way no soundfiles have to get attached to the file or rather delivery in any form. Once you start the game, it will create all audiofiles on the fly, probably filling up memory to any conceivable amount in full 16bit quality...lemony fresh effects and potentially even music, but I'm not sure if I get to continue this, thanks to THE MOUSE EVENT skipping crap! If I only knew what I've tapped into with that one? The weirdest f#$king thing is that it only happens under very specific cirumstances, yet, I can only reproduce the first appearance of it, yet, super reliabaly. If you have managed to edit our the first occurance of the bug, you may edit for ever, making infinite amounts of markers with the wildest dragging frenzy and nothing fails. Except then...suddenly...for the same bizarre reasons, it may happen again... and what happens doesn't make the program fail, it only makes the events fail except timertick... Anyone ever encountered anything like that? |
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| BTW - you may want to be able to save the sound data in external file formats such as "ogg" for those who don't use the Bmax internal sound system. ;) |
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| hmm...i've briefly tried finding some info about how to save both ogg and wav...well, both format and (don't laugh) how to go about it in bmax in the first place, hehe (it's ok if i laugh!). ;) If you have some helpful info, I'll be all over it! 8) |
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| OKAY! So now I've dug up the wav format, dug through blitz docs to find how to save anything and found banks, wrote a little rountine that copies an array with the wav format into the bank, copy the whole sample after it into the same bank and simply save the bank with incremental filenames (albeit overwriting former files...didn't get to learn about checking files, yet...or...eh...didn't get to care about that just yet. Eventually I think this should rather be a gimmik in the first place...i mean, saving wavs!) ANYWAY, now you can generate funky sounds and save them as wav. (Somehow I still have a tiny trouble with some minor format issues, but it works as far as I can tell). SO HERE IT IS: (just a little flavor of what's to come, of course...) Synth01 (or the "mini taronizer") - Alpha 0.1 INSTRUCTIONS hotkeys: SPACE - plays sound S - saves sound (incrementally, but always starting from 0 overwriting old sounds) DELETE - removes marker (make sure you have one selected, lol...I'm still cleaning up!) ESCAPE - quits interface: left click on wave display allows you to drag it around in the display. right click on wave display is x and y zoom, while x will stay around your mouse pointer. mouse wheel on wave display switches on a button free zoom (ROFL), but rolling the wheel should zoom proportionally. RED BAR is for volume markers YELLOW BAR is for frequency markers CYAN BAR is for filter markers left click onto any bar will create a marker under your mouse or select the one that's already under it. right click on the bar will allow you to drag the value of the currently selected marker on that respective bar. middle click will move the currently selected marker to your mouse X position on that bar. The Textfield in the upper right corner not only displays the value of the currently selected value, but allows you to enter a new value for it as well. The upper left corner of the window shows the toolbars reset buttons for the display, hopefully speaking for themselves. In fact I hope all of them can speak for themselves... at this point it's so primitive, you shouldn't encounter too many questions?! One thing about the filters, though. I have a rather primitive lowpass filter in there, which I've elevated in power by adding BIPOLAR as option. The filter than passes forwards and backwards over the sample, really filtering it down. But BEWARE of the resonance, which I currently havn't weighted, yet. You will have to adjust the volume of your sample to prevent it from clipping too much, unless you like that sort of thing, hehehe! 8) Have fun! It's truely merely the beginning... Be gentle at this point and don't just try to break it, because you will succeed. Instead explore... It's already a lot of fun, but not only still full of quirks (sound is fixed to (60000samples/16bit mono/44.1khz), marker management is still a little sloppy, filters are unbalanced), it's nothing compared to what it will become now! |
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| Closes right as it opens.. |
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| Woops, just uploaded a new version... (I'm running winXP64, hope that's not the trouble) |
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| same thing here. I guess with the new version. |
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| holy crap... I just noticed on my other machine... argh! I'm exploring what the source of that problem might be??? Very wild... ...it runs perfectly on my xp64 system. Hmmm... |
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| OH GOD, I'm so stupid... the stupidity!!!!!!!!!!!! I forgot to incbin the toolbar.png! hehehe... (embed is probably the proper word!) Works now! 8P (the wav files it saves work fine on media classic player and the likes, but the new windows players appear to not liking it much. Try to open it in any other player or tool...it should work!) |
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| Wow this is awesome! Suggestion: disallow playing the same sound more then once at the same time! It tends to get all distorted the more times you press play. |
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| Hmm.. Sometimes it gets stuck for a few seconds when I try to play a sound that goes in then out, with fading near the end. You should also be able to save the synth data in its own format - so we can keep tweaking the sound! EDIT: I think the lag is from all the lines being drawn, if I move off to the right it doesn't stop at all. |
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| Ah, sweet! Thanks, Plash! :) I purposely have space play freely after having had it as play&stop and really disliked it...besides occasional joy of layering sounds by doubleplaying them, BUT you just reminded me that I could simply have it play from start only...hmmm.... I also thought about piano-keys for some fun with it. Hmmm... Ok, I'll do the play from start thing with space then and give it whirl. The synth data thing WILL be the big deal, which is why I'm stalling on it for a moment, because I still have to make perfect sense of the construction. This is merely the skeleton as it is now, since it later will have limitless waveform blending, layering and mixing as well as various vibrato and arppeggio functions. Not to mention the creation of entire soundbanks, naturally. So, yeah... it's phase one and I'm so damn perfectly thrilled right now, I can't even begin to explain how much! 8))))) Oh, and I have the perfect wav format now implemented, in case I forgot mentioning that?! (at least I believe it's perfect now) Other funky revelations that put me into a state of mild shame: 44.1 khz means it's 44100 samples per second... DUH! So now I'm also adding a nice grid for the background as orientation. I'm also thinking about snapping options. I also have to think of elegant implentations of all the new functions. The interface will be one hell of an adventure, no doubt. And I really want to keep it as simple as it's humanly possible. 8I THANK YOU, once again! I'm very happy you have some fun with it already. As for any lagging, well, I'm still on my little monster machine and can't easily bounce around to check performance anywhere else, but it's really just a sample creation tool and doesn't have to be 100% at all time. I will try my best to make it fast, though. Some formulas have occasional challenges, but overall at least it's stabil right now. I'm sure it's possible to optimize the hell out of this one! 8) |
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| new synth version is up! ;) |
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| I like how play works now ;) When you move around on the screen the lines that represent the data seem to change in size.. |
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| Oh, hold on, I'm uploading a new version in a sec. It has also a little playbar and space has changed one more time, but you'll see why. I'm sure you'll like it, too! :o) Looping is activated right now, but I'll make it an option later, too! |
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| The playbar is not very accurate o.O Are you using a slight delay or pollsystem in your main loop? You probably should, when it is playing I cant click anything or get it out of the loop. |
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| Really? Hmmm... might be again a cpu speed thingy, because it's solid rolling here...hmmm... damn. AH well, back to the drawing board... :P Thanks, Plash, I'll upload a simpler version real quick... |
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| Alright, it's just a temporary fix, but it should work fine... (new synth version is up) The problem is the timertick event. I can't tell why it has priority over all the other events...not sure how it works, I guess. Maybe it's a waitevent question? No clue... I'll try stuff. (don't forget, I'm truely a total noob to Blitzmax or any of this kind of programming, really. Bear with me...) |
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| Accurate now.. Once I got it to crash by zooming in really far then back out again. EDIT: If I pause it pressing pause/space should continue to play from where it left off, not stop & replay. If you scroll off to the right, so you can no longer see the lines, the red, yellow, and blue channels and lines that make up the other parts of the system get lighter/decolorized. |
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| HAHAHAHA, REALLY? That's cool, I gotta check! Man, I feel like I'm totally on an adventure journey. Thanks for walking along, Tim! Alright, I'm writing the first fileformat right now, so hopefully in a few minutes or rather hours we can load and save sound settings! 8)))) I'll check into the other quirks right after! |
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| Done! 8))))))))) I can't believe it.... ...I just wrote a fileformat! My first very own friggin fileformat. Insane. Ain't it the simple things in life! 8D I'm making a quick upload, but will try to figure out file requesters in the meantime. For right now "F" saves the data and "L" loads the data. No failsafe yet, but u may try it out! ;) |
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| Got it... now with filerequester and everything! :))) Syntaron - alpha 0.3 "S" - brings up save requester (choose between .syt or .wav files) "L" - brings up load requester Yeah, ba..well, I'm happy! 8) |
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| This new version uses 99% cpu when events are being processed, or when the sound is playing. For example, if I just move the mouse around the main area the cpu usage will jump up to 94-99%. You should atleast have a delay of 5-10 in your mainloop to avoid this. Again, in this version, I can't pause the sound as it decides to no longer receive any events. You should start a new thread for this ;) |
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| aha...interesting! I'll try that! Thanks! I don't think I have the threading going, yet, in my version of max (1.30)? But particularely in this synth, I'd be scared to death of it! |
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| New version is up, but I'm not too thrilled about the delay. It works, I guess, but it just makes it feel a little more...ehm.... choggy, taggy, chewy maybe? What kind of system are you running? You didn't get to manage running it on a cellphone, did you? 8))))) |
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| I tried to run your synthy thingy. I pressed the play button and the sound never stopped. Took over my system, nothing could stop the sound, not even task manager. I had to reboot. Will try this again in a few revisions. ;) Looks very cool though!! :) Make a new thread for the sound thing! It deserves it! |
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| I've uploaded a new version just now! Where you running it on your minimal system??? I've tried it on the 1.6Ghz Pentium M with websites running in the background (couldn't stop my wife, haha). It ran fine. It did spike every now and then, but I was able to loop edit the sound while play, load and save and no troubles at all... Let me know if it's any better now... (?!) With the threaded stuff I wait until BMax goes official with it. I feel uncomfortable experimenting with experimental versions, while I still feel shakey on the released one. |
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| I tried to run your synthy thingy. I pressed the play button and the sound never stopped. Took over my system, nothing could stop the sound, not even task manager. I had to reboot. Will try this again in a few revisions. ;) Looks very cool though!! :) Aye, that's exactly what happened but I was able to task manager it.2.4Ghz AMD 2.5gigs XP SP2 Trying the newer one.. |
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| Nope.. still blocking my actions and using 95% cpu when its playing. I've never personally used hooks (that's what your using, right?) but a mainloop always served me well. There could be issues using a mainloop to gather events, with the way you play the sample though. |
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| Shhesh...that's a good system! Wonder if the Athlons are not so happy about the compile? I do have a super noisey Opteron here, which runs two AMDs but only at 2Ghz each. I could throw it on again and check. I, however, felt that the old laptop would make a harsher test. Hmmm... god, I hate that Opteron. Ah well. |
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