Rocks - bullets, asteroids and bad guys!
Community Forums/Showcase/Rocks - bullets, asteroids and bad guys!
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| Some fast arcade fun... http://www.ooeyug.com/rocks/ Hi everybody. Here is a little asteroids game that I started back in November. The core game was finished right around the beginning of January but title and support code take far longer than they should! Give it a go, feedback is welcome. Windows and Intel Mac downloads at the above website.    |
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| Looks really nice! There was some major difficulties when I tried to switch to full screen mode - the games freezes and if you try to run it again -> nothing happens - unless I deleted the config- file. Also, menus seems to work randomly with or without keyboard, this was a bit annoying. Win XP Intel Core2 Quad Q9450 Geforce 9600GT |
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| thanks John, menus seems to work randomly with or without keyboard can you tell me specifics? menus are only navigable by cursor up and down. my guess is you might be referring to the quit menu which has yes and no horizontally placed? maybe I should make those vertical.... or is there something else? which gfx driver (gl,dx7 or dx9) were you using at the time and have you had any other blitz games do this when switching to fullscreen? also what kind and size of monitor do you have? |
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| awesome game! Nice particles too. If you are open to suggesions then I think the light sprite for the glow of the player is a bit sudden and not rounded enough. Maybe it should fade in quicky rather than just appear when you press the throttle. :) Its really nice how it is though. |
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| Very nice game !!! congratulations !! |
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| It's a great game. I used keyboard controls and put the rotation speed on a low value. I think you got the gameplay balanced quite well, with the different types of enemies and the increasing difficulty. |
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| >can you tell me specifics? It seems that the cursor keys don't work in menus unless you move the cursor near to the menu texts. |
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| Quite good. - It's a crazy state of affairs when a 1.6Ghz CPU can't handle asteroids. But the frame rate was too low on level 4 onwards. Still the unspoken Bill Gates cult is to bring a CPU of any speed to it knees. What's your next project? "hello world!" for CPU = 3.6Ghz or higher? I take it this was more an exercise in gfx programing rather than optimising gameplay! - All asteroids games improve abit when the frame of reference shifts rather than the player's ship. Especially this one where power ups tend to loiter around the edges, and disapear just before returning to the middle. - There's no drag on the ships velocity? Don't know if it just I've only played asteriods with ship drag and I'm used to it, but I find it helps, otherwise player can never stop moving. This prob goes away when ship is velocity frame of reference. |
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| thanks everybody! @nate, I'll take a look at the thrust... press t for an alternate thrust gfx although it doesn't address your comment. @foppy, thanks... I think mouse plays better though at least once one masters the quick 180 thrust stop. @john, yeah, I missed setting a button default in the "new game" menu. otherwise it should be pretty constant when using only cursor up/down to navigate. @meemoe_uk All asteroids games improve abit when the frame of reference shifts rather than the player's ship. Especially this one where power ups tend to loiter around the edges, and disapear just before returning to the middle. I've coded those before but I wanted this to be a standard asteroids game, I would always get stuck in feature over load and just wanted to write something small and simple. There's no drag on the ships velocity? nope, just as in space. this was a specific fight characteristic I wanted but I can understand that it's not everybody's cup of tea. One needs to master the 180 degree trust stop as mentioned above :) I take it this was more an exercise in gfx programing rather than optimising gameplay! hmmm, actually it's quite optimized... even past level 10 I don't see any slow down on my 2003 4th gen AMD Athlon with a 2005 AGP Radeon x850. I was even able to play it ok on my moms P3 but I would say the frame rate was too low at levels too. but that is a seriously old computer. The game defaults to OpenGL and "normal" particles, please do try changing those. Do you by chance have on-board Intel graphics... or what video card do you have? I have profiled the game on a number of computers, the remaining performance problems are usually draw related.... the objects are lines not images so that's 3 quads for each line and standard blitzmax drawimage for all the particles. also remember this is not standard 2d asteroids with a 2d card... by chance have you played GridWars or Annihilation on your machine, how do they compare? Could you run the game for me and when it gets slow hit "F12" and play a little longer then quit the game and send the resulting file "Rocks stats.txt" to my email address you get from clicking my account name above? anybody else have any performance issues? |
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| I just uploaded v1.0.1 that fixes 2 menu problems that John talked about. does anybody else have any "Fullscreen" problems? |
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| *** not so useful reply warning ***, just felt like replying. >I would always get stuck in feature over load and just wanted to write something small and simple. It would have been smaller and simpler to do ship reference frame, than glowy vector draw gfx! >(about drag) nope, just as in space. Stuff does drag in space, moreso when theres loads of asteriod dust around. Otherwise stars would never collapse into existance from dust clouds and we wouldn't exist. >actually it's quite optimized... even past level 10 I don't see any slow down I meant optimising gameplay fun, not optimising graphics speed. > 180 degree trust stop What that? I don't know what gfx card this PCs got, but I know it's a old piece of junk by todays standard. Even so it should be able to play 100 games of asteroids simultaniously. I'll do that f12 thing and send the file, but right now I'm off to bed, I'll do it tommorrow. |
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| My 1.7Ghz computer has no problem with this game, it runs smoothly and so far I got to level 7. Perhaps what is more important is indeed the video card (mine is a 256 MB Radeon 9600). By the way I think this game is lots of fun. I like how some skill is involved in steering the ship around. You can fly very fast but you can also steer carefully past rocks to grab a bonus. |
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| v1.0.0 Win32 OpenGL 07A878E0 07A87520 ed: 6224, max: 76 eu: 967, max: 79 getp: 83, max: 4 pd: 6764, max: 77 pickups collected: 9 pickups lost: 9 pickups shot: 14 player shots missed: 810 pu: 5918, max: 102 pu1: 4669, max: 101 rc: 28, max: 2 rc1: 12, max: 1 rd: 6053, max: 86 ru: 179, max: 3 player shots: 1304 It's those large explosions that cause choopy framerate. - Isn't it wrong that powerups are destroyed when shot, but they originate when rocks are hit, where the player is concentrating shots? |
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| Thanks Foppy. I didn't want people to sit in the center like many would do in the original, so the design was to force people to learn to fly to get the item. so, that's what I was going for... I'm really please you like it. Thanks meemoe_uk for getting that info... those max numbers are very high, can you tell me what your video card is and what your cpu load is when not playing? your particle updates are really high, what particle level are you running? (low,normal,high) (it seems I forgot that in the stats) Isn't it wrong that powerups are destroyed when shot not only are they destroyed... when you shoot a green or red one it will lower that powerup for your ship!. but that's exactly what I wanted otherwise it would be just another bullet game where you just shoot indiscriminately at everything. this game is about flying and targeting your shots. now of course you have to sometimes clear an area so you just blow everything away to make some room but then you control your shooting and build your ship back up. I really enjoy the balance that part of the game creates. especially in higher levels where you have to decide *when* to just shoot everything and when not to because sometimes starting a level will mean lowering your ships capabilities which sucks at those high of levels. |
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| Beutiful game, love the interface. Great Job. |
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| Nice glowing lines effect, looks cool. Have not tried yet though. |
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| particle settting : low G card : SiS M650 idle CPU load = about 3% >shoot a green or red one it will lower that powerup for your ship!. but that's exactly what I wanted Oh, that's going to take me a while to adjust to! |
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| Yum - Nice Glow! Thanks for the Shout :) (sorry I could not help you any more). |
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| I really like the glow effects. I am trying to figure out how to do that myself, as I would like to remake some of the old Vectrex games I used to play with my son. |
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| @Dmaz nice game. One day I will take the time and add ass many more options options to mine. @GaryV you can download the Indiepath module from my signature link it does similar graphics if not the same that this one is doing. it include source if you care. |
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| yeah, Indie's fantastic texturedpoly.mod (customized for doug S's dx9 driver) was used to draw the lines. Most if not All tools used in the game are listed in the credit screen. I be happy to answer any questions I can about any of them. @Indiepath, you bet thanks, no problem on the other thing... it made for a fun/good exercise that open up some other possibilities! |
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| I was wondering (I should have coded some stats for this), who uses the keyboard over the mouse? also, has anyone found the flight training to be helpful? |
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| My opinion is that this type of games are lots of more enjoyable to play using keyboard. The idea of thrust-turn-thrust just is missing using mouse - and the game starts to feel like basic shoot-em-up. |
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| I also play with keys. I haven't tried with mouse though. But in other games I preferred the keyboard over the mouse. |
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| That is a seriously nice looking version of Asteroids, and it plays great as well! Definitely a game I'll be keeping :) I'm using the Keyboard. |
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| I played this a bit, it looks quite nice, nice particles and lines and stuff, but I found the mouse control a bit confusing. |
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| I really prefer the mouse since it's a variable type of turn... I can whip around 180 degrees to thrust, stop and shoot. I think the keyboard is just too limiting but that's me. :) You can also redefine the thrust and fire buttons in options or play a high bred of mouse/keyboard. IH, can you tell me more about what you found confusing? maybe I can tweak it... wow, Foppy is kicking some butt on the highscore table! |
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| @Jesse - thanks for bringing those all together - I hope they help others. |
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| Sorry - slight derail.. @GaryV - I developed the modules for other purposes but when BMAX first game out I flirted with the idea of remaking MineStorm - The game works but I never finished it. I might be able to help you out with overlays etc..  |
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| Minestorm was SOOO cool on the Vectrex! I like this Asteroids clone though. Well done. One comment: try to use more bright colors. I think the yellowish/brown asteroids in particular don't look as cool as they can be. But that's just nitpicking :) well done! |
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| Wow, that looks great Indiepath. It is a shame you never finished it. |
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| This game is class, well done. Looks superb at 1680 X 1050, pin sharp and silky smooth. Asteroid type games should be played with an analogue device for obvious reasons - mouse, trackball or analogue gamepad. |
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| dmaz, I'm finding it hard to go through the tutorial. The ship just moves too fast. |
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| Uhfgood - I tried the tutorial as well but its just better to jump into the game and start playing. |
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| This game is awesome... Love it... I dont even have one criticism at all Looks beautiful, plays great (love the reverse thrusters btw) one suggestion (because it happened in game) if you shoot a mine * and its right next to an asteroid it should seriously blow the sh*t out of the asteroid :) Awesome work! |
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| I did seem to see some glitches in the tutorial levels. If you finish the first one too fast, then the words on the next level run into those that are displayed from the previous. That is, if there's already text there and you start a new level it writes over the top. It also kind of acted weird. For instance I was playing for hours to try to get those 6 powerups in the second basic training level. Then it would just glitch (like I would get a pickup when the level was changing) and instantly it became a different level than I had seen. I can't really explain it much clearer than that because I can't reproduce the problem exactly. But just sometimes it would jump levels, and sometimes the text would overwrite existing text. Please, please, slow down the acceleration speed! (That is it gets really fast way too fast... I can't really control it) That being said I did play the actual game, and it totally kicked my butt. Although the sounds and graphics and stuff are really cool. I'm actually going to give it a review tomorrow morning, and even with the problems I've had, going to give it some positive press. |
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| http://reviews.gamesafoot.com/2009/06/02/rocks-can-you-smell-what-the-rocks-are-cookin/ |
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| @Uhfgood Thanks a lot for the review! it's really appreciated. Then it would just glitch (like I would get a pickup when the level was changing) and instantly it became a different level than I had seen. yeah, the training levels were kind of last minute... I've also seen that bug. to be honest, I probably won't fix it because it's doesn't seem to happen all that often. I would really like to call this one done!thanks to the rest of you too for the kind comments. on the "too fast"... I have gotten from others so maybe I should make some changes...? if anything, I think I would add a sensitivity setting for thrust power in options. Uhfgood, were you using mouse or key control for most of you playing? |
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| I used mouse. And yeah thrust sensitivity setting would be awesome! I tried once with keyboard, and it didn't seem to help so I went back to mouse since it's a bit easier with the mouse. |
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| it's a bit easier with the mouse that's what I like to hear... :) |
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| dmaz, Sorry about bringing back an old post. You mentioned using Indiepath's Textured Poly module. Can I ask how did you get this working with DX9? If possible would you mind posting your changes?? Nice game BTW. |
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| just popping this back up as I re-did the website and will be looking for ideas to for v2... please download Rocks (or even Texpac) or comment here http://ooeyug.com/rocks ps: response to Matt's question above was posted here: http://www.blitzmax.com/Community/posts.php?topic=93288#1066249 Last edited 2011 |
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