Dark Recall - Alpha Test
Community Forums/Showcase/Dark Recall - Alpha Test
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| Hi all, Just recently put the the web page for my latest project: Dark Recall This is a Hybrid Graphic / Text adventure game set against the backdrop of a deep space colony, where a natural disaster leaves the colonists scrambling to get off world before it is too late.  There are a couple of YouTube videos on the page, showing the menu and a mini clip of the gameplay. Check out the web page here Alternatively you could download the Alpha of the first few minutes of play Here Last edited 2012 |
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| Sounds interesting. I have one recommendation: I have sensitive eyes, and I know I would have a difficult time play this game over long period of time. You might want to change that font or remove the white background from the font. But, I'm only one person. Good luck! Jason |
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| Hi Jason, You might want to change that font or remove the white background from the font. Thanks for taking a look. You can change the font in the options menu. You can also adjust the SFX / Music volume independently and even lose the plasma fire background and adjust read speed from there. Last edited 2012 |
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| i cant really get what the game is like as the video shows mainly an intro sequence and the screenshot is the options menu |
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| i cant really get what the game is like as the video shows mainly an intro sequence and the screenshot is the options menu It is a bit short, but there is a link to download the Alpha to play with above and Here |
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| Hiya, The menu screen loads then after a second or 2 the screen alternates between a magenta/pink colour and green. The music and stills play throughout the all of the next part - although I can't see the visuals, I can select to start a new game and judging by the variation in music the new game does start. While in the game ( that I cannot see ) I press Escape, and I can see the 'Exit and Save' menu with the mouse pointer and a menu with a static background. I can select from the menu, any selection returns to the alternating colours again. I can press Escape at this point to quit and the game exits. Sony Vaio VGN-FW31M. Hope this helps. |
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| The menu screen loads then after a second or 2 the screen alternates between a magenta/pink colour and green. Whoah, that seems a little strange. I wish I had more machines to test on, as this is a little strange. What depth do you have your desktop set to? The code I use to set the GFX mode (in part) using DX drivers) is: Local XRes:Int = DesktopWidth() Local Yres:int = DesktopHeight() Local DEP:int = DesktopDepth() Local GR:TGraphics = Graphics(XRes, Yres, DEP, DesktopHertz()) Also if you have a minute, could you download the demo of 'Call of the Ninja' and see if that works on your machine or suffers horrible magenta death too. :/ Could anyone else with a Radeon based GFX card test to see if it goes boom too? Again the link to download the Alpha is Here Last edited 2012 |
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| i played to the end of the demo, text games can be good when you are making big choices but this game felt kinda on rails. Does it open up later on? |
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| text games can be good when you are making big choices but this game felt kinda on rails. Does it open up later on? To be honest, although I have mapped out the story line offline, there isn't much of it in the engine at the moment (The engine is in Alpha). Hence there isn't much variation in demo, and the choices are currently trivial as they are there merely to test the engine. Hopefully the coming weeks will see more of the actual branching storyline make it into the builds. Last edited 2012 |
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| I grew up on infocom games, so I'm looking forward to this. Good luck, Lee! Jason |
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| I agree with Jason W - I found the font very hard on my eyes after a while (I know it can be changed) - the semi transparent "glow" combined with the swirling light backgrounds not helping. I also found the way each word fades in very irritating - not least because I was continually having to wait for the next word to be rendered (I read quite fast). Looking very interesting though - clever use of highlighted text to prompt the player, and the sound effects/music are pretty cool. |
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| Hi All, There are some additional customisations you can use to make things easier: The + / - keys will increase or decrease the reading speed as you go. If this isn't fast enough though, you can make the entire paragraph auto complete by right clicking (or pressing enter). Also the word-hint fade-in can be immediately triggered by either pressing the middle mouse button or pressing space. If you can suggest any extra customisations I can add, that would be great. :) Last edited 2012 |
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| Hiya, In Call of the Ninja, I can see and play the game as expected ( cool game btw ), however the magenta and green is in the vertical widescreen borders on the left and right. By the way I'm using Win7. |
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| the magenta and green is in the vertical widescreen borders on the left and right. Hmmmm. Still can't think of why that might be. :/ I suppose it must be a driver thing (on PC it's using the Framework brl.d3d9max2d), as I'm only using the native BRL graphics commands. Do you have any problems running the blitz examples if you add the above framework or the DX7 ones? I usually find the DX ones to be better supported than the OpenGL ones. |
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| I've never seen it before. All other code that I have, BlitzMax examples and all my own code, run perfect with or with using the Framework command. The Framework command is just a reduced compilation of the same files, very unlikely to cause this strange behaviour. Are you using some kind of widescreen border control at all? My desktop is 1600x900, but the game doesn't appear to run in that screen resolution due to the borders. What's strange is that the game screen does show correctly for a moment before going to magenta/green, and I can see the game screen when the game wants to display the 'Exit and Save' menu. Very strange indeed! |
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| Ok, this is a very cut down version of the menu screen (i.e. there is no menu), but the mode setting is the same and the commands being used are the same, no extra weird stuff. Try pasting this into MaxIDE and see if it runs ok. Last edited 2012 |
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| Hiya, Blue alphad 'spark' images randomly pasted behind the word 'Test' centred on screen. In debug mode its windowed, in release mode its fullscreen. Works perfect. |
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| Works perfect. Humph, that figures. Thanks for testing it though. The only other stuff that's in there is things like the Blide.FontMachine etc. But I can't see why that would make a difference. For sanity purposes, I recompiled the exe as a separate OpenGL and DX One: Download (just unzip them into the same dir as the demo and try them both to see if they are different in any way (zip contains DXRecall.exe and GLRecall.exe) Dunno if it will make a difference though. :/ Last edited 2012 |
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| The OpenGL one dies before it evens starts - black screen, no sound/music, just a system mouse pointer, can only exit using the task manager. As the Ninja demo loads and plays it gives me a chance to help narrow this down. I've looked really close and as the game starts, when the front screen fades in very quickly, the side borders alternate very fast until the screen is shown, the border flashing then stops, then starts again as the screen fades back out. When the menu slides in from the left, the colours alternative in time with the steps taken to slide the menu across. I also notice in the Ninja game that the borders are very narrow. If I make an 800x600 fullscreen then the borders are considerably wider by comparison. What type of resolution algo is used ? |
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| The OpenGL one dies before it evens starts - black screen, no sound/music, just a system mouse pointer, can only exit using the task manager. Sorry, my bad. I forgot to switch it back to Pack Resources. Could you re-download and try again: Download Dark Recall doesn't use any borders control. But Call of the Ninja uses the ODD.Aspect Modules. |
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| The GL version works perfectly. Is the Dx version DirectX7 only ( from looking at the little test example above ) ? I'm on Win7 and I'm sure that DirectX7 is emulated. |
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?MacOs Framework brl.GLMax2D SetGraphicsDriver GLMax2DDriver() Import "-framework AGL" Import "-framework OpenGL" Import "-framework OpenAL" ?Win32 Framework brl.d3d9max2d SetGraphicsDriver D3D9Max2DDriver() 'Framework brl.GLMax2D 'SetGraphicsDriver GLMax2DDriver() ? Is what I used (swapping the remmed section for the GL Build). So it seems like a driver thing... :/ Last edited 2012 |
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| Really strange as I've never seen it before. I'll see if I can reproduce it and narrow it down. Maybe large images? Last edited 2012 |
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| Maybe large images? The largest images used in the game are 1680x1050 (background images). But none of those are used in the Menu, just the Spark image, Logo Image, and the Blide.Font stuff. One possibility is rotation. The Spark rotation is set by Y position, so setting rotation to > 360 or perhaps < 0 might make the driver go wacky. Try going to the option screen quickly on the one that goes funny, and turn off 'Plasma Fire'. (Down Arrow twice. Enter. Down Arrow once. Press Enter.) In terms of menu, the only commonality between Call of the Ninja and Dark Recall is the use of the Blide FontText. Last edited 2012 |
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| I had an idea of what it might be: Could you re-download and try again: Download It's just the DXRecall.exe one. |
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| Hiya, You've fixed it in the last post. But its running at about 4 or 5 frames per second for some reason, at worse 1fps when you go to start the game and the text is ( or would be ) nicely fading onto the screen, with the girl on the left. The GL version is liquid smooth as expected. I tried turning the plasma off and it didn't make any difference at all. The laptop isn't a slouch and is more than powerful enough for Max2D. Good brain teasers these problems eh ;-) EDIT - What is it that you changed? EDIT2 - I did as you suggested in the first 'bad' version. Although I must have pressed down only once, and I could see the LoadGame option screen. No other options seem to show up, but again, if the fps is low in that too, its difficult to tell whats happening when blind. Last edited 2012 Last edited 2012 |
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| So what I changed was a function that faded out the screen. It had a Viewport call that (wrongly) set the viewport to bigger then the screen size and then draws an alpha-d rectangle across the entire screen. Currently it looks like this: Function ScreenFade(AMT:Float) SetScale 1, 1 SetViewport(0, 0, XRes, Yres) If amt > 0 Then SetAlpha amt SetColor 0, 0, 0 DrawRect 0, 0, XRes, Yres SetAlpha 1.0 SetColor 255, 255, 255 EndIf End Function But before it was hard-coded to 2000 or so each way. Still no idea why this would make things go boom! But even less idea why it is now so slow. There are about 10,000 sparks on screen at once, so maybe the DX overhead for small batches is killing it? Oh, scratch that, there are no sparks on the game screen when it's running. What does your blizmax report when request DeskTopHertz() ? If this was mis-reported, that would slow it to a crawl as Frame Sync is on. Also, do you have overrides set on Anti-Aliasing for DX vs OGL in control panel? Come to think of it: I've set it to flip false on yet another build: Could you re-download and try again: Download Last edited 2012 |
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| Still runs slow. I turned all control panel enhancements off. DesktopHertz reports as expected. Strangely enough Dx is usually the faster one on this laptop. I changed the number of 'sparks' in post #16 to 10000 and it still runs smooth, windowed and fullscreen. |
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| blowed if I know. I think I'm going to have to eventually offer a OGL / DX version of the game at this rate. I'm stumped. O.o Thanks for all the testing though. Never know, the answer might come to us... |
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| Hi All, Updated to Alpha Ver. 1.1. * Switched to OpenGL rather than DirectX. * Fixed some issues with scrolling. * Save Games now contain preferences (Read Speed / Volume etc.) * Misc. fixes. Current Alpha Test can be downloaded Here |
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| Wow! I really enjoyed that first bit. The way you handle the story progression by clicking on the blue text and images is really unique. I've never seen that before. I would love to continue testing it for you. Cant wait to see what happens after they gather the supplies and head out! -B |
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| I would love to continue testing it for you. Sure. Sent you a mail. |
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| Looking good. Also good to see you're still around and creative Lee. |
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| Looking good. Also good to see you're still around and creative Lee. Yup still here. 8D I miss doing the proper 3D stuff though (ah Blitz3D... sigh), so may have to make my next proper project 3D in some way. Here's hoping. :) |
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| Hi all, Dark Recall is almost at Beta stage, so I put it up on Steam Greenlight! Here's my Project Page It's proving difficult to convince the wide world that a Hybrid Text / Graphic adventure game could be fun to play! 8D And of course you do get the odd choice comment! :/ |
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