[WIP] Crysis Prototype

[ransom1122]

I tried Beta 2 and it seems very good...

Thougt of an idea....

Could you add a "hard Mode" so enemies can spawn in random order, otherwise the pattern could be learnt pretty quick..

Also a nice little crosshair icon would suit this game better then a mouse pointer icon

[DiskDoctor]

Hi,

How to instal and/or run this magnificent game?

I run HDD script and also the binary but nothing happens. I can only invoke menu.

EDIT*

Works now, needs to be invoked from WB PAL mode, for RTG systems.

[lifeschool]

Originally Posted by DiskDoctor

Hi,

How to instal and/or run this magnificent game?

I run HDD script and also the binary but nothing happens. I can only invoke menu.

EDIT*

Works now, needs to be invoked from WB PAL mode, for RTG systems.

I didn't think about RTG, but yes the footage is hard coded to use PAL/NTSC modes. If I had made the stills NTSC, it would be 60hz compatible.

Originally Posted by ransom1122

I tried Beta 2 and it seems very good...
Could you add a "hard Mode" so enemies can spawn in random order, otherwise the pattern could be learnt pretty quick..

Also a nice little crosshair icon would suit this game better then a mouse pointer icon

It seems the Menu tool has an issue launching the game, but you can still use it to select a crosshair pointer in the options, and then select to load a difficulty mode, and it will then save the pointer to the game. You can also use the Toggle button on the QuickMenu tool to swap pointers. I re-drew the classic D-Paint crosshair, the monkey island one. A double sized monkey pointer, and also a red aiming reticule which I found in a duck shoot CanDo demo. All of these pointers can be forced in to hi-res mode in the menu, so they look nice within the game, but you'll have to use the menu again to switch hi-res pointers off when quitting the game, as there is no way to auto detect this in order to switch it off.

Difficulty. I thought about an extra hard mode, and there is a space for such a mode in the full menu. I think waiting for enemies to appear and randomising them is a good idea, and looks nice beside the cliff walls, but maybe not so nice at the start of the game? The difficulty is on easy right now, as I havent had time to fine tune the health yet. So this will change for release. I thought about perhaps resetting the mouse pointer to the middle-bottom of the screen each time, so the players cant just be right next to a random enemy, and save health. But that would mean players constantly rolling their mouse forwards and off the mouse pads?

[ransom1122]

Looking much better with different crosshairs

Here's all 7... Though 6 & 7 are coming up as the same icon?

Is the double sized monkey pointer #5?

Also... After you die, selecting re start level starts the game with infinite energy? Not sure if this is a bug or not?

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[lifeschool]

Originally Posted by ransom1122

Looking much better with different crosshairs

Here's all 7... Though 6 & 7 are coming up as the same icon?

Is the double sized monkey pointer #5?

Also... After you die, selecting re start level starts the game with infinite energy? Not sure if this is a bug or not?

Yes its a bit confusing.It starts with pointer 7, the windows 10 pointer. Then it goes to 1, monkey 1, and then 2, monkey double, and 3, d-paint, etc. I'll have to check on the order of the pointers in the game, but it seems the lack of one of them might simply be a looping bug. I can see 7 screenshots for 7 pointers, so thats all of them.

Yes the restart bug is there. I'm spending a few days away from this because it was a mountain to climb to release some kind of working demo. A lot of things broke at the last moment, and had to be patched up. I spent a long time debugging the cut scene routine, only to find I had forgotten to actually copy the cut scenes over to their new install, causing the errors.

Yes the game looks a lot more like a game with the pointers.

[ransom1122]

That's ok...

My replies are considered as feedback only..

Hope it helps

[lifeschool]

Originally Posted by ransom1122

That's ok...

My replies are considered as feedback only..

Hope it helps

I very much welcome the feedback!!!

Spent some time on the menu today after all.

Fixed broken loading of game from menu (I had forgotten to switch off the contextual menu timer, and it was still trying to run and quit at the same time, causing a crash). Fixed difficulty boxes reappearing on other screens (when returning to player 1 start page).

Also speeded up the response time of the menu, and light bar by 10%. (I changed the order of some things, and also remembered to pre-load the sound sample, rather than wait to load it from disk each time. The light bar is no longer solid, and shows a ghost behind it, but it's faster at least.)

No release of the new menu today, due to another bug I spotted with my new fixes.

[lifeschool]

Added a small update today. Just copy the menu to your install folder, and the tools to the crysis demo tools folder.

Spent way too long today getting a Windows 7 Gadget clock working on the Win 10 section of the menu. The clock was working perfectly on the Workbench screen, but as soon as I moved it over to the Menu screen, everything broke down. A long time spent working out how to fixing it. Having done so, finally, it took even longer to figure out how to quit the clock tool, as there are only Run commands in CanDo, but nothing much to quit. For now, I used a BreakName tool I found on Aminet, which seems to work.

The clock can be activated by clicking on the time in the taskbar. The clock will come up and appear to freeze. This is because it only updates every 5 seconds, and is only accurate to 2 to 3 mins, but I had the idea for this clock for ages, so it was time to put it in there.

Click on the drag bar to move the clock around. Click the clock itself to close it instantly. Or you can close it with a delay by clicking the time again, or if you double click to launch the game menu. The game menu will be delayed by 5 seconds to allow for the clock to close. If you close the clock before launch the game menu, this extra delay wont happen, and launching will be as fast as before.

edit: I fixed the colours on the clock now.

[lifeschool]

Another update today. I added a new update pack to the Beta 2 release, in case anyone wants to try it.

• No more Easy! - I removed the very easy mode with 1 enemy, and instead the easy mode is now the medium mode, with 3 enemies. Medium now has 5, and Hard now has 7.
• Random Enemies - Medium and Hard mode has a new random pause between enemies, and they appear in a random place on screen, except for the last enemy, which is always over the enemy shown in the cut scene.
• Commandos on Ropes - If an enemy spawns too high up on screen, it will instead spawn as a commando on a rope. The rope is brown, but can appear as cyan. The rope commando is smaller than the normal enemies.
• The game now loops properly after dying.
• Health on hard mode goes down a lot quicker.
• Health now slowly recharges when not being fired at.
• The player can use their gun while waiting for enemies.
• Blood spots on the screen will appear if the player is taking damage.
• Play of cut scenes too quickly, and also squeaky taunts, now fixed.

[ransom1122]

Updated now I get this error message as soon as the 1st enemy starts shooting at you

[

[lifeschool]

Originally Posted by ransom1122

Updated now I get this error message as soon as the 1st enemy starts shooting at you

Thanks for the feedback. I forgot to include the new enemy pics in the package. I've now updated the update pack to 2B, which includes those missing images.

Trying to deal with beta issues is something I've never done before, because I dont normally release anything until I'm happy with the final result. But doing that often means fans send in their issues after the initial release, and it leads to 1.1, 1.2 etc. I'm trying to avoid too much footage leaking to youtube of the pre-release versions, because this being a graphics demo, once people see it, it would spoil the surprise, and people might not want to play it.

Another thing:

• Fire! Message Gone! - For some reason, now that I've had to change the gameplay a bit to accomodate two different enemies, the context driven 'Fire!' button on hover has stopped working. I was going to move this to the HUD as a 'Locked ON!" kind of a message, but for now I decided to just remove it from the screen. No idea why this "Fire!" message isn't being cleared from the screen anymore, and just stays there perminantly. Maybe I will come back to fix it at some point, but it is not essential now that all of the hit boxes are working, I dont need to check them.

• Gameplay! - Gameplay is untested at the moment, so you might find gameplay is too hard or too easy. I'll look at this with 0.8.

[ransom1122]

A lot of fixes, game plays really well... Well done on all the effort there...

Not sure if I like the Commando with Rope enemy, the rope and the enemy colors blend in a bit making it look like one long vertical enemy. Also the Rope enemy does seem to small..

I opened the guy3.iff in photoshop and seem theres more room in the drawing field to make it a touch bigger.

Googling Commando pixelated enemies got me to this page
https://alb-pixel-store.itch.io/commando-1944-assets

Maybe it can give you some other ideas for the rope enemy, thats if you choose to keep the rope?

Have a good weekend
Later

[DisasterIncarna]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I seem to recall, back in the 1980s, there were some sort of laserdisc based games based on rolling footage.

this kinda reminds me of on the rails games like Dead Space: Extraction which i still have on my PS3, still have my horribly coloured namco guncon light gun somewhere.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I seem to recall, back in the 1980s, there were some sort of laserdisc based games based on rolling footage.

One of them was Time Gal for example. Some of them were later ported to the MegaCD.

[Karlos]

This is why I quipped that Crysis 2 might have been a better choice. That game may as well be on rails anyway. The first one at least allowed some nonlinear exploration of the island.

[lifeschool]

Ahhhhh!
Thank you so much for using this thread! I thought my efforts were not going to be seen this weekend.

You might notice I dont have the energy to work on games very often, as they do my head in, and I'm struggling to function on that level due to my disabilities. Sometimes it's hard to remember what I need to do, never mind working out how to fix it. Most of the heavy lifting is actually done during extended cigarette breaks, where I think about the path, and discover solutions. It wasn't difficult to code in all of this new stuff, but it took ages and ages to think about out how to make stuff happen, the way I wanted it.

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Technically it's quite nice, but I must admit the "gameplay" section falls a bit short. It'd really help if there were at least few targets to choose from, or maybe if they were better hidden (thinking a la Lost Patrol here).

So I took your advice and tried to make small enemies for the background wich blend in to the scenery a bit more. Basically if the player does not get tipped off by the colour clash, all they can see if the gun flash. This reminds me of P.O.W, and I figured this kind of action on the medium and hard modes, at random, would add some kind of 'OMG!, where is he??' to the action, which it was seriously lacking before. The pausing now adds some tention, although, if the random pause is long, the player will simply be glad to get lots of health back. So the pause actually is a relief rather than the fear I had hoped.

Originally Posted by ransom1122

A lot of fixes, game plays really well... Well done on all the effort there...

Not sure if I like the Commando with Rope enemy, the rope and the enemy colors blend in a bit making it look like one long vertical enemy. Also the Rope enemy does seem to small..

I opened the guy3.iff in photoshop and seem theres more room in the drawing field to make it a touch bigger.

Maybe it can give you some other ideas for the rope enemy, thats if you choose to keep the rope?

Have a good weekend
Later

I'll have a better Sunday now I can see some feedback.

See my reply above with the rope men. I wanted to have them fairly small (the background is a lot further away in the game, and they would just be single pixels if there was any sprite scalling); but not so small to be invisible like in P.O.W.

The rope can be taken away if it is too annoying. Sometimes on some screens (randomly, as it changed position), the rope looks like a rope ladder, with a streak of rungs running up the screen. With Hold and Modify mode, any big variation of the colours will create a mid-tone colour (like Cyan or Red) which runs in a streak until it meets a different colour.

I can see now why there wasn't so many HAM games on the Amiga without them being static games, like the Polish point and click adventures. Adding anything to the scene is problematic. I could have made all of the still screens in Extra Half Bright Mode, 64 colours, and this would have fixed the streaking so that I can put ANY number of enemies on the screen, and even animate them. But with HAM, the only thing possible is to define a box, and then draw something over the top of it, like with the health on the HUD.
However, I might look into drawing the enemies from right to left instead of from top to bottom, and see if that helps.

I think the rope is tricky, as sometimes without the rope, it looks like the guy is hanging in the air like Superman. With the graphics, I am limited to the same first 4 or 5 colours on the palette, which change per screen, but there is also a fixed RGB palette in HAM, which means I CAN add greyscale colours and dim, medium and bright red, green and blue. The sprite is limited to the size of my hit boxes, so yes, it can be draw bigger or smaller. Yes it means hit detection would be more lax this way, but a fixed hit box size is just a heck of a lot easier. The only non-regular hit box is the one on the jeep screen, where you can click on the door to get inside. I still have not tried this since my "Fire!" hit detection checker went bust, so I can only presume it works.

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

this kinda reminds me of on the rails games like Dead Space: Extraction which i still have on my PS3, still have my horribly coloured namco guncon light gun somewhere.

Originally Posted by TCD

One of them was Time Gal for example. Some of them were later ported to the MegaCD.

Any Quick time game (where the player can choose a direction or press fire buttons during footage) is possible, like TimeGal etc. If a game has some way to pause or change paths, then bits of footage can play like branches, no problem. It doesn't HAVE to be linear like in this game, and I thought about making pathways on the beach actually. For example, maybe from getting out of the water, the game could pause to allow the player to look around the horizon in quarter chunks. Maybe if the player tried to get back in the water, a swin cut scene would dive and return them to the beach. The only issue is making all the cut scenes, and rendering off the final frame as an IFF. Of course, if there was team working on making N, S, E, W views of every 'room', they could map out a small beach block by block, and allow more freedom. With Amiga, having modern 2024 graphics and sampled sound is not an issue, it's just putting it all together, and time.

Originally Posted by Karlos

This is why I quipped that Crysis 2 might have been a better choice. That game may as well be on rails anyway. The first one at least allowed some nonlinear exploration of the island.

I totally agree, although I've never played it. The meme is 'Can it do Crysis?', not Can it do Crysis 2. Sadly there is NO!! way to put any kind of graphics over a moving HAM6 screen, without it looking like Loom on acid. I'd love to convert Virtua Cop, but it would mean dumping my current video viewer and experimenting with RiVA and Frogger, just so that I could perhaps get a mouse pointer moving over footage, so I can hit detect some hit boxes, and then map out the enemies in the game. Moving hitboxes are no issue because the player cant see them moving.

[lifeschool]

More progress today. I wanted to know if sliding in the enemies worked better than popping them up. The effect of sliding enemies in is good, and looks more like a proper pop-up shooter. Although the colour banding effect is unchanged. The random delay when drawing in the slide means the player is often on top of an enemy before they start to fire. So just to fine tune the random parameters.

No build today, as the game is set to no damage mode while I test it. I also want to add in the bullet counter, and work on the difficulty modes.