21 July 2024, 05:25 | #41 |
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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 |
21 July 2024, 08:27 | #42 |
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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. Last edited by DiskDoctor; 21 July 2024 at 10:35. |
21 July 2024, 14:53 | #43 | ||
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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. Quote:
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? Last edited by lifeschool; 21 July 2024 at 15:01. |
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22 July 2024, 03:23 | #44 |
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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? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |
22 July 2024, 17:29 | #45 | |
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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. |
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22 July 2024, 17:33 | #46 |
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That's ok...
My replies are considered as feedback only.. Hope it helps |
22 July 2024, 20:22 | #47 | |
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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. |
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24 July 2024, 23:23 | #48 |
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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. Last edited by lifeschool; 25 July 2024 at 00:02. |
27 July 2024, 00:28 | #49 |
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Another update today. I added a new update pack to the Beta 2 release, in case anyone wants to try it.
Last edited by lifeschool; 27 July 2024 at 00:37. |
27 July 2024, 03:26 | #50 |
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Updated now I get this error message as soon as the 1st enemy starts shooting at you
[ |
27 July 2024, 14:19 | #51 | |
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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:
Last edited by lifeschool; 27 July 2024 at 22:13. |
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28 July 2024, 04:40 | #52 |
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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 |
28 July 2024, 10:47 | #53 | |
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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. |
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28 July 2024, 11:32 | #54 | |
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28 July 2024, 13:20 | #55 |
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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.
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28 July 2024, 15:28 | #56 | ||||
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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. Quote:
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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. Quote:
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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. Last edited by lifeschool; 28 July 2024 at 15:37. |
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28 July 2024, 20:26 | #57 |
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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. |
29 July 2024, 05:23 | #58 |
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Slide effect sounds good.
maybe a mixture of sliding and non sliding enemies may be a better way? |
29 July 2024, 15:08 | #59 |
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^ I was thinking the same way. Currently, there is a dice throw for the slide ins. (Or rather, they pop up in position, they dont slide in from off the screen).
1 - slide in from bottom - this pops up the enemies like they are growing up from the ground, like a normal pop-up shooter. 2 - slide in from left 3 - slide in from right 4 - dont slide in, just appear in place. The final enemy on each screen still acts like the old Easy mode, e.g.they just appear over the guy on the screen and dont slide. There is also no random delay for those final guys, as it's fairly obvious after 6 enemies where the final one will appear. Spent some time making a map HUD yesterday. Again a double edged sword. On one hand, it means I can highlight the position of enemies on the map like in the real game. On the other hand, the map is fixed, has major colour issues on some screens, and basically gives away the positions of hidden enemies - making pixel hunting far less frantic. No matter what I add to the game, the gameplay changes, and this also affects things like health and damage. |
30 July 2024, 17:09 | #60 |
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So the plan is to have another demo ready by the weekend. I'm almost done with my ideas for this 'prototype demo!!', and it's been a lot of hours, all told, mostly going around in circles, to produce simple things. But my idea of implementing one idea at a time seems to be working so far. The hardest part is keeping track of all those VARIABLES!!!
Spent too long yesterday trying to get a duck to fly over the screen. I tried maybe 5 or 6 different ways to do it. AnimBrush is limited to having a solid background. Clip Region is limited to visible areas of the screen only, so I cant just paste a sprite off screen, and copy in the frames of animation. Buttons are also solid backgrounds only. So in the end I was forced to move a normal brush over the screen. The solution was to clip the area under the brush before stamping it down, and then pasting that clip over the brush before moving forward by X amount. The final result is a compromise. Without any masking, the sprite was very hard to see, due to the colours I had to use. But a black border around the duck just looked horrible, due to dark colours causing more colour bleed than the light colours. So I opted for a half-way house, with some darks to highlight the duck, which looks strange on the flap of the wings due to odd things. But I'm done with it. This duck shoot idea came from a similar demo provided with CanDo, which uses an animbrush over a black background, I think. Or at least, I couldnt get the background to change to a transparency. After I get the map working, and the ammo count completed, and maybe even a grenade if I can get the right mouse button working instead of it bringing up the top menu?? Then with V8 its all about playing the dam thing over and over, to get the difficulty right. Oh joy... Last edited by lifeschool; 31 July 2024 at 21:01. |
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