I don't get why (since Minecraft) everybody seems to like blocky unfiltered low-res graphics...

On Windows 7 64 Bit with a Radeon 2900XT, there's no mouse. ALT-F4 doesn't work and switching to the task manager makes the whole desktop jumping up and down..congrats, i've never seen any application doing this. It also cleared my SSD-cache and i had to reboot. Pretty efficient killer app...

I agree that Bing isn't really important, but if you can tame it by adding a simple entry to the robots.txt, it would be a win for everybody...so why not!?

That's a great way to ruin your ranking in the search engines. You can add a crawl-delay setting to the robots.txt and, if you register for Google's Webmastertools, adjust the crawl frequency for the Googlebot in the settings.

Trying to find the flaw in my A* calculations that makes Mr. Tomatohead here choose the long road from time to time...

Good luck on Android then...

Yes, in most cases. And that's a real pitty. Why not try to improve things?

It depends on the game. A role playing game (if it's not a kind of rogue-like) needs a story and an adventure game certainly does too. A shooter at least largely benefits from a good story. It also depends on the player. I, for example, wouldn't touch a shooter without a story. Shooting people in glorious ways just doesn't cut it for me unless you are giving me a good reason to do it. And if you don't, you might have implemented the greatest shooter game play of all time, i still wouldn't play it.

BTW, this is a nice book on the topic: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Video-Writing-Design/dp/158065066X

Runs fine on a Galaxy Note with Android 4.0.3. It also runs fine on a Nexus S with Android 4.1.2, but because game logic doesn't seem to be frame rate independent, so it runs very slow on that device. I actually didn't notice that until i tried it on the Note and experienced how it was supposed to run...

Just keep in mind that on a lot of Samsung devices, there's a cap to ~58fps (not 60!). If you log anything below 60, you'll spam the log on such devices.

I'm actually not really sure about the combat system, but the general movement (especially turning) in Delver is very good, very smooth and direct. Much better than what i had (and i already thought that mine wasn't that bad, at least when compared to others), so i took some time and reworked my controls to come close to Delver's. My game's controls are much improved now, thanks again for mentioning Delver here...

Apart from that, i added map markers and a basic inventory gui for chests:

Intel has one per physical core, older AMDs had that too. Newer AMDs (Bulldozer) have one per module (which includes 2 integer clusters), but that one can be used by both clusters and switches pretty fast. On my Core i7 (4 cores, 8 threads), i get 57fps with a cpu load of 25% (i.e. 2 of the 8 possible threads are at 100%).

The alternate version works fine for me.

That helps, but i actually never adjust the zoom. I use the default settings and that's where it looks flawed.

Looks strange while scrolling on my makeshift graphics card (GeForce 8600 on Windows 7 64 Bit, Java 7, latest drivers): http://jpct.de/pix/buggy_buggy.png

Performance is between 15 and 50 fps on a Nexus S, 33 and 60 fps on a Nexus 7 and 35 and 60 fps on a Galaxy Note. I'm not going to add shadow mapping anytime soon, because i want to focus on the game instead.
Lighting in outdoor scenes is simple vertex lighting (had per pixel lighting once, but it was much slower and didn't look that much better). In the dungeon, it's parallax mapping used for the first light source (which is the player) and vertex lighting for the torches.

Delver is a pretty good game (albeit i usually don't like the pixelated, minecrafty look...but i love the soundtrack) and i played it for quite some time. Regarding the controls, i still don't really like how it handles ranged combat. Hitting something with a wand/bow is pretty difficult sometimes. Some kind of auto-aiming would be nice, but then it would suffer from the same problem that mine would: Auto-aiming is fine for projectiles that you don't see like bullets. It's crap for arrows especially if the bow that fires them isn't flat and pixelated. You either have to make the bow auto-aim too (which might look pretty strange) or make the arrow fly in a different direction than one would expect. Well, we'll see...

The APK doesn't install:

Thanks for pointing me to it. I just bought it and will have a look...

Flickering is gone now, but the sound continues to loop after closing the window. There's no Java process to kill, it's just the sound looping endless.

Still flickers like crazy on my machine (Windows 7 64Bit, Geforce 680 GTX (latest drivers), Java 1.7.0_09). And the sound loops endlessly after closing the game window...very annoying, i've to reboot now to stop that.

Try to use something like



instead.

If there were any, i would have edited them for the video... But as long as you move around in the wilderness, there are no loading pauses anyway. If you enter a dungeon, it loads some data and shows a simple loading screen for a few seconds.

I'm trying to avoid showing the player's character, because i don't have one to keep things simple. So this isn't really an option.

...hard to tell. Leaving aside the 3d engine itself, maybe the grass patches. It actually didn't take that long to implement them, but it took me some time to figure out how to do it efficiently. All my ideas either consumed too much memory, too much cpu or both. Then suddenly i had this inspiration and implemented it in maybe two hours.

I've really no idea. There's no real game play in it ATM. You can run around, pick some flowers and drop and collect items...there's no combat, no quest system... I'm hoping to have something playable within 2013.

Gamepads...i never thought about it. I'll consider it though. Concerning game play...i hope so, too. I've some ideas, i have some books on that topic and this is my second rpg (the former one was for the Amiga 20 years ago...), so i hope to be able to pull it off.

That's what i thought initially, but then i tried some rpg and rpg like games on mobile devices and just didn't like the controls at all. Well, we'll see....i guess i have to try some things to see what works best.

Maybe. I'm using a desktop version for faster development, but it lacks some features (like sound) and my main focus is on the mobile version. Making a real desktop version would allow for increased detail though:

41...so i've seen much concerning gaming and controls... Thanks for your idea. It reminds me a little bit of the controls in The Witcher and it's an interesting idea, which i will take into consideration.

I'm working on this one (on and off) since december 2011. There isn't much real game play ATM, which is why there isn't any downloadable demo yet. However, i can show some random screen shot and a video. It's supposed to be somehow similar to the Elder Scrolls series in gameplay...but simplified to work well on touch devices.

I'm still undecided about combat. I wanted real time combat first, but i'm not so sure now, because a turn based combat might be better on a touch device. Any opinions on that topic would be greatly appreciated!

Anyway, here's a screen shot...




And here's the latest video...

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/FUXsjI4AXu8?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/FUXsjI4AXu8?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

Controls seem to be bit overcomplicated to me. Why is left/right on the arrow keys, but jumping is on z? Why not simply on crsr-up? Remember that not everybody is using an english keyboard layout. I have QWERTZ, not QWERTY, so x and z are spread across half the keyboard...

Try to get rid of your exceptions first. Generating exceptions is expensive.

So this is the "how do you look like in germany"-thread now? Well, ok...

Then i'm below average too. And some (the better ones...) of my colleagues are too. Spring solves problems that nobody would have without it.

I don't like it much, at least the GPU part. Texture rendering accuracy is below PowerVR's and on par with Mali (which means pretty bad). The depth buffer's accuracy is laughable by default. You have to use an extension to enable a decent quality (but it still remains 16bit, there's no support for anything higher). Performance is ok, but nothing to get crazy about. I would prefer a PowerVR based solution any day.

The one on the left side seems depressed to me...