Game play issue..

[kevglass]

As Cas' suggestion I'm raising this here, any help would be appreciated:

I'm working on a multiplayer asteroids game, initially the game is just deathmatch (blow each other up). Its here if anyone wanna see:

http://www.cokeandcode.com/astroprime

The game play problem I having is that combat seems to be very "slashly" in that you see the other player, maybe get a few shots off, and then because of the speed you're travelling you've sped past. This kinda reduces the fun.

It many ways it reminds me of the problems in Elite: First Encounters combat game play.

Anyone have any idea how to make this better?

Kev

[Matzon]

Simple. Do as Star Control. Start zoomed out, and as combetants get closer, zoom in. Works like a charm!

[Markus_Persson]

That, and/or provide a radar in a corner that tells you where everyone is.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Mojomonkey]

Also, you can put in obstacles (asteroids themselves) that if the player runs into he dies. That way, control and speed maintainence is an issue. This will keep the game running at a slower pace I think.

[kevglass]

Guys, I really love this place, community wise, it just doesn't get better...

The zooming in/out is a neat idea.. but I'm multiplayer, so there could be lots of other ships. Which one do I use to caculate the zoom?

Radar - tick, got that one already

Asteroids (and other things) are on the agenda, maybe I'm just worrying too early?

Many thanks for the feedback so far,

Kev

[Markus_Persson]

Or you could make it zoom depending on the speed you're traveling in. So the slower you move, the farther you see.

That would bring the overall speed of the game down, while still allowing for quick escapes.

[kevglass]

Coo, cunning idea. May see this implemented pretty soon

Kev

[Markus_Persson]

w00t. =D I'm starting to really like this game. =D

[princec]

Try a little HUD thing that always points at the nearest enemy if there are none on the screen too. I got asked to do this but it didn't fit with the screen scrolling. I think it'd work fine if the ship's always in the centre of the screen.


Cas

[nickdotjava]

You should add cloaking.  Make it so that you're just as vulnerable to collisions, weapons fire, etc. as anyone else, but they can't see you.  And maybe make you appear for a second when you fire.

IMHO, that would kick ass.  Of course, if everyone cloaked, then it would just be everyone carpet bombing space.

Is this going to be like a MMO Action game?  Where we can save our ships?  Or do they disappear into the electronic ether when we quit?  If it's a MMO action game, you are my hero!

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[kevglass]

I hadn't intended it to be MMO, more of battle game (ala counter strike). However, that being said, I see no reason why it shouldn't be MMO aswell, go for the full trading thing (although I know this will annoy Endolf ).

I've been trying to aim at obtainable goals, hence making this battle oriented. Maybe I'll do a "Astroprime: Universe" afterwards or something, but I'd just like to get this bit down first.

Cloaking however is a brilliant idea. I'll add it to the planned features list. Just updated the web site generally, http://www.cokeandcode.com/astroprime

Thanks for all the ideas folks,

Kev

[jbanes]

Just a though, but you probably want to try playing Subspace and NeTrek for some good prior art in this area. Subspace was originally going to be a commercial game. They solicited opinions from people around the world, got close to a release... and then it disappeared. Now it's back as a free online game. Not quite sure what happened in between, but it must have been interesting. As for NeTrek, you can't call yourself a geek if you've never played NeTrek.  

[kevglass]

Thanks for the links, SS looks pretty cool. I was really basing the whole thing of XPilot. I guess the idea isn't too original, but hopefully no one will be offended if I just carry on.

Damn it, I can't stop thinking about a MMO version now either. I think it'd have to be a different game client/server really, but even so.. hmm...

Kev

[blahblahblahh]

Or you could make it zoom depending on the speed you're traveling in. So the slower you move, the farther you see.

That would bring the overall speed of the game down, while still allowing for quick escapes.

...and maybe combine with GTA-esque directional zoom. The screen-offset/centring of the ship changes depending on speed and direction. In GTA, of course, the faster you went the further ahead you could see AND it zoomed out - and even so it was still damn hard to get far in a Lambo

[blahblahblahh]

I don't know why, but webstart still doesn't work on any of the PC's I use - two flavours of Windows and linux - so I'd appreciate a non-JWS link?

I don't understand why JWS is apparently completely buggered on most of the PC's I see it on (?), but I wish people wouldn't keep making JWS-only apps.

PS I've heard similar things from other people, so I'm fairly confident it's not that lump of kryptonite embedded in my stomach that breaks any JWS installation within 20 feet...but you never know. [if anyone knows how to get it to work, I'd be interested]

[kevglass]

Ok, Ok, I'll create a sans webstart version. I'll have to package JOGL with it tho I spose.. I was trying to stop having to do this.

Kev

[tortoise]

I don't know why, but webstart still doesn't work on any of the PC's I use - two flavours of Windows and linux - so I'd appreciate a non-JWS link?]

What do you mean by not work? Because on my machine, Java Web Start will load up and get going but then immediately lock up on me. I have to kill it with the task manager, then if I run it again (same program loading), it's fine. It does that every time. I've not tried it under Linux.

[kevglass]

Right, I've added a bunch of zip files for the current version. I'm afraid they might not get updated as quick as the web start version, but I can but try

They're all under the downloads section, hopefully they'll work. Give um a try and let me know..

You can also run the server from them.

Cheers,

Kev

[AndersDahlberg]

What do you mean by not work? Because on my machine, Java Web Start will load up and get going but then immediately lock up on me. I have to kill it with the task manager, then if I run it again (same program loading), it's fine. It does that every time. I've not tried it under Linux.

Are you using the new [windows] version included with 1.4.2? I've had problems with fullscreen apps + webstart where the app directly goes to fullscreen and at a small delay a webstart "integration" popup behind steals focus thus forcing you to a alt-tab.

[tortoise]

Yes it's 1.4.2 but it does this for all kinds of programs: games (fullscreen or not) and general applications.

[swpalmer]

It could be your graphics card that is locking up WebStart.. I found that DirectX is sometimes very flakey and many Java apps would lockup my machine (because of Swing's use of DirectX) until I replaced the graphics drivers.

[blahblahblahh]

What do you mean by not work? Because on my machine, Java Web Start will load up and get going but then immediately lock up on me. I have to kill it with the task manager, then if I run it again (same program loading), it's fine. It does that every time. I've not tried it under Linux.

Yeah, I've definitely had that, but repeated attempts still don't work for me IIRC. Other times, it just acts as if it isn't even installed - no file association/mime-type/etc, nothing. java webstart pages just make MSIE go "Duh?". Actually, I may not even have tried it on linux. Although, given how much harder it is to set stuff like this up on linux (no standard web-browser, for instance) I may never even have managed to get it to start, let alone work .

I've had similar problems all the way back since 1.3, and when it was an optional package. The way I see it, if they still can't make the damn thing work on a large percentage of clients, I'm not even going to think about using it as a developer for at least a few years. What's the point in a deployment technology to make life easier for the user when it silently crashes, hangs, and doesn't work? (From a sun-provided install package!)

[AndersDahlberg]

EDIT: Lol, so much for posting a reply in the wrong place

[sugarshark]

I had the same problem regarding Webstart on my Win2K machine at work when I upgraded to JDK 1.4.2. Webstart , which did run just fine in with the 1.4.1 beta wouldn't work anymore.
Only uninstalling of all JREs/JDKs and reinstalling of JDK 1.4.2 helped. Must have been a registry related problem. This behavior was reproducable on other Win2K machines  which had a JRE with Webstart installed before.

But this is the only problem I ever had with Java Webstart.
With my other machines (Linux and Win) it just works. So to say it is completly buggered might be a bit of exaggeration.  

About installing it in Linux, you just need one line in your ~/.mailcap (or systemwide /etc/mailcap) file and all  browsers and mail clients know JWS:

1	application/x-java-jnlp-file;/opt/j2sdk1.4,2/jre/javaws/javaws %s

The webstart install script adds this line for you, along with the entry in ~/.mime.types

[blahblahblahh]

About installing it in Linux, you just need one line in your ~/.mailcap (or systemwide /etc/mailcap) file and all  browsers and mail clients know JWS:

1	application/x-java-jnlp-file;/opt/j2sdk1.4,2/jre/javaws/javaws %s

The webstart install script adds this line for you, along with the entry in ~/.mime.types

Thanks for all that. I've had 5 versions of Mozilla, two of netscape (against my will - distro installed them ), and done two restores from backups on this PC - so it's quite possible I broke something subtle.

I'm especially thankful that you told me about Mailcap - OpenOffice 1.0.1 has 0wn3d that file (filled it with 50 lines of associations), despite the fact that I'd installed 1.0.3 (which apparently was too shy and retiring to want to take control)...in typical linux fashion, it's a stupid filename (I don't have mail-related apps on this computer, so what do I want with a file called mailcap?) - although I can guess historical reasons why a mime-type assoc file would be called that -  and there's no manpage for it.

[blahblahblahh]

Right, I've added a bunch of zip files for the current version. I'm afraid they might not get updated as quick as the web start version, but I can but try

They're all under the downloads section, hopefully they'll work. Give um a try and let me know..

Seems to be the standard problem that using external libraries with the JRE is either incorrectly documented (by Sun), broken (in some platforms), or undefined (and so basically no-one has a clue)...

It would give me more confidence (as a developer) in things like LWJGL if this kind of thing didn't happen everytime to most people on linux (I can sort it out, thanks to Elias, but none of my users would be able to). My vague memories of LWJGL are that I need to add a -X directive or similiar, to force the classloader to recognize the .so file in the directory, but I've no idea what any more .

All I do remember is that the JRE/JDK violates "principle of least surprise" here: you can't just put libjogl.so in the classpath; that has no effect.

java -jar prime.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: net/java/games/jogl/GLEventListener
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass0(Native Method)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:537)
       at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:123)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:251)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:55)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:194)
       at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:187)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:289)
       at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:274)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:235)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:302)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass0(Native Method)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:537)
       at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:123)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:251)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:55)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:194)
       at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
       at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:187)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:289)
       at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:274)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:235)
       at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:302

[kevglass]

If it was a library linking problem I'd go for:

1   2   3   4   5

java -Djava.library.path=. -jar prime.jar or export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH;.

But it looks to me like it can't actually find the jogl.jar, which probably means I've got my manifest wrong, maybe I got the / the wrong way round or something. This might work better:

1	java -cp prime.jar:lib/newdawnnet.jar:lib/jogl.jar -Djava.library.path=. org.newdawn.astro.client.Game

I'll check it out and try have it fixed as soon as. Knew I shouldn't have rushed those distros

Kev

[kevglass]

Yep, looks like I got my slashes the wrong way round, god I'm becoming such a windows freak...

Kev

[blahblahblahh]

This might work better:

1	java -cp prime.jar:lib/newdawnnet.jar:lib/jogl.jar -Djava.library.path=. org.newdawn.astro.client.Game

Yeah, that did the trick. Thanks.

[JasonB]

Back on your original subject, have you thought about having dots around the edge of the screen that indicate the position of offscreen enemies?  The dots could change colour as the enemy grows closer and then fade away just before they appear on screen again...

(with apologies to anyone who might've suggested this before, if I missed it in the prior postings)