Rimscape

[MBrenaman]

Yes, the messages came from shooting other ships.

Yes, I was trying fullscreen mode.   Windowed mode gives 40-50 for menu and ~40 for game play.

[Malohkan]

The Launcher now saves your settings with a Muffin, woohoo!  Some additional tweaks to the Tutorial have also been made to make it easier to understand.  Let me know how you guys like it!

[Malohkan]

I've just made a pretty significant enhancement to speed up the game.  Could you guys try it out and tell me what frame rates you get when flying out relatively alone in space or when you get in the middle of some ships fighting?  Both extremes are useful to have results for.  Thanks!

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[MBrenaman]

I tried it out, noticed some improvment in windowed mode. I've got a P4 1.6ghz JVM 1.4.3 and some type of Intel video card.

Fullscreen - 12 fps at intro and menu, barely playable. 40-56 with no one around. 18-~20 with a group around.

Windowed - 22-48 at intro and menu, which was descent beacuse the intro at that time had alot of stuff going on. 26-30 in crowd fighting someone.

As usual, windowed mode on my system runs much better, but I only noticed a small improvement in speed during actual game play in windowed mode.

Hope this helps, good luck at getting it to run smoothly everywhere.
                   

[Malohkan]

Does anyone have ideas on why Fullscreen mode would be slower than Windowed mode?  So far everyone has had this experience.

[dsellars]

Quick problem I just had.  I was going though the tutorial and I think I managed to remove my weapons on the trading screen.  When I later tried to fire the primary weapon in the tutorial the game crahed back to the desktop.  

Dan.

[Malohkan]

hehehe whoops.  Thanks for that!

[Riven]

Every few seconds I get a white flash (single white frame). No flashes when I don't touch the mouse btw.

It may be a special-effect for which I couldn't find the cause

[Malohkan]

Wild!  I just put a new update with many bug fixes, check HERE to see the list.  One of the improvements involves a conversion from Frame to JFrame and also properly accelerating the Graphics context so hopefully that'll be enough to fix the problem you were having  Give it a shot now!

[Malohkan]

Do you still get the same effect now Skippy?  Also, does sound work for you in my game?

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[Riven]

Haven't seen flashes anymore, but I guess there is something terribly wrong with my sound-drivers. They got corrupt somehow, so even my media-players don't play anything.

Anyway, that background scene for the game-menu kicks butt

[Malohkan]

glad you like it  It's completely random every time

[dranonymous]

Tried RS again and thought of some more feedback.  

- This isn't my type of game.    Its not bad, its just not preference, so its hard to get into.  Take comments with that in mind.

- The scrollbars on menus and such look nice.  The problem is that you can't actually drag them like you are used to in normal OS guis (linux, mac, win)  I'd expect to be able to click on the slider and drag it up and down.  This kept getting me into 'trouble' and I'd miss what the rest of the text was, because I kept trying to drag.

- The app had no problem going full screen for me.  

- I still don't prefer the system for buying and selling, but unless others start really giving you feedback on this, it might just be me.

- I couldn't figure out how much money I had.  Maybe I just missed it. When I moused over things to buy and sell, I kept expecting to see how much they cost, rather than how much I'd have if I purchase/sold the item.

- Graphics are excellent (as all of your projects are)

- Targeting might need a bit more work.  I was facing someone directly, with a red X on them shooting missiles and they just flew straight off to the side.  It appeared they were going after someone offscreen.

- I felt way outmanuevered when trying to battle other ships.  They obviously have a much better command of flying a spaceship than I do.  

- A good background track would be nice, maybe change it relative to the area your in.

- The mouse movement was very choppy for me in 1024x768 mode.  It ran fine under 800 res though.  Probably my limited ATI laptop graphics card.

- Power bars and names above the ships is a great addition.

- The frame rate still drops to nothing when viewing the star chart to make a jump.  Flying around and shooting I was averaging above 100fps.  At the jump map, I was at 14fps.  

- It gets better each time I check on it.

Dr. A>

[Malohkan]

Thanks for checking!  The targetting bug makes it sound like you may have a cached jar because I actually fixed that very but (or thought I did) in the last update... did you make sure it downloaded the latest?  For me I always have to download applications twice (if I've played before) before Webstart realizes there's an update

Background track... I like the idea, I'll see what I can do

I'm going to change the method of displaying money in the menu next.  Right now, when you're not selecting something you can buy/sell, your current cash is shown.  When you are selecting something you can buy/sell, it shows how much money you'll have after making the transaction.  I'm going to change that so that it shows exactly how much each item is worth and see if it makes things more clear.

I'll take another serious look at the jump map.  I've had other comments saying it's slow so I need to give it more time to figure out what I've missed, because there's no reason it should be so slow.

Thanks again!

[Malohkan]

A heck of a lot of changes here!

Click here for the changelog:
http://www.gamelizard.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=556

EDIT:  The updates include thrusters!  Woooo pretty engine trails in Java2D!

[Malohkan]

boo hoo!!  No one wants to check out the newness?  I'm hurt...

[Per_T]

Awsome! The most polished Java2D game I've seen. The menu runs really slow tho - 10 fps

Keep up the good work!

/Per

[Malohkan]

Thanks!!  Yeah I think I'm pushing the limits of Java2D there with that opening menu.  Essentially thanks to the way I cache the menu should be drawing 2 managed images at most, most of the time just 1 (1 for the menu, 1 for the highlight image).  However when you first load the game the background shows a live game for a "demo" so that really hogs the CPU with all that extra rendering... however in an actual game, when you load the menu that game is paused so the background is cached and the menu's speed goes right back up.

Soon hopefully I'll have an option to use OpenGL in which case if that's available to you you could probably benefit from it and get the menu speed right back up!

[alexl]

Lol everyones been commenting on the menu... I might as well too lol.

The menu is quite choppy, however gameplay is fast.

I would suggest making view zoomed out more, and not allowing other ships to accelerate so fast, I keep losing track of them lol.

very nice tho

[Malohkan]

The menu has been sped up and ships are now slower in lower difficulties.

If you want things to look more zoomed out, turn the Art Scale down in the launcher before you start playing.

I've also added a new image and sound for the Torpedo, whereas before it just looked like the other Missile.

Strafing capability has been added too (A and S keys) to make movement a little easier to control.

Thrusters now display when you hit stop in a realistic fashion.

Gameplay has been tweaked to make the first few quests easier and things to be more fun.

Weapons and Ships have had their stats tweaked to be more balanced and fun.

Anyone wanna try their hand at writing some combat AI implementing the new strafe feature?

[Malohkan]

Could some of you guys running Linux check out the game?  I've had one friend on Linux try the game only to have the window not even show up.... that's not good news.  If this can be confirmed by you guys I'll need help figuring out what's wrong.  Thanks!

[EgonOlsen]

Could some of you guys running Linux check out the game?  I've had one friend on Linux try the game only to have the window not even show up.... that's not good news.  If this can be confirmed by you guys I'll need help figuring out what's wrong.  Thanks!

Works fine on Knoppix 2.78 here on a PII-400/512MB/GF2MX/Java 1.4.2. I was running it in 640*480 and while it was very laggy in the menu (around 10fps), it gave me around 30-40fps in the game itself.

[selendic]

Could some of you guys running Linux check out the game?  I've had one friend on Linux try the game only to have the window not even show up.... that's not good news.  If this can be confirmed by you guys I'll need help figuring out what's wrong.  Thanks!

Works great here, cca 100 - 120 FPS, in full resolution. Suse9.2, jre5.0. I can see it loads some ogg files during startup, but other than clicks on menus, I cant hear no other sound during a gameplay.

[Malohkan]

Awesome, good to know it's fast on some machines  I still haven't figured out why the menu is so incredibly slow on some computers.  On mine it's quite faster.  Strange indeed...

As for the sounds, on Linux and Mac there's a pop as they're loaded, but not on Windows.  I'm aware of this happening but have no idea of how to make it stop.  Does anyone know?  Here's how I load them:

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public int addClip(URL url) throws LineUnavailableException {         try {                   byte[] audio = decodeOgg(url.openStream());                   AudioFormat audioFormat = new AudioFormat(                         rate,                         16,                         channels,                         true,  // PCM_Signed                         false  // littleEndian                   );             //      System.out.println("rate :"+rate+" | channels: "+channels);                   DataLine.Info info = new DataLine.Info(                         Clip.class,                         audioFormat                   );                   afs.add(audioFormat);                   sizes.add(new Integer(audio.length));                   infos.add(info);                   audios.add(audio);                   num++;                                     //Load it into memory once so the next time it gets loaded it doesn't lag                   Clip clip = (Clip) AudioSystem.getLine((DataLine.Info)infos.elementAt(num-1));                   clip.open((AudioFormat)afs.elementAt(num-1), (byte[])audios.elementAt(num-1), 0, ((Integer)sizes.elementAt(num-1)).intValue());                   clip.stop();                   clip.flush();                   clip.close();             }             catch (IOException e) {                   System.out.println("Error loading: " + url.toString());                   e.printStackTrace();             }                         return num - 1; }

[hvor2]

Aaaah! I discovered Rimscape only now! Great, I'm soo glad to see something so polished and entertaining made in Java. I am especially satisfied with movement, the way you handle it. Your physics professor should be very happy with that  . No, seriosly, movement is very realistic and I liked it. Being astrophysicist myself, I have several ideas for game put in  some universe for some time now. Rimscape is  real motivator! Good work.
p.s. i'm not shure always about credits I owe in menus...

[nardev]

i'm gonna be honest with you. The menus look and work sweet but the zoom thing has to be implemented. You can see too little of the space. It's important that you keep it simple for a person starting for the first time so you don't loose a gamer. Or strongly suggest to take the tutorial because the movement is hard and "some" people skip tutorials out of impatience  Also if your game is going to be strong on the story line, you might want to consider doing it in full 3d like the old school "elite"? It would be a big jump, but space games are i believe easier to implement in 3D than let's say a game such as doom. But it seems like a rounded up project. Good job!

[Lareon]

Here's a new system for ya'.  I'm running one of the iMac 20" Intel Core Duos, and the game runs fine, allowing that I run in Java2D mode.  I get around 27+ FPS running fullscreen at 1680x1050. ^_^  I'm gonna just try and get an Intel build of the LWJGL for me to try it with OpenGL.

--Scott

[Malohkan]

Awesome!  Thanks for trying it   I'm not sure why you couldn't run it with OpenGL on your Mac, but hopefully in a future release you won't have problems

I plan on having an open beta within a couple weeks.  I already have a private one going on (only a few people looking at it right now) that's playable but still missing some key elements like a couple of menu's and a local game saving system.

The new GUI is coming along well and I believe you all will really like it!

[denka]

Guess which another system it could support... Solaris 10 x86. I got "SunOS not supported..." message