2 playa Quest for Peace

[gangrel-br]

I think it is strange to play a game in windowed mode, and the window has no border

As for the 'Esc' problem, it is now gone. Now it shows the menu and the menu works fine.

[blahblahblahh]

Wow, looks great. The only problems:

1. on linux, appears in a small 640x480 window in top left of screen. A fullscreen window would have been nicer (my desktop res is 1400x1050)

2. generally very smooth but also slow - it auto disabled all options and yet it was still low fps. Playable, but you felt that you were missing out a bit. This is on a 1Ghz + geforce2, so it ought to be fine ?

3. Death to all obfuscators!

[Hansdampf]

there is one main reason why its so slow:
- it doesn't support 3d cards

but you can reduce the game size, so even Onyx with 500 mHz should reach high fps. A problem at such a small game size is that the gui components in the options screen will overlap.
And the collission detection won't work for objects that have a pixel size<1  

on my celeron laptop (1.7 ghz, 256 ddrram, NO 3D!) I get around  40 fps, on my desktop athlon 2400+ 512sdram+gf2  a litte less fps. (both xp)

So this game is for the mobile businessman with a fast cpu and no 3d card  

I think this way ist not the worst, this game will still run in 20 years on the next-generation cpus, I don't think Doom3 will do, due to compatibility problems.

Is someone out there with a monster cpu (3gHz?) and no 3d card?

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

[blahblahblahh]

That's a fine approach, it's just that I'd expect it to be easily twice as fast on the quoted hardware. Are you using all the available tricks for accelerating 2D blitting etc in java?

[Hansdampf]

no tricks
I write eveverything into a int[] buffer with my own routines for scaling, rotation, transparency,... it's very flexible.
The only possible hw accelleration is when the int[] is drawn as a BufferdImage. When I draw nothing but the background at 800*600 I get max 60 fps.  :-/


voila the cpu usage


you see, the pure blitting takes 20%, equal to the time System.arracopy (23.4% and 20.27% ) needs to copy 800*600 ints.
I'd REALLY like to hear that there is a faster way to get ints[] to the screen. I want to stick to ints[], because I love them and its easy and quick to alter the

[swpalmer]

Working well on OS X now (Java 1.4.2_05 Update 1) - around 40 fps on my 1Hz Powerbook.

But there doesn't seem to be any way to exit the app?

[namnet]

WOW! Awesome

I can't come up with any bugs or things that could get improved, since the only problem/feature(?) the game has is that it's slow, and since you'r doing the graphics in your "special" way, there's maybe nothing to do about it...

I got 40-120 fps (sound on, 800x600 I think) on WinXP, p4 2,4ghz, 256 ram, gf4.

[blahblahblahh]

no tricks
When I draw nothing but the background at 800*600 I get max 60 fps.  :-/

I'm pretty sure you can go much, much faster than that by being a bit more "accelerated-java2d-friendly" - but you'd have to dig around the J2D forum or ask someone like CrystalSquid or Abuse who might know. Personally, it's been so long since I did pixel-array based java graphics I can't reallly remember what you can and can't do - and I was doing it before the BufferedImage etc were even invented, so I'm not much use to you

[blahblahblahh]

the memory bug vanished for some reason.

Nope, tis still there. I just played the obfuscator level, completed it, then tried to play the test level and it crashed the JVM with "OutOfMemoryError".

You have a memory leak .

Go get a profiler and find out where you're leaking memory.

[blahblahblahh]

hm.. on my pc there is a startup time of about 42 ms after the applet has loaded (less than 400K). Must be OS dependent.

Yeah, it's OS dependent I think. At least, I just tried on windows and it came up straight away (although this was the fullscreen webstart version I tried this time - nice).

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

[blahblahblahh]

Anyway, now I've played the game "fast", a few comments:

- It is good fun and looks nice, lots of potential, but still some way to go to fulfil it's full potential I think.

- The HUD is crap. The point of a HUD is to be easy to see without having to look away from the action. Yours is too small and too cryptic (had no idea what any of it meant, apart from the lives which I guessed OK). Take a look at Alienflux for a *basic* HUD which is nevertheless clear and easy to read. Although I think you can do something much more funky- like you already have, but bigger with more self-obvious meanings.

- The enemies and background look great, but it would be even better to do more with the background. At the moment, it's basically all grass. Nice grass, but just grass. Download Raptor: Call of the Shadows (an old Epic shareware game in the same style) and see what "pretty backgrounds" means .

- The shop didn't have costs on each item, so I found it hard to choose what to buy

- You need to increase the contrast or brightness in your grey screens (the shop and the level select) - on this windows PC the level select orbs were so black they were INVISIBLE when not selected (I only knew there were two becauseI'd already played on linux and seen them ).

- he bullets for your ship are too big and too ugly . They help the screen look cramped and let down the excellent ship and enemy graphics.

- Generally, it all feels a bit too cramped. Maybe just shrink everything by 20% and it would look sharper and less cramped? Dunno...that's something you have to experiment with and use lots of trial and error.

[Hansdampf]

thanks for the feedback  

I could not reproduce the memory leak  (in the new version), but was able to crash the game from time to time... any crash reports are welcome

I made the bullets smaller and there is an option to smooth the explosion layer now (the old one was scaled by four to save time).
Shop has item costs now (I think)
leveldesign still sucks... much to to

the "test" level is a copy of the other level, but has another background (more simple fractal->faster) and all objects are rendered with other lights (darker, more reflectance)

Yes, the background looks boring. And the explosions are kind of annoying.

the hud: I want to keep it small (or kick it completely).
No one really needs to know how many points or money he has collected. And if a second player joins, two big huds  on the screen? Or what do others think?

the colored characters in the hud are the specialweapons.
The one bigger than the others is the active one, ignite it with up+down+left+right at once (don't know if this is possible on every keyboard...) or with the right mouse button. Fire is now possible with left mouse (only player one)

[misterX]

VERY cool! it's definitely a damn cool thing!
+ it ran flawlessly!

...moreover, i'm stunned you did all this using only the buffer!!! it's awesome!

...however, a nice thing would be music and better sounds.

but again, great job!

[blahblahblahh]

I can't remember the status of this - working on all platforms or not? - but could you finish off your current round of changes and submit it to JGF? (its already webstarted, isn't it)

[Hansdampf]

webstart: yes , 1.4
applet 1.3

I guess it works on the three platforms
(fullscreen problem on linux?)

[Malohkan]

that 800x600 array you're copying, is that relative to the screen resolution?  If so, and you're increasing the size of the array when you increase the resolution, it may be that you simply don't have enough memory allocated to the JVM and that could be what's causing the error.  If you have a few of those arrays alive at one time at resolutions above 1280x1024 you can overdo your limits for the default memory allocations.  I know, that's exactly what I did

[Hansdampf]

Fullscreen switches to 800*600, thats the maximum gamesize.
I think the problem occurs when there is no 800*600 mode available (game window  top left ?) but I can't reproduce it here.

It works even in 1280*1024 without memory problems for me.
I tested precalculating the whole background (around 40 screens!) and just draw it... more fps and easier to code.
I had the outOfMemoryProblem too (as applet), so I sticked to the "life-rendering" mode.

Edit: should be "live-rendering", no living creatures are forced to do the rendering  

[dranonymous]

Great graphics!  I always provide feedback in list form, so here ya go -

- The Alt key made the game loose focus.  I was pressing keys trying to remember what did what.

- After exiting the game, windows was very confused about where my menu bar was supposed to be.  I had to redo my resolution.

- The spacebar seemed to fire for player 2 much faster than holding the shift key for player 1.

- It was difficult for me to find my way around the options.  At first I didn't think there was any sound, but then I accidently got an option screen to come up.  From there I didn't realize the button said exit. So it dumped me out of the game.  

- Again, great graphics!

- I need to play some more!

Dr. A>

[Hansdampf]

thanks

- The spacebar seemed to fire for player 2 much faster than holding the shift key for player 1.

I bet you collected a powerup
It's much better to fire mit the mouse for player one

- It was difficult for me to find my way around the options.  At first I didn't think there was any sound, but then I accidently got an option screen to come up.  From there I didn't realize the button said exit. So it dumped me out of the game.  Sad

yes, it is cruel. the exit button exits the game
you can hit esc again to exit/enter the options screen and for PAUSE
will change that and other things next month

[Hauk]

The applet played fine for me. I'm running 800Mhz CPU, 64MB gfx card, 256 RAM. Enjoyable game and nice shield physics

Hauk

[Malohkan]

Oh man, I just had a great time playing your game

However, I would like to see some game saving though, as well as more of a sense of progress, like a storyline to the game and you go through different waves/levels and fight bosses.

Also, as happy as I was to be able to buy just about everything I could ever want from the Shop the first time I found the Shop, I do think for practicality's sake you'll want to make it take longer to get money and also make the random floating powerups more rare especially if you end up adding levels and game saving and such.

Could you make it so that the player can move forward/backward more?  I found sometimes when the battles got really heated that I had nowhere to run and was forced into collisions because I couldn't go back at all, and I could only get a tiny bit more screen space by going left or right.  There are times where things get REALLY intense and a strategic player likes to be able to dodge everything

How bout some speed and energy upgrades?

Keep this one up man, this is definitely worth my money

[Hansdampf]

Thanks, fellow folks  
Lots of motivation this morning.
The save function (works via a short cut&paste string code) is deactivated until there is more to see. I'm thinking of a universe full of systems (episodes) with several levels in each of them, weapon reset between episodes.
Levelbosses: yes, please!

Could you make it so that the player can move forward/backward more?  I found sometimes when the battles got really heated that I had nowhere to run and was forced into collisions because I couldn't go back at all, and I could only get a tiny bit more screen space by going left or right.  There are times where things get REALLY intense and a strategic player likes to be able to dodge everything Smiley

You can use the ShieldSpecial, SuperClusterbomb (which destroys all enemy shots) or upgrade the NegativeTractorBeam to prevent collisions.

Flying backward (pushing the screen down like in Xenon2) will be hard to implement because I'm using a ring buffer, craters and such things get lost when moving (the screen) forward. Would be possible if I prerendered the whole background, but takes too much RAM. By now, levels which are 100000+ screens long are possible. The old trade-off.

Ship upgrades: will be available in upcoming shops

[Malohkan]

awesome!  OK, I still don't quite understand why you can't have a freer screen.  If you can move left and right, why can't you make a bit more room moving forward?  If a player scoots himself forward as he's playing, then he has the option of moving back, achieving the effect I'm talking about.

EDIT:  Can you not exit from the level select screen?  I couldn't find a way out from there

[Hansdampf]

Hmm...  I think I got what you meant. Just have to increase the scrollbuffer height, so you can move forward/backward half a screen.
Next things to do:
1)getting drunk now
2)making playable levels next week

EDIT: I moved the "exit game" button from the options screen to the level select screen, but not uploaded the new version yet

[Hansdampf]

update!

New Bug-Level, few enemies in there (yet).

select smart weapons with the mouse wheel, ignite with rigtht MB, normal fire: left MB

I would like to know if the controls are ok for you
thanks  

[Hansdampf]

+hiscore available now
+push-screen-back enabled
+option to download better soundbank if no deluxe/mid soundbank present


+ 2 buttons on the html page you can copy

[Hansdampf]

not just a silly BUMP,
this game is now completely mouse controlled, works quite well even with my touchpad.

http://www.qfp.argon244.server4free.de/qfp.jnlp

ingame ESC for options
I think the "Obfuscator" level is fair enough to play, Mr autopilot makes it.

Anyone with a Mac? I can log a MouseWheelException from time to time