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Program Announcements / Arch Ball

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ico
18
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Joined: 17th Jun 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posted: 8th Jan 2007 15:17 Edited at: 15th Jan 2007 12:21
Yay! Another ball game. The objective is to roll all the balls through arches in order. Made with DBPro 1.063

Features:
- Uses Newton DBPro wrapper
- 5 balls that react differently in world
- Configurable game options

Screen shots:



Download:
Primary link: http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/1/8/613117/arch_ball.rar
File is compressed as .rar
File size is 5.35 MB

Try it out and tell me what you like and don't like. Report any bugs. Good and bad crits welcome!
Dared1111
18
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Joined: 25th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 8th Jan 2007 17:05
Looks impressive

Game progress- 30 percent
Coder#05
19
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Joined: 26th Oct 2005
Location: Denmark
Posted: 8th Jan 2007 23:03
looks cool, downloading..

easy comes easy goes
C0wbox
18
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Joined: 6th Jun 2006
Location: 0,50,-150
Posted: 8th Jan 2007 23:54
How did you do the shadows?
Did you just use the shadow shading command in DBP 6.3?


http://www.soharix.homestead.com/
spooky
22
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Joined: 30th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 8th Jan 2007 23:59
Game looks great but playing it is another story altogether. I just couldn't get anywhere. I think most people will just get frustrated within the first minute and give up.

Boo!
ico
18
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Joined: 17th Jun 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posted: 9th Jan 2007 00:25
Quote: "Looks impressive"

Quote: "looks cool, downloading.."

Thanks

Quote: "Did you just use the shadow shading command in DBP 6.3?"

Yes

Quote: "Game looks great but playing it is another story altogether. I just couldn't get anywhere. I think most people will just get frustrated within the first minute and give up."

What's throwing you off the most? Are the balls rolling too much? Difficult terrain? I made alternate routes, you can warp through pipes.


Thanks for the replies.
Coder#05
19
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Joined: 26th Oct 2005
Location: Denmark
Posted: 9th Jan 2007 09:43
Quote: "I think most people will just get frustrated within the first minute"

I actually got frustrated, but only lasted for about 30 secs, until i got the hang off it,.. maby add a Small map.. Relay fun to play, and nice idea.

criticism:
The menu looks like a loading screen..
The red line is hard to see...

Great job..



easy comes easy goes
spooky
22
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Joined: 30th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 9th Jan 2007 11:43
OK. I gave it another go and got on with it better this time and manages to complete a few arches.

I like the warps. Like the swimming pool one that can only be used by balls that sink. Rubber ones float so you have to use a different route. Clever!

The red line thing at the bottom is a bit pants though. It goes very fast, about 1 second from left to right and the red line is not that smooth either so appears to flicker across very quickly. Trying to hit boost or jump is really quite annoying, specially when you sometimes shrink the width of the buttons to about 1cm.

No other problems apart from that.

Boo!
C0wbox
18
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Joined: 6th Jun 2006
Location: 0,50,-150
Posted: 9th Jan 2007 18:19
Wow, thats quite cool, I've been playing it frequently for 2 days, finding all the cool places you made.

Two questions:
1. How did you make the map?
2. Is it possible to get off the edge of the map, with a well timed jump+boost?

Cowbox


http://www.soharix.homestead.com/
Dared1111
18
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Joined: 25th Oct 2006
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Posted: 9th Jan 2007 21:10
Can i use the idea sometime?

Game progress- 30 percent
ico
18
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Joined: 17th Jun 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posted: 9th Jan 2007 23:42
I uploaded an updated version. You can download it from the same original link in my first post.

Changes from the first release:
- Slowed down the Cursor speed
- Improved Cursor visibility
- Improved loading screen
- Boost and Jump Bonus sizes aren't as dynamic
- Improved camera collision detection
- Added total game time in Results message box
- Changed turn start messages. Now only the current ball text and next arch text appear.
- In this version I have denied Boost and Jump bonuses overlapping.
- Fixed a few other minor bugs

Things still to do:
- Remodel Sand and gravel areas
- Tweak Newton body and material properties



Quote: "1. How did you make the map?"

Modelled and textured the map in Anim8or. All of the textures were originally from http://www.noctua-graphics.de, except for the sky and foilage textures, I made those.

Quote: "2. Is it possible to get off the edge of the map, with a well timed jump+boost?"

No. There are invisible walls and ceiling. Although if I disable these the ball would respawn from starting point
Note: The current version denies Jump+Boost

Quote: "Can i use the idea sometime?"

Of course. This was a fun project and I learned quite a bit from it.
spooky
22
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Joined: 30th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 9th Jan 2007 23:56
File not found.

Boo!
tiresius
22
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Joined: 13th Nov 2002
Location: MA USA
Posted: 10th Jan 2007 05:16
It's corrupt for me. I really want to see this game!

I'm not a real programmer but I play one with DBPro!
Crazy Ninja
19
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Joined: 27th Aug 2005
Location: Awesometon
Posted: 10th Jan 2007 10:23
me and spooky have the same problem. Dang, it looks fun.

ico
18
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Joined: 17th Jun 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posted: 10th Jan 2007 12:25
Whoops. I have dial up so I left the computer to upload and I went to bed. Woke up finding the upload hanging After several more tries, I still couldn't upload the file completely. So I uploaded the file to geocities, at least there they support ftp and resume, but I had to compress the game to a zip file. The file size is larger now, but the link should work now.

Also I'm wondering when you start Arch Ball what is the first Display Mode listed in the menu.

Enjoy
spooky
22
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Joined: 30th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 10th Jan 2007 13:41
Those links work, but only if you cut and paste link into a browser. Looks like they dont support hotlinking. This forum lets you upload big files you know, only it requires downloaders to be logged in to forum.

Anyway, the speed thingy at bottom is much better now, although pink for the cursor is a horrid colour. A nice bold red would be better and mayba make cursor a bit thinker.

Default res is shown as 1280 * 1024 * 16 which is correct resolution of my desktop, although you are not detecting colour depth correctly. Should be 32, not 16.

Here's code I use to detect users desktop res and colur depth.



Other things you may want to improve:

Skybox is really blocky and looks really quite bad.

Loading screen is a bit low-res and does not upscale too well.

Presumably you are using text command to output ball and arch numbers. TEXT in DBPro is very slow, specially if you change ink colours in main loop. Game noticably slows down when holding CTRL. You should try cloggys text DLL which does superfast anti-aliased 2d and even 3d text. Or when you output text make sure the second parameter of ink command is always just 0. Whatever you do, NEVER use SET TEXT FONT in main loop as it really slows things down because DBPro reloads font every time you call that command.

Getting there though and quite enjoyable to play.

Boo!
spooky
22
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Joined: 30th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 10th Jan 2007 15:39
Ignore what I said about sky. Playing with your texture and detail settings fixed that.

Boo!
C0wbox
18
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Joined: 6th Jun 2006
Location: 0,50,-150
Posted: 10th Jan 2007 17:45
Another question concerning the map and Anim8or.

I have Anim8or and can use it to import objects into DBP for my games.

Recently I had some problems in the one of my objects had a red textured area on it but when exported into a .3ds for use in DBP, it showed up entirely red. (Instead of the planned, grey with a red patch.) I don't know really if you know how fix that.

But my main concern is how you made your "map" in Anim8or? How do you turn it into a map, surely the balls would collide with the objects bounds (being a cube) and not actually collide with the things in it?

(Tried making a .x map once and it was set to stop the player if it touched the map object but when spawned inside the map, it just got stuck, even though the player was clear of all the walls. I realised this was because the bounds were box shaped. Please, how does one overcome this?


http://www.soharix.homestead.com/
tiresius
22
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Joined: 13th Nov 2002
Location: MA USA
Posted: 10th Jan 2007 18:24
This is pretty cool!

The starting screen size the title screen defaulted to was insane and my screen couldn't really do it. It was something like 2048x1536 or something. I just got a black screen, heh.

You should try an option to have software rendering of the shadows maybe? My craptastic GPU doesn't do the stencil shadow thing so I didn't see the shadows. I know, that is insane.

If you switch it to software mode and the shadows still look pretty good, could you let me see the shadowing code? I have a marble game myself and have given up for now on producing a nice shadow via the software renderer.

I'm not a real programmer but I play one with DBPro!
ico
18
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Joined: 17th Jun 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posted: 10th Jan 2007 18:48 Edited at: 10th Jan 2007 19:45
@spooky
Thanks for the code snippet! Currently the default display mode is determined by the first item in the display mode checklist. I'll have to fix this.
I noticed the slow down while holding ctrl too. I'll be fixing this too. Thanks for the awesome replies.


@COwbox
Quote: "Recently I had some problems in the one of my objects had a red textured area on it but when exported into a .3ds for use in DBP, it showed up entirely red. (Instead of the planned, grey with a red patch.) I don't know really if you know how fix that."

You have to apply textures not materials. Anim8or only exports 1 material for 3ds.

Quote: "But my main concern is how you made your "map" in Anim8or? How do you turn it into a map, surely the balls would collide with the objects bounds (being a cube) and not actually collide with the things in it?"

I use Newton's tree collisions

* Also your questions are off topic, please stay on topic.


@tiresius
Quote: "You should try an option to have software rendering of the shadows maybe?
...
I have a marble game myself and have given up for now on producing a nice shadow via the software renderer."

I'll stick with the hardware rendering, because from my experience it's faster and more accurate. You might be able to fake your shadows, just make a plain with a picture of your shadow and position it on the ground following your object.
ico
18
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Joined: 17th Jun 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 01:08
Uploaded an updated version today

Changes:
- Holding ctrl or RMB hardly slows down game now. Displays sprites instead of text.
- Touched up map
- Default display mode matches desktop
- Corrected some fatal bugs
- Fixed a few other minor bugs


Oh and for the curious, hold F1 to display FPS
Bizar Guy
19
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Joined: 20th Apr 2005
Location: Bostonland
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 03:04
The site is currently unavailable. Too bad, I wanted to try this.

spooky
22
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Joined: 30th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 12:22
Playing really nice now.

Can confirm that correct resolution is chosen.

Using the arch sprites when holding down CTRL or RMB looks a bit naff now in my opinion. I like the new ball numbering using that bitmap file. Maybe use a similar system for labelling the arches, such as Arch #1, etc. - If you like the arch number sprites then by all means leave them alone, it's your game!

The only other slight niggle which is virtually impossible to stop is the camera control when ball is close up to a wall and the camera gets squashed becuase it has nowhere to go. Nothing you can do about that though. The only thing you could do is force camera to move up so it looks down on ball. Maybe quite difficult to pull off though.

Boo!
Valle
18
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Joined: 10th Mar 2006
Location: in your girlfriends bed
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 15:22
this sounds very interesting, but it didnt work for me
after the loading screen i get an error message from windows.
Maybe my laptop isn't good enough...


ico
18
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Joined: 17th Jun 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posted: 12th Jan 2007 16:09 Edited at: 12th Jan 2007 21:21
#Bizar Guy
Quote: "The site is currently unavailable. Too bad, I wanted to try this."

It's working, you might have been trying to download it while I was uploading it.

@ spooky
Quote: "Using the arch sprites when holding down CTRL or RMB looks a bit naff now in my opinion. I like the new ball numbering using that bitmap file. Maybe use a similar system for labelling the arches, such as Arch #1, etc. - If you like the arch number sprites then by all means leave them alone, it's your game!"

I'm going to change those anyways. I didn't finish everything yesterday and uploaded whatever I had done.

@Valle
Quote: "this sounds very interesting, but it didnt work for me
after the loading screen i get an error message from windows.
Maybe my laptop isn't good enough..."

Did you try lowering/disabling some of the options? I'm thinking that something like the shadows are enabled and your gfx card can't cope. Are there anymore details you can provide?
ico
18
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Joined: 17th Jun 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posted: 15th Jan 2007 12:38
Updated again.

Changes from last version:
- Finished off Ball and Arch sprites.
- Updated Camera. Cam doesn't go crazy when pinned against obstacle and does not zoom across map to next ball.
- Add First person perspective to camera. To change between first and third person views, press shift or mouse wheel button.
- World Details sets Newton solver. Setting world details to low will perform physics calculations faster but less accurate. High will be slower but more accurate, setting to medium is sort of in between.
- Setting World Details to Low will disable underwater fog.
- Water is much harder to roll through.
- Replaced dbpro icon with my own.
- Added more error handling during load.
- Optimized some blocks of code, may have created new errors, but when I tried it the game seemed stable.

I think that was it. Enjoy
spooky
22
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Joined: 30th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 15th Jan 2007 16:33
Even better!

When you complete a game you simply output a status screen and a "press and key to quit" type message. You press a key and game exits back to windows. Would be far better to restart game at options screen, just as if you had loaded game fresh.

Self-shadowing, specially on the stone ball, is a bit iffy, but I do know that DBPro has a couple of issues with self-shadowing, and I see you have already modified the shadow fx file and changed the zclash numbers, so can assume you tried all sorts of different numbers and you are now left with best option.

Rest of game is nigh on perfect now.

Boo!

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