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War Pong
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Poll Result
  How good is War Pong?  
 
It's super!
9%
 9%  [ 1 ]
It's a good distraction.
27%
 27%  [ 3 ]
It's alright, but you know...
18%
 18%  [ 2 ]
Could be better.
9%
 9%  [ 1 ]
It's bad, but it could be worse.
9%
 9%  [ 1 ]
This sucks! Why did you make me waste my time on it?
27%
 27%  [ 3 ]
 
  Total Votes : 11  

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Konedima
Grammar Police
Grammar Police


Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship



PostPosted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 12:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Fost wrote:
Weeble wrote:
Does that mean us Grammar Nazis get to have a field day on Mr Robot?

Yes!
Woohoo!!!!
I mean... Yes, that will be quite fun on my part.

And in case your wondering... the version I released earlier supports skins (its quite easy to make and use them - there's a simple guide on the site). It also has more advanced ball mechanics and is much more user friendly (no more instantly quitting when it gets to the max score of 9 - it goes up to 21 now and you get a "player x wins would you like to play again" screen).
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Konedima
Grammar Police
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Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship



PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2006 9:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm working on an update now... depending on how long I take it will be up either tonight or tomorrow tonight (school goes back tomorrow, damnit!).

Anyway in this update I am including basic AI (technically not intelligent, but I'll get to that later) and a main menu (instead of people having to press a million different buttons to access the game modes.

Now, my in-depth look into my AI that I am writing cause I feel like it:
It's not actually intelligent. It's more like an animal. If the ball is above it, it moves the paddle up. If the ball is below it, it moves the paddle down. Simple enough. It moves at the same speed you can. Which presents a problem: that thing's hard to beat! I will probably include difficulty levels later (either making it move slower or having a random chance of missing). Of course, when I was almost done I forgot something: it should shoot! You can shoot in this game so I though I would make the AI. This presents a few balancing problems since the AI is basically a sharpshooter (it will only shoot when you're in its sights). This is defeated by some of the existing game balancing rules, the game itself and some new ones I'm giving the AI (depending on how it works though, I might apply it to players). One restriction already in place for everyone is that you can't have more than six bullets per player on the screen at once. This so the screen doesn't load up with bullets, which not only makes it incredibly easy to hit (if you have bullets everywhere), plus the game kinda starts chugging with that much detail. Also, bullets take time to travel across the screen, so you'll only get hit if you stay in the same place. Something I had to add for the AI was a reload timer on bullets. Maybe that's the not the best name for it but I implemented a system so the AI can only fire once a second. Without this in place, bullets would be fired off in a big clump with barely anything separating them. This of course means that when you're hit, you're hit bad (and the game chokes because the bat resizing is inefficient for multiple hits at once). I may include this for human players however it is not as much of an issue.

And that's the end of my longwinded an unnessecary explanation. If you're still awake, look for that new version soon.
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Konedima
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Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship



PostPosted: Mon Oct 16, 2006 7:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just uploaded the new version. If not having anyone to play with stopped you before, don't let it now. Especially since the AI offers up a challenge. Get it at http://warpong.sourceforge.net
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Konedima
Grammar Police
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Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship



PostPosted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Aside from this being a flimsy excuse to bump the thread, is there anything any of you out there browsing the forums would like to see in the game? (Fost, Poo Bear and Hamish, I'm looking your way since you're developers).
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Poo Bear
Pod Team
Pod Team


Joined: 14 Oct 2002
Posts: 4121
Location: Sheffield, UK



PostPosted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It seems like a perfectly reasonable pong game to me, you could try and sex up the artwork (check out Titan Attacks) or add more power ups I suppose.
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Fost
Pod Team
Pod Team


Joined: 14 Oct 2002
Posts: 3734



PostPosted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Perhaps powerups could drop from the top and be awarded to whomever shoots them? There's no shortage of ideas you could steal from the many arkanoid clones out there.

I second Poo Bear - Some kind of tank like in Titan Attacks would look great and I'm sure you'd get a lot more people playing if there was a bit of nice art to draw them in. It would also help to have some indication of where the bullets come from (i.e the 'tank's barrel.)
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Weeble
Starscape Jedi
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Joined: 25 Apr 2003
Posts: 1143
Location: Glasgow, Scotland



PostPosted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 11:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You might want to allow the player to travel partially beyond the top and bottom boundaries. It's frustrating when you get so big that you can't really aim at the opponent anymore. Either that or cap the maximum bat size.

Maybe you could have charge-up shots? Or a means to exert a bit more control over the path of the ball? I think one problem at the moment is that it doesn't really seem possible to force the opponent to take hits by clever use of the ball and shots - it seems only luck if you're in a position to fire some shots that will coincide with the ball at the far side, forcing your opponent to take the hit. I would like to see new features that make it both possible to outwit your opponent, and sufficiently rewarding to do so.
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SethP



Joined: 24 Apr 2006
Posts: 302
Location: Connecticut, USA



PostPosted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 7:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The only real difficulty that I've encountered so far is that I need two hands to play. Possibly it's just me, but I find it difficult to smush my fingers on the w, s, and d keys. It feels more comfortable (to me) to use the w, a, and d keys. That way I can keep my fingers on all three buttons at once, which I like. Ideally there'd be a way to switch the configuration (since I'm sure the w s d configuration works better for people who like to use one finger to control movement).

All the other (slight) issues have already been mentioned (i.e. graphics, powerups). Another mode that I could see being pretty fun is some sort of a ladder mode, where you defeat opponent paddles of increasing difficulty, getting the chance to buy powerups and whatnot in between the rounds. In all honesty, though, the game's pretty fun as is. I think you've done an excellent job of putting a new twist on an old concept, and I can't wait to see what you put in the next update.

As a side note, I don't know anything about Blitz Basic, but what are the odds of getting a linux build? I have two machines (windows and linux), and it'd be cool if I could get this on both of them Smile
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Konedima
Grammar Police
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Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship



PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 9:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

SethP wrote:
As a side note, I don't know anything about Blitz Basic, but what are the odds of getting a linux build? I have two machines (windows and linux), and it'd be cool if I could get this on both of them Smile
Blitz Basic - no chance. However Blitz Basic does have a newer brother called Blitz Max which does support Linux and Mac OS. However it costs 80 USD, and I simply don't have that kind of money. However a generous donation might make it happen (wink wink).

Since everybody seems to think there should be powerups, that's what I'll work on for the next version. However I can't decide powerups I should make. I'm thinking:

    Rapid fire (no six bullet limit)
    Quadruple damage (bullets work x4, obviously)
    Shield (invunerable to bullets)
    Giant bat (bat takes up most of the screen)
    Blind (opponent's half is covered)
    Substitute (unbeatable AI takes over)


Of course, there are obligatory powerdowns, and to that end I'm thinking:

    Slow reload (only two bullets at once)
    Butter ammunition (bullets do very little damage)
    Bullet collector (larger bullet pickup area but not bat)
    Tiny bat (bat shrinks to tiny size)
    Noball vision (ball becomes invisible on your half)
    Erratic movement (controls are reversed)


And of course things that work both ways:

    Giant ball (ball becomes 4x bigger)
    Speeding Bullet Becomes Faster (bullets go twice as fast)
    Frozen bats (bats are frozen in place)
    Frozen ball (ball is frozen in place so let players duke it out with bullets)
    Double scoring (next point adds 2 to score)
    Reverse speed (bats become slow and ball becomes fast)


I don't expect to include ALL of them in one update (I could, but it would take ages... what do you out there think? Add a few and release it then add more later or release later and add as many as possible?). I also might include a new graphics theme with the next update (but don't expect it to be the next Mona Lisa... I'm not an artist).
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SethP



Joined: 24 Apr 2006
Posts: 302
Location: Connecticut, USA



PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 12:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

One thing that I just noticed was how slow the hit code is. It wasn't a problem before, but now I'm running my laptop on battery mode, so to save power it puts a cap on the max CPU usage. Now every time a bullet impacts the game pauses for a good half a second or more. The game's still playable, but I was wondering if there's any way for you to optimize your code a little (I tried looking at it, but I don't know blitz basic, so I can't offer any suggestions).
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Weeble
Starscape Jedi
Starscape Jedi


Joined: 25 Apr 2003
Posts: 1143
Location: Glasgow, Scotland



PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 4:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

At a quick glance, I'd say you're constructing the bats from a pixel-thin sliver that, every time they resize, you draw repeatedly onto an off-screen bat image. This is probably responsible for the slow-down. You might be able to reduce these to one scaled draw, which is probably much faster. I don't know Blitz though, so I'm not sure what's available. You also seem to rebuild both bats every time one of them changes. Presumably you can change it to only rebuild the bat that has changed.

Does Blitz allow you to pass parameters to subroutines?
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ewerybody



Joined: 05 Sep 2006
Posts: 165
Location: Berlin



PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 5:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hey konedima!

Emm.. I'd like to say nice, and stuff but I get this when I start the game:

but i could start the 0.3 version without the 'graphics'.

Quite nice concept so far. Had any skinners so far?
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Konedima
Grammar Police
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Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship



PostPosted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 2:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Weeble is right, the bats are 1 pixel thin sliver drawn as many times as needed. However it would be pointless to change it so that it can draw bats individually because both of them change at the same time (one shrinks, the other grows). I can think of two ways to make it faster:

1 (not sure if I can do this): I could look through the commands to see if there is a scale function in the graphics
Edit: Tested now. There is a resize function, but it won't resize pixel for pixel, it must use its own system. Looks kinda funky, but not what I want.
2 (not sure how much this would help): The bats never resize in increments other than 5 or multiples of it (20 for losing a point), so I could make the bat picture a 10x5 (instead of 10x1) and see if that helps. It should, because it only has to draw 1/5ths the number of image.
Edit: Tested that. It certainly helps, though especially during tough (i.e. multiple) hits, it does slow down, though not nearly as much. It would help if the bullets did 10 damage instead of 5 (halving the number of draws) but I'm wondering if that would affect the balance... what do you think?

ewerybody: Because the skinning functions require each skin to be in a seperate folder, by default the game doesn't include a folder to look for the graphics, so if you launch the executable, that's the problem. You need to launch it via a shortcut set to start in "folderyouinstalledin\default". I don't actually know NSIS scripting that well so the shortcut might have been made wrong if you didn't install in the default directory (I doubt it though). There's a picture in the skinning guide. Version .03 doesn't have any graphics to look for (everything drawn in game and is just solid blocks of colour).
And no, unfortunately no skinners yet.
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Konedima
Grammar Police
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Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship



PostPosted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 6:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

SethP (or anyone who cares), I just uploaded the exe for the faster bat draws. Download it from [url]http://warpong.sourceforge.net/War Pong 0.06.exe[/url] and replace your original with it.

Edit (several hours later): I just realised that this version requires the bigger paddle graphics. They are at http://warpong.sourceforge.net/paddle.bmp and http://warpong.sourceforge.net/paddle2.bmp . Just replace the originals in the default folder with those. Sorry for any problems on account of me being very very forgetful.
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SethP



Joined: 24 Apr 2006
Posts: 302
Location: Connecticut, USA



PostPosted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 7:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the fix, it works a lot better now. There's still a teeny bit of a slowdown, but it impacts gameplay a lot less.
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