Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

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Crash
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by Crash »

Righty where do I start. Sprites are traditionally 3D right? but hey if the hat fits...Don't worry there's stacks of powerups later on. I think you might have a point there though about them going off in the wrong direction. I thought about having 'em go slowly straight down never really got 'round to it. Right I'll do something about that. Okay but yeah so you can't make X-Bomber all that nippy. I mean its huge. I worked it out and it came to 206 metres. Besides those little fighters only go 10% faster than you do.The laser fire on the blue Astrofighters is chosen completely at random from a choice of 7 downward directions"they'd be quite an uber-weapon if they targeted every enemy ship without mercy!" Yeah you get that quite a lot of that actually, especially with bosses. Makes it that bit interesting when they fire right at you.The boss?... Oh I just took the idea of an Astrofighter carrier and stuck a few more arms and legs on. It was designed in a pub in Corbridge.Some of the music tracks include 2 or 3 seconds of blank sound before the beginning of the song. Whilst most of the others start instantly. If you've ever listened to Supertramp you'll what I mean. It's nothing to do with loading or selecting or freezing. Oh teachers yeah! I can't really say what happened because they know I come here a lot and if I tell you what really happened they'll deny it and I'll get booted out the school. But let me just say that if it had had anything to do with rugby it wouldn't have happened. Anway there's lots of us who are very unhappy about it to say the least. As for teaching the curriculum I'll have to remind them about getting 'round to doing that one day.
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AndyThomas
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by AndyThomas »

The sound thing may well be something to do with my system - a recent "patch" has done something to my system (thank you, Mr Gates) so I'm not convinced it's 100% at the moment. Perhaps it's a mental thing - if the music stops naturally perhaps I'm just imagining the pause in gameplay!I agree that X-Bomber shouldn't be nippy - not a criticism at all, just that as it's so big and not massively fast it'd be good if the shields/armour held out a little longer from my point of view - do the shields recharge naturally at all?Sprites are 2D - back when I was trying to write the odd game for the old BBC, you either constructed things geometrically or you used a sequence of user-defined characters to create ships, animals etc. I don't know if anyone calls anything a "sprite" these days - it's been a very, very long time since I was looking at things like this.
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Crash
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by Crash »

Even if your synthesizer's acting up the music does cut out for a few seconds anyway.  But unless you know any MIDI coders there's not a lot I can do about it.  (MIDI are usually as bent as corkscrews anyway).Ah, shields I've thought about this a lot.  They don't recharge normally but your weapons reload (slowly) and if you press 'S' on your keyboard it'll send a bit of energy from your weapons to the shields.  P.S. your shields are made more than 2x as hard after level 6.  But I think I might make em a bit tougher in future.Ah right, well, the graphics on XB were just drawn in a sort of MS Paint lookalike.  So nothing like that.  There's no actual programming associated with making the graphics.  Multimedia Fusion deals with geometric sprites to an extent but there's no point in using them unless you're writing a 3D application.Oh about the turrets - were you talking about X-Bomber's turrets or the bad guys' ones?
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by AndyThomas »

X-Bomber's...
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Bradster
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by Bradster »

I've just had about 5 minutes to try this out and I must say I like it! Its hardware demands are (thankfully) low enough that the game runs just perfectly in my emulated Win 2k environment on my Mac. When I have time to play through more, I'll try to find any quirks that haven't already been mentioned.
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Crash
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by Crash »

You got it to run on a Mac? nicely done! Hey, I had my fingers crossed but I wasn't sure if it would play ball.Thanks for tryout there Bradster. If you come across anything amiss, put it up here and I'll fix it for the next one. But yeah, have some patience with it. It gets a lot better after level 1. As for X-Bomber's laser turrets - they try their best to go after the little ships. I think there's an art to getting them work... sorry, we were talking crossed-purposes earlier.
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by Bradster »

Well, if you consider "running on a software-emulated x86 chipset in a rooted window" to be analogous with "playing on a Mac" then yes.
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by AndyThomas »

Right, level 2, it's asteroids on steroids! That's what I was expecting from the description, though, so spot on. New ship types as well - how many levels are there Crash? I think I'm beginning to sense why the teachers may have been a little annoyed - you've clearly put a massive amount of time and effort into getting this to this point! Is this actually based on some sort of example game, or is it all done from scratch? Just curious as to whether things like the comments on scores came as standard!In terms of playtesting comments - I'm still getting pauses on the music switchovers, but it may well just be my system being glitchy. I'm working the energy better - laser torpedoes are handy if used in a controlled way as I can get a couple of targets at a time with them. I found the turrets very handy for taking out the first boss, as I could stay out of the way of its beam cannon using them.So is anyone else playing it then? What do others think?
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by Bradster »

It's not just you, Andy. I'm getting pauses as the music switches too. Also, if you return to the main menu while music is playing and you switch the MIDI option off, the music just keeps on playing until the end of the track.On a somewhat unrelated note, the two Star Fleet MIDIs you have for download on your site, Crash, are actually the same file. Did you sequence the SF tracks yourself? They sound pretty good.
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Crash Override's Game - Work in Progress

Post by Crash »

There's 9 levels ranging from the strange to the sublime. you'll love level 3. Its completely different to ... everything. It's all been started from a blank screen and nothing else. It's a very common sort of genre and very similar to Raptor (YEAH!) which I grew up on. But it uses its own little engine which isn't really based on anything in terms of its mechanics and behind the scenes stuff. For example the bad guys don't arrange / formulate themselves in a repetitive way - it's all done by random which as far as I can tell is a new way of doing things (but very easy to do). So in terms of putting it together it was started completely from scratch thats why it took me since last summer holiday (on and off).I got the idea for the scores from some ancient game 'atomic war' ... or something. Where it slagged you off for being rubbish when you got annihalated. So I thought i'd put in something similar. I just put in some of my own insults and cutting comments. Just to sort of spur on whoever was playing it. It was just like - "score is less than 1000... this guy wants slagging off, what do I type in here?"The music shut-off will be fixed right away. I know exactly what you mean. Because the MMF command line for playing about with the music doesn't work with many new sound cards - I had to improvise a bit but I know how to rectify it. It had completely not occurred to me. Thank you. It's dead re-assuring when people have approached the whole thing from a fresh angle and see how to improve it. That's great! This is amazing stuff - anything else, just put it up here ... I'm making a list.Hmm. those 2 MIDIs. Yeah I got em from right here and from a Mr Mike Egerton. They're not absolutely the same I think that one sounds v. slightly better at the beginning and one sounds better at the end (although depends on the old FM synthesizer). apart from the fact that the file sizes are different. I didn't want to include one and not the other. I figured it wouldn't be right to say "thanks but i got a better one already".But no, never coded a MIDI file in my entire life. Don't really want to either. I'm not a musician.
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