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A forum for discussion of Crash's retro-style arcade game based on Star Fleet
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Crash
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Post by Crash »

http://www.xbomber.co.uk/index.p....&ucat=&By the way, it's gonna have 4 wings. I've only made one of them so far.
Dream big and bold and daring.
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Vanessa
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Post by Vanessa »

Hey Crash, your M14 Boss is looking very awesome indeed! I'm wondering how anyone could beat such a creation in battle So, you've got a Dell XPS M1730 I like Dell stuff and my one and only computer is a Dell Laptop XPS M1210, running XP Pro with 2.5G memory and Core II Duo processor.It's a most excellent machine and has been everywhere with me. I like the small size, and it has never missed a beat. I did specify the large-capacity battery pack though, and that's been a real blessing.It works well with my PAYG mobile broadband dongle, as I have no other form of internet access at home.Hopefully your machine will work as well for you as mine does for me...
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Shane
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Post by Shane »

Wow! That's a fantastic looking sprite!I look forward to getting my ass kicked by that in the next version of your game. Have to admit, I have a very average computer at the moment and I do experience a bit of slowdown when playing your game whenever the screen fills up with sprites. Is there an official minimum spec for your game?
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Crash
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Post by Crash »

Err ... try turning down some of the options under game like length of smoke trails and stuff. Gonna put in more of those. It doesn't hurt the look  but it should really affect how many objects the CPU has to handle.It runs on my ancient desktop pretty well.That's Athlon 64 3200+ (although I gave it a slight overclock) and it had an old 9800xt radeon. That was all hi-spec in early 2004 but things moved really quickly after that. The 9800xt is really feeble by today's standards. I found an HD 4670 with the old AGP socket and plugged that in and gave the 9800 to a friend whose 9600 blew out. I don't think it makes much difference. As long as there's 3d acceleration there... it should be enough.I wonder if this robot is too Gundam and not enough Star Fleet ... but we never saw an Alliance Robot to gauge what direction the creators would have gone in.My previous ones were more organic-like but this is more blocky and gundamy. Infact it hasn't gone terribly accordingly with my drawings. Might try and fix that for the next one.You should see its gun - that really does look awesome. Will update again once I have a bit more progress.I'm a bit stuck on the colours too. I like the blue-yellow chest and the purple hands but ... I think for the body red purple and grey should be the colours.This Dell is lovely. It's like a poor, reliable cousin to the Alienwares. They gave me Win7 64 ultimate for free installed on it. It's in good condition but I think its previous owner was a bit aggressive with his esc key. I might order a replacement keyboard off of ebay if it gets troublesome. I hope it keeps up the good work.You should see how it runs Crysis. It was gobsmacking even before I found out how to turn on its second graphics card.It's a little bigger than my old one but it's faster, quieter and really pretty.I found what looked like a sim-card slot under the battery housing and that must be what it's for - mobile internet without wifi. Random. I find it's cheaper to borrow peoples' wifi without them knowing.We had a guy and Uni living with us... we hacked this neighbours router and got on and he, well, he went a step further. He hacked the router admin panel, unlocked all the ports for bittorrent and absolutely hammered that connection for all it was worth. He was pretty cool actually for an Irishman.Whoever actually owned that router was not getting the speed of service he was paying for.



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Shane
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Post by Shane »

The slowdown occurred with all of the graphic settings scaled back (I'm used to having to do this when I run a game on my computer, which is not very often).My laptop computer's processor is an AMD Semprom™ SI-42 2.10 GHzAnd I have a poultry 1 GB of RAM
I like parties, I like fun, I want to live in a hamburger bun!
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Crash
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Post by Crash »

Well that's cool. I don't see why people should need loads of performance just to get things done. It's just lazy coders fuelling the corporate hardware manufacturers.I was gonna add quite a few more options to scale back the graphics fest for the next version anyway. I think they should make it. Damage smoke and fire trails were one thing but I have the rest written down somewhere.Make sure your PC is plugged in obviously cos any laptop runs slower on battery and have a look in power options to make sure it's on home/desk or high performance.In the game's options, on the right it should say something about DirectX 9. If that's working properly then that's about all you can do.I just tried the program with the lowest settings and it actually looked pretty good. The only difference was the missiles lacking their smoke trails. The missiles look even better in my test build here because they create a big cloud where they were launched as well. I'll have to make it so you can turn that off.I need to do some optimisation work on my upcoming build anyway because the new smoke system I built is putting a bit more strain on the collision detection. It's not bad the way it is but it could stand some improvement.I should say that we only broke into that guy's router for about a month while BT screwed us around over a lousy telephone line activation.
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Shane
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Post by Shane »

I think that's sound thinking and it would allow even the most under performing machine to run it. It does look gorgeous with all the settings turned on, but then it stalls completely for me.I'll have a look at my Direct X options.
I like parties, I like fun, I want to live in a hamburger bun!
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Vanessa
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Post by Vanessa »

QUOTEWe had a guy and Uni living with us... we hacked this neighbours router and got on and he, well, he went a step further. He hacked the router admin panel, unlocked all the ports for bittorrent and absolutely hammered that connection for all it was worth. He was pretty cool actually for an Irishman.Whoever actually owned that router was not getting the speed of service he was paying for.I should say that we only broke into that guy's router for about a month while BT screwed us around over a lousy telephone line activation.He He Crash, you are naughty, but I sure did chuckle over that  I'm totally sick of my Avatar, am trying to get my own to appear, but it sure is difficult for a computer simpleton like me



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Vanessa
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Post by Vanessa »

Well, whaddaya know...Did it Just goes to show, if you blithely click away at as many options as possible, sometimes, just sometimes, it eventually works
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Crash
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Post by Crash »

Oh, one more thing: if you want fullscreen use the Alt+Enter way of getting it (rather than maximising the window by clicking the button next to the red close one).That way the screen upscales the picture rather than the graphics card. That speeds things up too.
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