Iteration 6 Feedback
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Another release of T.W.T.P.B. is available! Detailed info is here: http://www.spellofplay.com/node/230 We're particularly interested in what you think about the new enemy colors, the energy bar and if the "No Boss" bug appears again! Thanx and enjoy! /hObbE |
Submitted by hObbE
Fri, 02/08/2008 - 15:56
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Iteration 6 Feedback
The new colors are nice, and the energy bar is helpful. Could be a bit smaller though. Also, 1680x1050 is 16:10, not 16:9
I haven't played a lot yet, I might say some more when I have.
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Yey!
I like the story!
Iteration 6 Feedback
New colours = Awesome! It would be interesting if the different colours meant something though. I don't know if you have played Ikaruga, but they have a really nice system that should prove to be some good inspiration. Anyway, it's just a thought.
Other things, I like that you made time warp cost more, even though it's quite annoying because I use it a lot.
But it feels more balanced now.
The mega huge story is nice, I'm looking forward to the rest! I do have a small complaint, although I didn't think to try it at the time. It would be nice if 'space' or just clicking anywhere on the screen let you start the game without having to click the start game button when the story is being presented. Once you have read it once you kinda want to skip it.. Again, I might be complaining over nothing, I didn't think to try if I could skip it that way.
Hmm, what else.. Oh yeah, when will we be able to get back our shields? Those 3 don't last forever.. Are you going to connect shields with weapon power? That might be interesting. I'm sure there are many more things you can do with it.
Powerup power isn't as visual as I would like, I dislike taking my eyes off the top/centre of the screen and the text at the top is slightly difficult to read when dodging bullets.. I rarely look at my own ship so that bar is mainly unused at the moment.
Well, those are my thoughts.. Oh! I figured out how to kill the huge megaboss without losing a life(or time warp)!!!
Iteration 6 Feedback
Thanx for the comments!
Good that you think it is more balanced with the slightly more costly time warp.
Right now you must click the start button. The problem with a more general "click anyware" is that you often click quite franatically in the game so it could be quite possible that you skip by misstake. Space is a good idea though
The colors are just coupled to the levels right now and are mostly meant to be some variations, I will check out Ikaruga.
Regarding the shield/life i'm considering an all new approach:
There will be lives, and health. The ship can withstand a certain amount of hits until it runs out of health, then you loose a life and get to restart at the begining of the level.
You then can do interesting things with the health, for example add a "Regeneration" ability that takes energy and transforms it into health.
Anyways, this will be tested in the next iteration
Good feed on the energy bar, i think I agree on that as I also don't look at the ship that much... Maybe put the bar directly under the small text?
/hObbE
Iteration 6 Feedback
The lives and health things sounds interesting. Will you make it so that you have a special ability that converts energy into health when you activate it, or were you thinking of another way of doing it?
I think coupling health with the energy is a good idea, how it is done is another matter though.
Moving the energy bar to the top sounds like a good idea, just make sure it has a background or similar so you can see where it begins/ends.
Out of curiosity, are you using the IMGui approach? Have you made some for of general helplib for it or do you redo everything on a per-project basis? I began looking at it and wanted to code together a small lib with the general parts, but as always I just kinda left it hanging in limbo. I need more self discipline..
Ouch! A thought just popped in my head, will you be changing the look of the energy/weapon upgrades? I'm thinking a glowy particle effect thingie for energy and something resembling an atom (big thing with little spinning things around it) for weapon upgrades. Although that's a random suggestion just taken from the dark vaults of my mind.
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hObbE please confirm this, but I'm pretty sure that all our IMGUI's are project specific.
At least for me, I have a hard time motivating reuse, because I find that most of the code in an IMGUI is directly related to visual style for the game in question.
For example in UfoPilot2 the "buttons" are all text based, while in AC they are more standard. Also, the way that fonts work differs between the two projects as well, due to UP2 being software rendering and AC being D3D9.
I am slowly accreting a utility library for all my D3D9 stuff, and there is a more "standard" imgui there, but truth be told I'm currently only using it for the integrated editors in a yet to be released project. So I guess that's project specific too
Iteration 6 Feedback
There will probably be an ability like "Regeneration" trading energy for health. At least that is my thought right now!
There will definitely be a change in the powerup visuals, good ideas. We'll see when we get around to that tough
Of course I use the IMGui approach in all my games and also hUb is completely coded using imgui. I use an even simpler approach than the one at mollyrocket though, I don't have any gui context at all and it works well in my simple cases.
There is currently no reuse of code between the guis, but the design is very much the same thing except for the actual rendering code (hUb uses GDI).
And the amount of code is so very small, and often copy pasted from my latest effort, that I guess it is more worth having the flexibility to do exactly what you want in a simple way than reuse existing stuff.
If it would be a help or interest to you we could write an article or something... or at least post some simple code
/hObbE
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An article would be interesting to read, the more detailed the better though.
I've already coded a bit around it and got the basics down. But your thoughts on more difficult gui behavior would be interesting, as the stuff I have read about IMGui's rarely approaches the juicy stuff. You simple no-context approach sounds interesting too, another area I would like to see more about.
My own thought would are in the lines of coding together the things that are similar in most projects. Like the collision detection code.. I'm still not sure what else to add to it though, but most GUI's do have text and textures too, but then I need to define good interfaces for that etc.. but you get my general idea I hope.
I'm not sure how IMGui my solution would be however.. but I think it'll work for me and that's the most important part.
Thanks for the info though, hope to see the next itaration of T.W.T.P.B. soon. (I really really want to know what the name stands for!!)
Have you had a look at Ikaruga yet? I hear they are making a HD version for XBLA. I think it was originally made for the Genesis and it was also release on the Gamecube.
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[quote="Malice"]Have you had a look at Ikaruga yet? I hear they are making a HD version for XBLA. I think it was originally made for the Genesis and it was also release on the Gamecube.[/quote]
You've really have to try Ikaruga if you haven't done so yet!
(Ikaruga was first released in the arcades, then ported to Dreamcast (only in Japan in 50.000 copies, however, making it a true collector's item), eventually released worldwide on GameCube and soon to appear on XBLA.)
Iteration 6 Feedback
Malice,
I found some slides on IMGUI here:
http://sol.gfxile.net/files/Assembly07_IMGUI.pdf
When it comes to "more difficult gui behaviour" my opinion is that you should take some time to reevaluate what it is you're trying to achieve. I have years of experience with MFC, and have created at least 3 different Retained Mode gui systems in various professional game projects, and I firmly believe that most of the complex things out there (tree views, tabbed property sheets, heirarchies of windows, etc) are a direct result of the non-dynamic nature of Retained Mode guis.
In RM, it is a big deal to dynamically create and destroy widgets, but in IM that kind of thing is implicit. So, you can do things differently.
I personally use buttons, radio buttons (which in essence are a two state button, driven by app state), text, a colorpicker (pshop style) with some sliders to go with that, but that's about it.
I don't use widget ids, because I have no real use for "hotness". Granted, this makes my sliders a bit icky, but I don't really mind.
I have abandoned any concept of heirarchies in guis. Everything is flat, since you can essentially "regenerate" you whole screen of widgets based on a single piece of application state. There is no need for list widgets, and the "holy grail" of having list widgets that support multiple kinds of widgets in the list at the same is easy, since there are no lists, you just have a bunch of doXXX() calls while looping your app state.
My style is based on that I'm a huge fan of "dedicated screen real estate", which means no overlap. In practice this means that your guis "change shape" a lot more, whole screens appear and disappear, but in general it keeps you more focused on the task at hand, and I find that I can use the whole screen space much better.
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[quote="samplerInfo"](Ikaruga was first released in the arcades, then ported to Dreamcast (only in Japan in 50.000 copies, however, making it a true collector's item), eventually released worldwide on GameCube and soon to appear on XBLA.)[/quote]
Doh! I meant Dreamcast, not Genesis... never had anything that wasn't Nintendo so I mix the other stuff up.
I'm still contemplating on how to solve drag-and-drop with the IM gui solution, but it should be doable. Other stuff I'm interested in is sliding UI components. Listboxes and similar things are also mindboggling but should prove doable, but I'm afraid that any kind of "Browse..." functionality will have to be dropped. Then again I'm not expecting to use that specific behaviour in games, but the earlier examples are things I'd like to use in games.
When(if) I do begin working on a lib for IMGui's it will most likely be small and not connected to anything. On the other hand I'll use it in future projects as much as possible. Naturally the behaviour of the GUI's will be completely project specific, albeit copy-pasted in most cases, I still want to be able to reuse other things from project to project. How to connect GUI-komponents with texts or images for example. I'm not sure it makes much sense as I've written it, but it's quite clear in my head. =)
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Lucky me then that I also have a game cube
Ikaruga ordered! 
/hObbE
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I have a few more things to add.
It seems that sometimes when I hit escape to abort my current game, I immediately get sent to the high score table with ~2000 points. I believe my bullets that were still on the screen hit something after I killed myself and this somehow sent me to the highscore table.
Another thing, it would be nice to not have to add your highscore if you don't want to, the only way to do it now is to violently shutdown the game. If you could abort reporting a highscore with the escape button that would be great.
It's nice that you save all highscores in a fashion, but it's also a bit annoying. I'm filling up the list unintentionally atm by playing a lot. =/ Maybe you could just save the top 10 (and the most recent) scores for each name? It would suck if people used this to write scores with other peoples names however.. But hopefully that won't be a problem.
Frag on!
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Good comments!
We're planning/working on a whole new higschore backend that will allow for some exiting stuff
A project carried out by a couple of web-programming students of the University of Kalmar. Will be really exiting stuff 
One thing I'm wondering about is if anyone has experienced the wierd "no boss bug" in this version of t.w.t.p.b? I could not reproduce it but walked through the code and change some things that might be the cause of this problem... so it would be really good to know if this is still an issue...
/hObbE
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I have not had the bug you describe appear in this version of TWTPB. I'm not sure if I got it in the previous version either.. but it was quite random so it might just be that, but hopefully it's gone forever!
I'm looking forward to the highscorethingie!! =)
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I was psyched to play this. and it threw me out to windows without a word after I heard one sec of music
This is a quite competent machine so I don't know what could be wrong. I found a log in the game folder saying:
TWTPB log: 02/18/08 - 20:57:58
Shader :data/effects/enemy.fx uses unhandled vertex shader input semantics, this shader will probably now work.
Shader :data/effects/enemy.fx uses unhandled vertex shader input semantics, this shader will probably now work.
Shader :data/effects/bar.fx uses unhandled vertex shader input semantics, this shader will probably now work.
Are you using pixel shader 2 or 3?
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hmmm ok....
The shaders are for PS 2.0 so that should probably work on most new reasonably machines.
Thanx for the log as usual I could use your computer specs.
We have not tested TWTPB on any ATI based cards as far as I know... if anyone got an ATI card and have tested TWTPB I would love to know.
/hObbE
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I believe that I have tested it on a ATI Radeon 9600 (on Win2k) after you switched to pixel shaders. I will try it again.
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I have actually found something that might have caused the problem. We'll see on Friday when the new version is released.
There will be a whole new level, a new boss and new enemies to look forward too
/hObbE
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[quote="hObbE"]I have actually found something that might have caused the problem. We'll see on Friday when the new version is released.
There will be a whole new level, a new boss and new enemies to look forward too
/hObbE[/quote]
SCORE!!!! \o/
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Cool
The computer I tested on was
XP home, P4 3ghz, 2gb ram, ati radeon 9800pro, sound card is a m-audio audiophile 2496. maybe the sound card is the problem but I heard sound for a second.
I also tried on my gaming rig
intel core 2 quad, 4gb ram, ati radeon 3870, soundblaster x-fi xtreme gamer. vista x64.
Worked perfectly there.
hope it helps.
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Thanx for the info!
/hobbE
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