Posts by Asholay

Hey peeps - Ash here, just dropping you all a line to ask for a bit of help sharing my Kickstarter campaign of animal zombies plush toys! Please login to see this link.

Any help in sharing on Facebook, etc would be gratefully received (and if you know anyone who'd love an awesome zombie animal, then all the better!)

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Thanks guys, over & out
Ash

Hey everyone, I've finally managed to get a version of Retro Tanks on the xbox indie forums! It's still incomplete, but I'd like to get the back end complete before going crazy on adding level content, although there's plenty to test with!

I'd love for any form of feedback possible

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Thanks
Ash

Hi Cole, yes I'm logging in with just my main profile, then using other made up accounts to test other players on - but they don't get a chance to save any data. It's the person who presses start at the beginning who has the data saved and loaded. (Do I have to allow other players the ability to save their medals and options?)

I converted a version to PC and watched the ini file saving & loading and couldn't get any errors to replicate there, so I'm still baffled as it's still happening every now and again and I can't pin down what causes it.

Quote from Asholay

Anyone have any ideas on this?

Francois - who's game had this problem, I'll drop them a line.

Still having problems getting the INI to stop resetting/deleting? Any help appreciated.

Any suggestions at what the improvements or new features might be Jeff? If there's something useful to my current project, then I might hold off on a few things, so it would be good to know.

That's fab GK - just what I was looking for.

I've hidden the non-player toolbars and am working on tidying up the toolbars as you suggest - yes, I guess it could look a bit daunting - you forget that a fresh face will be playing the game rather than the person who wrote it, and I've started many games only to be knocked back by what looks like an overly complex system.

There are certainly plenty of help menus and even a tank builder page where you can analyse all the upgrades in detail and see the costs of each upgrade (cumulatively and alone) and what they do, along with my tip for each upgrade - so once people get the basics of the game there's stacks of depth to be had with taking different upgrade routes.

The coins are indeed the mineral currency of the game used for both purchases and can also be the win condition of the game (both by total coinage and highest value of coins collected) for the pacifists our there. There are 4 types in order of rarity - abundant gold, common blue, uncommon green and rare purple. All of the upgrades and weapon purchases are carefully costed to ensure good game flow, and additionally, the coin placement in levels is carefully accounted for to make mining correctly a real bonus later on (particularly for the purples). My level designs offers lots of varying opportunities for coin mining as well. This makes purchases people choose quite an art, for example the plasma gun is a powerful weapon but costs quite a lot of purple coins which could go much further if spent on upgrades. So if you choose the plasma route, you might have the fire-power edge, but the other players might have a higher coin magnet or hull capacity, or whatever.

The first campaign (which you need to play first to unlock more content) also drip feeds game features over the course of the 10 levels - as you suggest complexity might be an issue, I might try hiding unused parts of the toolbar (e.g. the keycards, and maybe some of the upgrades/weapons) that way people can get a bit of excitement from progressing and seeing what comes up.

As for camping, your red doors can be shot through and moved through only by yourself, and your starting point rapidly heals your tank - therefore camping is a big no no, and even hanging around someone's base has been rendered pointless, as the defending player will just come out, whittle your health down a bit, dash back to reset their health. This drives the focus of the game on getting out there and mining the best blocks as quickly as possible so you can get the better upgrades.

Thanks again for watching the video and providing some useful feedback.

Thought I'd upload some Alpha footage of a 2 player battle from my latest XBLIG game made with MMF2 and the XNA exporter! Feel free to scrutinise, offer suggestions, etc. I'm shortly going to post a version on the XBLIG forums for testing, prior to peer review, if anyone is a member there.

The footage doesn't show too much off, as it's a first level game with no start-up bonuses to improve the tanks, but it does show the basic premise and give a taste

Retro Tanks is a 4 player local co-op tank skirmish game with plenty of features, such as game customisation, various weapons and upgrades, team-play mode, 3vs1 mode, single player time-attack game, post-game cumulative stats with ribbon awards and medals to unlock more game content, tank-builder mode to see the costs of different tank builds and plenty more.

There's around 50 maps at present which are played in either campaign mode or free level select. The campaigns are 10 levels long and dedicated to specific setups, e.g. Team-play campaign for 2vs2 games with each level carefully designed to create the best 2vs2 experience.

Hope you like what you see!

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Anyone have any ideas on this?

Francois - who's game had this problem, I'll drop them a line.

Thanks Francois, that's good news - I'll double check the XNA forum again in case I missed something, but pretty sure I didn't find anything related to this.

I'm noticing that my INI data is resetting every now and again when testing my game on xbox.

I test all my changes on xbox by building and deploying and 95% of the time the INI data is working, but occasionally I start testing and the sound is off in the game, which alerts me to the fact the INI data has reset somehow.

Is anyone else finding this, and it's just a testing thing, or have I coded the INI wrong and therefore this is likely to occur when actually running properly?

Can someone who knows their stuff briefly outline how the INI files are saved with regard to profiles/system players?

Actually, this might help
<HOW I HAVE USED INI>

My current setup polls for system player at the splash screen with a START press as usual.
This start press (assuming the Alias is >0 - thanks CJ) does all my value setting, then under the XNA conditions I set sys player index to 1, assign gamepads 1 to 1 and open storage device. These change according to the controller pressing start naturally.

Then on the next screen (menu) I load all the INI data at the start of the frame (this didn't seem to cause any problems the first time I did it, but is this bad? Do I need to use an INI data check condition instead of just start of frame? To load the data I'm simply setting all the appropriate global values to the INI values

To save data, on my options screen I have a SAVE group which activates when you leave, and this group has the event: alias$>0 system player: set all the INI data parts to the global values (which you can edit on this options menu)

Those are the only 3 pages which have a major effect on the INI, but I also use some basic stuff on other pages:

- Medal page (achievements/unlock system): this simply highlights medals you have, and allows you to clear them - which deletes ONLY the medals groups of the INI - this works fine and doesn't change any settings when I use it.

- Post game stats page: used to unlock medals earned via gameplay. Doesn't delete any data and just essentially sets a binary switch when you earn it which is tested against on other pages (inc the medals page)

- I also use the INI in other pages to just check whether you've unlock medals - there's no changes made to the INI made

Is there anything wrong with what I'm doing here?

Nice - I managed to get my little audio reward quite quickly for hitting the cyan block.

Feels like that platformer called N - except this feels a bit quicker.

Reloaded - on my menu screen I have two groups, purchased and trial, both inactive at the start of the frame.

Then, for your first events, just have:

'game is in trial mode' then activate the trial group and deactivate the purchased group.
X ' game is in trial mode' activate purchased group and deactivate the trial group.

You need to deactivate the other group otherwise when the player buys the game for the first time, it will leave both groups open.

Then in those groups just have your different options - e.g. in the purchased version, remove the option to purchase and add any other features you want them to access. In the trial version, make something flash to say trial object, and grey out any options not needed to be active, etc.

Works a charm.

Don't forget, trials only work for 8m at a time, so if your game is long enough, you shouldn't really need to block too much content in trial mode, as the timer itself should be a barrier enough, but then again a trial mode is useful for limited character options, or weapons and features.

Cheers chaps - yeah, XNA is really limited and tough to work with Koni, but I am still particularly chuffed that I'm managing to make games on a console! I never imagined this would be within my grasp using Clickteam products.

It doesn't help that fastloops absolutely kills the performance on the xbox though - so a solution without these would be amazing. I'm desperately trying to avoid hitting the clone button 100 times for these objects lol

Hi peeps, does anyone have a good example of how to (without any extensions) create multiple enemy tanks, each with a turret and collision detector around them and the ability to independently shoot at the player.

I'd like to be able to handle creating new tanks at run-time, from a spawn-point as well as pumping them out at the start.

I've had a search and started to play with various things like fast loops (although I'd prefer to avoid these if possible as they slow down XNA) but can't seem to get anything working well.

I've managed to get multiple instances created and moving around (just using MMFs basic ability of linking up newly created items) and also having them rotate towards the player when he's nearby - although when I test for overlapping of the collision detector, it simply moves all of the turrets rather than independently. Additionally when I try to have an enemy shoot, it seems to just pick one of them to do all the shooting.

If anyone can point me in the direction of decent tutorials or threads about doing this sort of thing, I'd be most grateful.

Thanks

Quote from colej_uk

I echo Danny's experience, I've found it to be super smooth even in one of my projects which was quite complex. Comparable to performance on my PC really, and with way more than 70 actives.

I do remember from beta testing there were some bugs that triggered massive slowdown (lower than 1fps). But to my knowledge they were all fixed. I wonder if something you're doing is triggering something similar?

I'm focusing a lot on android atm, but I'm hoping to go back to a bit of xbox development soon so if you like I can help get to the bottom of it.

Don't forget that you guys are probably coding to a much better standard than others, including me.

For the first run of coding on my current project, I got stacks of slow-down without using anything too special - but it was coded in a very basic fashion. Now I've re-written everything it works far smoother - and the overall code is actually longer as I've added more features.

I'm not saying you've coded it badly Rookyard - just pointing out that just because others have managed to get something running fast with plenty going on means nothing when there are so many pitfalls you get caught out with by essentially doing nothing wrong! There are so many ways to perform certain actions and some will smash a frame-rate while others will be okay, and there's no telling which is which until you've experienced everything (or really understand coding properly).

Oh, and as Danny says - remove everything in your game piece by piece until the slow-down stops happening. Document it and make a few saves which you overwrite, or it's tricky to work out which bit it was when you fix it. I literally had to remove everything in my game and bring it to about 8 events before I worked out the problems I was having - and it was actually down to event order, which was very peculiar, as there was no logical reason to why the order would make a difference in that scenario.

Nope, I had this problem as well, it sucks major balls - you have to be really careful how you code things, and it's a right nightmare if you're used to just coding like you would in MMF on an ordinary day.

Few tips from experience:

Try and keep everything in groups, and only activate them when absolutely needed. I mean *really* tuck everything into a deactivated group if you can - I found this was the best way of improving performance.
Don't use the OR conditions, I found these slowed things down loads.
Don't use changing the font size on counters (and possibly text) - this crashes at runtime for me.
Don't use restrict actions condition - it's bugged after 5m and literally just stops working - took weeks to work this out (awesome!)
Alpha-blending seems to be okay for me, so don't be afraid of using that.

I was experiencing slowdown at 1200 events, no extra layers or fast loops and with a low resolution, so I can imaging with these implemented you have to be very careful.

I'm not sure how DA works, but if your armour is an active object which follows the actor around, you could create different animations frames or directions showing varying amounts of blood splatter, then change the frame or direction depending on how much health they have, or when you want to apply blood to them.

You could also add a standard timing counter so that over time the armour blood level reduces as well - this would be a nice effect. Also, if you collide with water or something, then set the blood level to 0 as well.

You Sir, are a genius! That's exactly the sort of answer I was hoping someone would provide - credit worthy stuff.

Works like an absolute charm and kicks in a touch earlier than my current formula so gives a touch more warning when your health is down (although just in case anyone is learning/using the formula - you slipped an extra * in the MMF syntax by accident Looki)

Thanks for the idea Kev but I'm writing for the XNA exporter so cannot use that extension - I'll have a look though as it sounds like a good extension for my other bits.

I've made a quick graph of what I am aiming for in the hope that it helps:

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It just demonstrates for having a max health of 100, but ideally the graph shape should remain whatever the max health is, i.e. by working from percentages of your health&maxhealth.