A Miner Adventure

by Forum_account
A Miner Adventure
Use a pick-ax and bombs to dig tunnels and build scaffolding to traverse the caves. Be careful, you'll never know what kind of danger you'll find!

Miner Adventure, Major Update

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ID:110730
 
Mar 12 2011, 2:49 pm


Version 8.1 has been posted which contains two new modes of play!



I had been working on a few new modes and would have been happy to add one of them in the 8.1 update, but instead I added both!

Survival Mode

This is a player-vs-player deathmatch where you use your pick ax and bombs to kill everyone else. Everyone gets five lives, the winner is the last person standing.

This mode uses a different form of scaffolding. In survival mode, scaffolding will collapse shortly after you build it. This does two things: it prevents the maps from filling up with scaffolding and it limits how high you can climb. Like other gameplay modes, there are medals to earn for getting 1, 3, 5, and 10 wins in survival mode.

Career Mode

This is a game mode where you do some actual mining. Venture into the mine, collect ore, and turn it in for money. Use the money to buy better equipment. One of the items you can buy (the Builder's Kit) lets you build tiles. This is more of a sandbox mode, but there are medals to earn for earning money.

Other Changes

Background Music
I always wanted the game to have background music but couldn't find anything I liked. Luckily, Mr. Waltz put together some music that fits the game perfectly - it goes great with the eerie feel I was trying to create and is more pleasant and musical than only having ambient noises.

Medals and Avatars
There are eight new medals and two new avatars that you can get in the new game modes.

Observers
Players who join Survival games already in progress join as observers. It would be unfair if they came into a game in progress with the full five lives. When you die in a survival game you become an observer. While you're observing, press page up and page down to cycle through players.

Interface
Some small changes were made around the chat log. Most noticeable are the "help" and "who" buttons, which show the help page and a list of players in the game respectively.

Bug Fixes
I'm still working on fixing bugs that have been around since the 8.0 update. Here's what I've knocked out since the last update:
* #219 - fixed runtime error
* #217 - fixed aliens walking on air (though I like how surreal it looked)

What the Future Holds

Now that I've added a way to have observers, I'll be adding an option to allow people to watch games in progress. When you join a game that's already started, you'll have a "watch the game" option in addition to the "join the game" that you currently have.

The change to scaffolding for survival mode is a change I wanted to make for future adventure modes. The type of scaffolding will be left alone in existing game modes, but going forward this new type of scaffolding will create more interesting adventure mode scenarios. It was tough to design maps when the player can build
scaffolding to reach any height.

More music. Mr. Waltz makes the music faster than I can add it to the game. I have some "battle" music I need to include in survival mode. I'm considering getting new music for different modes, but I'm extremely pleased with how the current music sounds for all modes.

I was hoping to have saving and loading in career mode in place for this update, but I didn't have time and I really wanted to get this posted tonight. Hopefully this'll come in the very near future.

I expect the new game modes will contain their share of bugs. But, like I've been doing since posting 8.0, I plan to work diligently on fixing whatever bugs get reported.
Mar 12 2011, 2:57 pm
It's not starting up for me... or it's taking a really long time.
Mar 12 2011, 3:12 pm
From the time I double click the .dmb, it takes about 5 or 6 seconds for the main menu to be showing. I'm not entirely sure what causes this. I've tried to move stuff out of constructors so that less processing is done when the world starts up.
Mar 12 2011, 3:26 pm
It was not starting when I tried to join online server, after downloading it myself, it started proreply. I think there is a bug: when you press right/left key, you are keep moving right and cannot stop moving or change direction untill you hit some dense object. I chose single player tutorial mode.
Mar 12 2011, 3:50 pm
Yeah, my movement keys stick too. It's usually when I'm in tutorial mode and I get close to NPCs, or when I'm in water. Sometimes it just happens spontaneously and I fall into a huge pit and die. :/


It's frequent enough for me to consider the game frustrating to play.
Mar 12 2011, 3:53 pm
I didn't code the game to have sticky keys, so any problem like that is on BYOND's side of things. I posted an issue in their bug tracker but haven't heard anything from the staff about what might be the cause. If you guys can post a comment on there saying that you experienced this problem too, maybe it'll help to narrow down what BYOND version, OS, video hardware, or other settings might be causing this.
Mar 12 2011, 3:53 pm
I take that back. The game is UNPLAYABLE for me, especially in adventure mode for some reason.
Mar 12 2011, 3:58 pm
Duelmaster409 wrote:
I take that back. The game is UNPLAYABLE for me, especially in adventure mode for some reason.

All I can do is point you to the bug report and hope the staff figures something out, sorry.
Mar 12 2011, 4:02 pm
Forum_account wrote:
Duelmaster409 wrote:
I take that back. The game is UNPLAYABLE for me, especially in adventure mode for some reason.

All I can do is point you to the bug report and hope the staff figures something out, sorry.

I have a feeling that it may be the game, because I have no problem with your Sidescroller library (which is what the game uses, I assume).
Mar 12 2011, 4:09 pm
When I play the game my CPU usage is around 25% and I had over 100MB of ram taken by dreamseeker proc (now it dropped down to 30MB) When I played the game few weeks before, I haven't had any problem with it.

Yeah, your sidescroller library runs ok for me too.
Mar 12 2011, 4:11 pm
Um, how do you know how much money you have in Career mode? There's no HUD for it.
Mar 12 2011, 4:13 pm
Yut Put wrote:
This also happens in exordium and terminus, and any other game that uses your library and has a larger map

Negative. Exordium and terminus works perfectly fine and any other game that used his library and has a larger map too. It's the problem with this exact game.
Mar 12 2011, 4:15 pm
Um, how do you know how much money you have in Career mode? There's no HUD for it.

Press tab.

I have a feeling that it may be the game, because I have no problem with your Sidescroller library

It has to be something about the game - BYOND doesn't always behave this way. However, it's not the code that's doing it (so profiling won't help to track it down) so I figure it's the combination of music, sound effects, and more objects on the screen. If BYOND can't have responsive keyboard input when displaying graphics at 30 frames per second and playing some sounds, there's something in BYOND itself that needs fixing.

Exordium and terminus works perfectly fine and any other game that used his library and has a larger map too.

This is why I'm guessing it has to do with graphics and/or sound. A Miner Adventure has more concurrent sound effects (though E&T gets up there) and it has partially transparent overlays on each tile.
Mar 12 2011, 4:41 pm
Ok, I posted an update which will slightly improve the initial load time (I think part of the delay is that the maps are kinda big). Hopefully some of the changes will improve the general performance of the game too.
Mar 12 2011, 4:55 pm
Cool thing is, this game's always worked for me before. It's just now stopped working, so I wouldn't assume it's BYOND's fault so soon.
Mar 12 2011, 4:59 pm
What I mean is that the problem is undoubtedly because of something I did, but that the thing I did (whatever it is) should not be causing such a problem. For example, there was a weird bug where having a screen object and moving the client's pixel offset twice in the same tick would cause massive lag (for some people). It's the developer's fault that the screen object exists and that the client's pixel offset was set twice, but it's BYOND's fault that it caused a massive slowdown. I suspect this is a similar issue. Unfortunately the only tool for identifying problems is the world profiler, but since CPU usage from executing code isn't the problem I can't do much more than guess at what the problem could be.
Mar 12 2011, 5:18 pm
I just ran the game on my laptop (which is all-around worse than my desktop, and has no fancy graphics hardware) and was able to experience this problem. It wasn't playable - tapping an arrow key would make you move half a tile or 10 tiles. I opened the display options (F2) and set the game speed to slow and it was completely playable (though at a reduced framerate). For reference, fast = ~33 frames per second, medium = ~28, slow = 25.
Mar 12 2011, 5:19 pm
Well, whatever you changed in your most recent update happened to reduce the bugginess of moving around, enough so that I could actually play through the entire adventure mode. It was pretty awesome and atmospheric, though seemed short.
Mar 12 2011, 5:21 pm
I don't seem to be having any of the problems anyone else has. O: I did notice a few quirks though.
Mar 12 2011, 5:58 pm
All of these updates and you still haven't managed to make it so the icons aren't horribly stretched.

Great job.
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