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!

A Miner Adventure - v8.1.3 preview

ID:111087
 
Mar 22 2011, 4:36 pm
I haven't had a lot of time to work on the game lately. In addition to fixing some bugs, the next update will contain some new features. Nothing big like new gameplay modes, but still neat and useful features. I'm hoping to have this update posted this weekend.

I'd like to expand the building aspect of career mode. You can build an infrastructure (walls, elevators, tracks) to help get in and out of the mine faster. I'm also looking into ways I can change the behavior of cave-ins for career mode to make them less frequent but more devastating.

A preview of the HUD that will be displayed when you've purchased the builder's kit in career mode:


Mine carts!

(drop a bomb behind the cart to make them go really fast!)

I've also added some more minor features. Pressing N will toggle the display of player names. I've also made some maps reset. When you start a survival game the map will be restored to its initial conditions. Tunnels dug in previous games will not persist. I'm also working on saving and loading for career mode. At the very least your money and inventory will be saved, I'm not sure if I'll have map saving in place.

There's still a bug with avatars. If you've earned certain combinations of medals you'll unlock avatars. The bug is that you should be able to select your avatar at the main menu, but the game often fails to get your list of medals from the BYOND hub. This feature works all the time when I run the game locally, but when joining someone else's server I have never been given the option to select an avatar.
Mar 22 2011, 4:36 pm
MUY BUENO!
Mar 22 2011, 4:37 pm
!!!!
Mar 22 2011, 8:47 pm
I LOVE SIDESCROLLERS
Mar 23 2011, 6:30 am
good I want see car :)
Mar 23 2011, 8:09 pm
Looks like the interpolation quality of your lighting system has improved? Or maybe you just picked good screenshots to use.

Are you still using cosine interpolation? Or have you switched to linear?
How many shade levels are you using?
Mar 24 2011, 3:24 am
It's been using linear interpolation and 5 lighting levels for a while now. What made a big difference (at least when you're playing the game with a stretched screen, its less noticeable in the screenshots) is that many of the tiles are not solid colors any more. The noise in the tiles adds noise to the lighting gradient so the simple patterns don't jump out as much.
Mar 24 2011, 6:27 am
That brings up an interesting idea.
Would it be better to apply a noise to the interpolation rather than to the graphics?
Mar 24 2011, 6:43 am
I thought about that because there are some icons I left as solid colors (the building interior in the first picture). I'm not sure how noticeable its effect would be, but with the variation in the light overlay itself I suspect you'd run into problems. Either:

1. The variation is random so when the lighting changes, a tile looks different (because its new overlay state has different variations)

2. The variation is the same in each tile and you can see patterns caused by this.

The difference between solid colored tiles and detailed tiles was significant, so it suggests that there may be more ways to get significant improvements. It's certainly worth looking into. I think the slight drop shadow on some tiles works nicely with these lighting effects too.
Mar 26 2011, 6:56 am
Here's an example of what I was talking about:

Solid Background
Textured Background
"Textured" Light Gradient

In the first screenshot you can see two artifacts: the solid color background makes it easy to see vertical or horizontal lines where the gradient changes direction. The stretched icons make it easy to see the steps of the gradient.

The second screenshot has a textured background and you can't see these artifacts. The third screenshot uses a modified shadow icon which adds a random value between -4 and 4 to each pixel's alpha value. The first artifact is still noticeable, but the second one isn't as much. Aside from not completely solving the problem, the biggest drawback is something I hadn't considered - adding this noise to the icon file bumps the file size from 171 KB to 498 KB.