Thank you for the in-depth explaination, Ter13!
| |
It's actually really fun so far. I played up to when you get the flexible suspension. There were a few of those "AHA!" moments when new mechanics were shown for the first time, like using the charged lazer to shoot through all the vines, after not being able to hit the switch by spamming, to open the door. Aside from the environment being a bit plain, the only issue I had was during boss fights, more so the 3 eyed ship thing than the plant. The ship took so long to kill that at one point I wasn't sure if it was even possible to kill it in the demo. Some way to tell the health of a boss is pretty key in my opinion.
So far the gameplay is pretty solid, though, as well as the performance (solid 60 the entire time). | |
So I already dun goofed. The third boss dies in only a few hits (missed a few zeroes), and some enemy lasers do no damage!
I'll be uploading the proper file in a moment. @Reformist Thanks! Boss HP bars was high on my list and I forgot to check it before releasing the demo. Luckily it's BYOND only, so I only have the hatred of people here to look forward to... yaaay -_- Edit: Okay, updated to fix the beams and the hp of the third boss. Hopefully that's all the major issues out of the way. Link just in case: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w0jf83b60xdmjeo/Lux_Demo.zip?dl=0 | |
Yut Put wrote:
I'd strongly recommend slightly tilting the robot to the right or left depending on the direction of the horizontal aerial drift Sounds like a plan. =) | |
It's definitely meant to be easy at the moment, especially since there's only 100 life evailable at the moment. Most enemies currently only do 5 points of damage but in the full demo they'll do anywhere between 10 and 40 (armor upgrades will keep this form being completely unfair), and the first two bosses are missing phases.
In fact, the plant boss is also currently missing the blooms on either side which will attack the player if they get to close (but they can be killed to give the player temporary cover). This BYOND-only demo is simply for the sake of making sure things function from start to finish without huge issue. The full demo is still slated for August. As for your suggestion to the robot angle, I updated it and it looks a bit more action-y now, as the slight blur makes it appear like it's really rushing through the air. | |
Yut Put wrote:
http://puu.sh/oMbiV/d1095eef0e.jpg First issue: Did the Peacekeeper follow you and beat you into the doorway? If that's the case then I need to make a reset for them. As for this quoted issue: Yeah. For some reason having large images on planes is something BYOND doesn't like. I've been meaning to make a bug report because other stuff causes the background to disappear. For example: Animating an area will cause large images to disappear, but then reappear after you move to the left of the screen... or something. It's acting really wonky and I'll need to send source files to LummoxJR again. Thanks for the feedback though, it's very helpful. | |
Thanks for the feedback. I agree on pretty much all of the points, I think adding an HP bar for bosses next on my agenda) will help with how much life they have, that and adding in the ammo-based weapon I've been looking into.
As for that one room, it's meant to be a troll-room and an homage to a room that shows up in Metroid Fusion with pretty much the same idea behind it. I will be adding a method to reveal the blocks in a room to show their true identity (much like Metroid). It also won't be anywhere off the main doorways and is going to be a hidden "100% the game" kind of room. To be honest, I forgot I left it in the demo =P Edit: Also, in the case of the FPS issue, I noticed that as well. Ever since planes were implemented the game likes to spike in CPU usage every few moments. It might be my CPU itself though, as it does this in other games. | |
There seems to be a very serious and consistent memory leak. Dream Seeker's RAM usage went over 340 MB. I checked when it became unbearably slow. Even at the title screen I can see the memory usage slowly rising for no apparent reason.
That first save area at the beginning, where the NPCs are, seems to still have a dark overlay from outside, when you first enter, but it goes away after a second. This can be easy to miss. I would not be defeated by that annoying grass! I mowed it down without the crouch ability. Did I enter that area too early and break everything? I remembered and took this screenshot on the way back. I had to stay at the edge and spam click very quickly until at some point I made it through all of the grass.  There seems to be a graphical glitch here. I'm not sure what it could be.  This boss failed to respawn after I died to it, and I could just continue without fighting it.  The movement down this ramp keeps glitching as if the bot is on flat ground. I could be wrong, but the ramp below that one doesn't seem to have a problem.  Other than that, I would say that clicking isn't as responsive as it should be for this type of game. Half of the time, no shot is fired until the second or third click. This is when I first start clicking. Once the bot starts firing, there is no problem. I would suggest using the W key as an alternative to the spacebar. My focus is split between WASD, spacebar, and the mouse, and it just feels odd. I feel like the spacebar might work better as a way to activate special abilities or something. I would have to try jumping with W to know for sure. I think part of why it feels odd is that in games that don't use the mouse, I use one hand for movement, and the other just instinctively hits spacebar. In a game where both jumping and moving must be done with one hand, I think it's best to keep those controls close together. Also, why no firing while jumping? There are all kinds of reasons why that would be a good thing. Just don't make it too exploitable and it becomes a whole new feature. You could make all kinds of areas and enemies that require using it. It would also make things more fun. I just don't see a reason not to have this. I can summarize it in one word. Combos! | |
Overall pretty good. Liked the secret walls, reminds me of the old days playing Jazz Jack Rabbit. Was a little disappointed there was nothing in them but it's just a demo.
The enemies were cool but I found the hitboxes to be a little small. I saw my lasers passing over their icons but not hitting them. Especially noticeable with the Venus Fly Trap type monsters. Got a little annoyed with the first boss monster. I kept looking for a pattern to follow but nothing really showed up. Ended up on low health, went into the next level which was called high security and didn't have enough health to tackle those new monsters there. They wrecked me because I didn't know how to damage them. Then it restarted me back to before the first boss and I quit because it was too boring to do that fight again. I also liked that blocks could be destroyed. Makes for some cool speed run techniques. One last thing. Sound would make this 100x better. I'm serious. 100 times. The silence was brutally boring. | |
First and foremost, what version of BYOND are you running?
The first room the lights are off and they are turned on. Not a bug, but poorly conveyed without an audio cue. The grass will be buffed to be ultra stronk in the future. Graphical Glitch: Remnants form another instance. I really need to just fill the world with blank turfs. The map loader seems to want to ignore turfs that are empty, instead of going to where the empty turf should be and clearing it completely, it just leaves that turf alone. Boss failing to respawn: I've run into this before and I thought I figured it out. Basically it's an older version of the room not clearing properly, and the boss wont spawn because there's another one in the game already. I'll have to see why the older one isn't clearing. Ramp glitches: Shouldn't be happening at all, my version doesn't have this issue, but I'll look into it. Clicking: Everything's responsive for me. Perhaps it's the BYOND version? Jumping and shooting: You should be able to do that. Something's up with your keyboard/mouse/BYOND version/PC | |
I have sound, but it's very poorly implemented at the moment and adds about 15mb to the filesize.
I say poorly implemented as in: The BG music has issues and almost all of the SFX are either temporary or nonexistent. Thank you for the feedback! | |
Sorry, the part about not being able to click while jumping was actually just a Windows setting that I left enabled and forgot about. It's actually enabled by default, and it's just stupid because it's only relevant while typing. I don't know if Windows applications can even provide a workaround to bypass that misguided setting. If so, Lummox JR should look into it. How will most players even know to turn that off or where to look?
I actually did need to update BYOND. Things did seem to run smoother, but only at first. The slowdown and apparent memory leak is still present. After the update, the light turning on at the beginning seems to take much longer. In one case, I think it even waited for me to move further into the room. I'm not sure, but there could be a bug hiding there. The graphical glitch is still there. The boss with three "eyes" still doesn't respawn. The slowdown seems to become more severe after dying to that boss, or it could just be the memory leak becoming too great at that point. The ramp glitch is still present. I ran into a bug where only the shields are present, but not the actual boss, platforms, or much of anything else. This left me trapped in the room and I had to reload.  I also got this error: runtime error: Cannot modify null.alpha. After reloading, the boss worked, but when I was defeated, my mob became invisible and the whole view was off-center:  I also saw this long error: runtime error: Invalid bounds This happened every time I died. I wasn't able to defeat that boss either. I think I went beyond the final phase. The shields turned orange and chased me, but instead of dying, the boss reverted back to the previous phase. Is it supposed to be that hard, or is it stuck in a loop? | |
It appears that most of your issues are coming from the instancing problem I was mentioning, where rooms wouldn't completely clear out and it would leave stuff behind. The errors are my way of knowing whether or not something got left behind.. sort of.
The long error is part of that. The platforms are trying to move whatever's above them but it's bugging out because their loc is null. Again, all an issue of the instancing not clearing empty turfs properly. I'll work on it and release a patched demo sometime in the next few days. As for the boss. Yeah, it's just that tough. It cycles through it's phases several times before dying. I'll be adding in a health bar for bosses as to give the player an idea of their progress, and I'll likely be lowering boss life while increasing boss difficulty for all bosses. It's not so much that they're hard to fight right now, they just take far too long to kill. Again though, thanks for the feedback. @Ghost of ET: Yeah, that'll probably be the best. I'd have it fade in/out but the issue is that fading doesn't work very well with my lighting system, but the flicker option should work just fine. | |
For the memory leak issue, I recommend running in DD and playing in DS. Do a memory report in DD early on, and then do a few more as time goes on and memory goes up. That may point out where some things are starting to pile up, like lists or objects.
| |
Last reply tuesday BYOND IS KILL | |
Probably everyone's too wrapped up in their projects to post right now. I know Yut Put is hard at work on Epoch.
| |
I'm feeling programming'd out after my last update to pif_LongInt and now I'm working on side projects instead, hence my lack of posting here. Not that anyone cared about those particular updates anyways, but that's my reason.
| |
Because BYOND games pay into the engine by serving ads to the playerbase. BYONDexe forgoes the showing of ads in favor of allowing the developer more control over their distribution and branding.
Well, thing is that there's no formal agreement. That's been Lummox and Yut, and Lummox and Silk. I can't talk about the terms or the reasoning, but it would make sense to me that there is one. Lummox pulling 5-10% or a maximal quarterly dollar amount (whichever is lesser) of a developer's net profits for cutting himself off of the ads would be an entirely equitable agreement if you ask me.
The engine needs to justify further development. Lummox works closely with his Steam-based apps and is more likely to add features that they request. Why? Because they are pushing the engine into the mainstream.
That information would be a private agreement between Silk and Lummox. I don't know.
Now, I'd assume that if a game is using hub services like hub credits, the content of a royalty agreement would be entirely different. More or less every game's monetization scheme is different, and only two games have existed that justify a significant off-site presence using the BYONDexe client. So mind you, all of this is speculative and based on my experience with the way that engines typically license themselves.
Most engines do this in some way: Either the engine has an up front cost, a restricted launch platform (ergo ads), premium services that help fund free users, or a quarterly/yearly royalty.
BYOND's premium services don't function as intended to support the business model, so that's an issue. BYOND has no up front cost. It has a restricted launch platform, but BYONDexe does not. Therefore it's logical to assume that a properly equitable business model would have a royalty.
Also, before anybody gets up in arms about "royalties being theft of profits"... No. No they aren't. You are wrong. Don't go there.