Zero Hour - New homebrew game

hyperdyne · Post by **hyperdyne** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 8:49 pm

Hi All,

A buddy and I have been working on this game (Zero Hour) for a while now and we have a level1 demo/beta ready to go. It is a manic in the Cave/Raizing/Toaplan style with some Seibu in there as well. It is the first level so we tried to restrain ourselves on the levels of crap it throws at you... Let me know if it is too hard/easy/cheesy need more bullet spam etc. Music was done by our very own Vodkatron.

You can check out some screenshots and grab it here:

http://zerohour.pixeltheater.com/

We haven't totally worked out system requirements yet, but it does need a reasonably fast machine (1.4 gig is the lowest it has been tested on) running Windows 98 or higher with a DirectX 8 video card and 256 megs of RAM at a minimum. 512 is probably a better idea though.

Drop any feedback here and it will be considered. Remember it is a beta so be gentle

Thanks everyone,

Craig

Oh, and if I posted this on the wrong forum I apologize. I see these type of post both here and the dev forum, but this forum receives more traffic so I put it here. Feel free to move if need be.

antron · Post by **antron** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 10:28 pm

doesn't run in WINE

Nate · Post by **Nate** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 11:00 pm

I played it again and sent the boss packin' this time. Had to use all 3 credits, though. Pretty tough! I don't play a lot of these, but I think it's pretty damn good for a homebrew. While I think we could have done a better job on the music - it still kinda grows on me. I remember that was the first time we used the new keyboard - Roland Phantom.
I don't see any reason not to move on and do another level!

Diabollokus · Post by **Diabollokus** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 2:34 am

How do i Get it to run?

Downloads fine, open it, loading screens appears but nothing happens?

landshark · Post by **landshark** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 4:33 am

Runs incredibly slow on my AMD64. At 30 FPS it still doesn't seem right.

Control messes up all the time too. All of a sudden up or down or something gets stuck and hitting the key again does not clear it.

Frogacuda · Post by **Frogacuda** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 5:06 am

The control is all screwed up. It's stuck moving up and to the left the whole time.

hyperdyne · Post by **hyperdyne** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 5:46 am

Yikes, looks like there are a few issues here

Diabollokus: It should run right off the bat. What are your system specs? I know it's a lame question, but have you rebooted and tried it again? Are you running on a locked down machine possibly? The exe unpacks files to a temp directory, if you do not have write access that may be the issue? This is a problem I have not run into yet.

Landshark and Frogacuda: I had the same control issue pop up once before, it turned out that I needed to re-calibrate my gamepad. After that, the problem never appeared again. I have also seen this behavior when an analog pad is plugged into the machine. Hopefully one of these is the solution to your problems?

As for the speed, I am not sure what the problem could be. Like it says on the website, we tested on a 1.4 gig athlon and it ran great at 30 fps... What are your system specs besides the athlon64? I am really curious what the problem is, I guess that is what a beta release is for.

Thanks again everyone.

Post by **Dave_K.** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 5:53 am

Everything worked fine for me (PSX->USB Controller). Very profesional looking!

Frogacuda · Post by **Frogacuda** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 6:00 am

hyperdyne wrote:Landshark and Frogacuda: I had the same control issue pop up once before, it turned out that I needed to re-calibrate my gamepad. After that, the problem never appeared again.

Negatory. It does it even with no joystick plugged in at all.

the2bears · Post by **the2bears** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 6:59 am

Worked fine for me here, pretty new Inspiron 6000 laptop. Very nice game, I'm looking forward to seeing more of it!

Bill

battlegorge · Post by **battlegorge** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 9:47 am

The graphics are great.
Only the player ship looks a bit flat.
Gameplay seems to be good too but i cant really play because my gamepad is going crazy and it sends me out of the screen.

Music and sounds are nice but the explosion sounds could be a bit softer.

highlandcattle · Post by **highlandcattle** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 10:22 am

Mac OS vesrion please :d

Neon · Post by **Neon** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 10:47 am

Too much DDP, not enough Garegga and Progear.

Good work though. Please consider porting it to a non-PC format (deadcast or ps2). PC gaming sucks and you know how crazy people go for new DC games.

mice · Post by **mice** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 12:33 pm

Ey! I still hear ringing in my ears after the explosion of the boss. Cool!

The presentation in the game and the homepage has a really good design, but the in game gfx doesn't live up to it.
All of the enemies and the player ship look really flat, could be to the fact that there's a constant light source straight from viewer. (But the shadows on the ground has a bit of offset, like its coming from above left).
I probably get why you choose a straight on light source, because of the rotations used on the enemies?

Just my 2c.

hyperdyne · Post by **hyperdyne** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 6:57 pm

Thanks for all of the comments guys.

the2bears: I see we made it up on your site. Thanks for the plug and nice comments:)

Frogacuda and battlegorge: If you guys are interested, I will send a version over with the joypad code ripped out so we can see if that is the problem. If so, that would help immensely in getting it fixed. Let me know.

Mice: You are correct that we went with the direct over head lighting on the sprites due to the use of sprite rotation. We thought about doing different sprites per 45 degree movement, but decided to pass on it for this game. Maybe next time. Not sure what to do about the sprites looking flat though, maybe shade around the edges a bit more?

As for toning down the explosion fx, I have received that comment multiple times now... I think we will get that change in for the bugfix version whenever we get that released.

Regarding a port to another OS or platform, that will probably not occur in the forseable future... sorry. Maybe if we go with a different development tool for our next project whenever that happens.

elvis · Post by **elvis** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 8:20 am

Neon wrote:Too much DDP, not enough Garegga and Progear.

Just enough DDP, and avoid the Garegga.

Top effort, I really like it. That purple stream of bullets from the boss (the one that "flowers" twice) was a nice touch. It really threw me off at first.

It was a touch laggy even on my system (AthlonXP 3200+, GeForce4 ti4200, 1GB RAM) but not so that it ruined the game.

I'm well impressed for a homebrew game. I can't wait to see more. I'd certainly pay money for this level of product quality.

Oh, and include a tate mode option in the final release!

hyperdyne · Post by **hyperdyne** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 8:48 am

Thanks for the kind words Elvis, glad you enjoyed it

I have had quite a few folks note that it was slightly laggy on their system. Because of this I think I may add an option to the options menu that will allow you to drop down to 16 bit, 60 hz mode. In early testing this sped it up quite a bit with no graphical degredation. The only reason I did not initially include this was the fact that many people have an aversion to color depth and frequency changes. I think it should be fine if it is optional though.

I have been thinking of a tate mode as well, though I am not quite sure how to pull that one off yet...

elvis · Post by **elvis** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 9:17 am

I'm wondering why I'm seeing occasional stuttering on my system? Surely 2.2GHz (3200+) is fast enough for such a title? If dropping back to 16bit mode fixes issues, that is usually an indication that the problem lies in the fillrate of the card (which again is strange for a title of this nature).

Did you write the engine from scratch? Or is it part of some sort of prebuilt environment or APIs?

[edit] and without knowing ANYTHING about the engine, your engine obviously handles scaling to fullscreen without any dramas. A tate mode should just be one step further where the final buffer is rotated as well as scaled? Again, knowing nothing about your engine I can't offer more help than that.

Diabollokus · Post by **Diabollokus** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 4:12 pm

Not bad. got it up and running on another computer, my pentium 3 laptop must just be crap.

1st boss nicely done, tanks are cool aswell. How baout some plane type enemies, or a giant garegga style level 5 flying fortress?

landshark · Post by **landshark** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 4:23 pm

hyperdyne wrote: Landshark and Frogacuda: I had the same control issue pop up once before, it turned out that I needed to re-calibrate my gamepad. After that, the problem never appeared again. I have also seen this behavior when an analog pad is plugged into the machine. Hopefully one of these is the solution to your problems?

I did not have a joystick plugged in

No other games I have do this.

As for the speed, I am not sure what the problem could be. Like it says on the website, we tested on a 1.4 gig athlon and it ran great at 30 fps... What are your system specs besides the athlon64? I am really curious what the problem is, I guess that is what a beta release is for.

AMD64 3400. 1 gig of ram. GeForce 6800GT video card. WinXP Pro.

hyperdyne · Post by **hyperdyne** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 9:09 pm

Elvis: I am not sure why you, as well as a few others, are having so many speed issues. Your machine is faster, with a better video card and more ram, than the machine(s) it was built on. We actually worked on it using a few different machines; a pentium m 2.0 gig w 512 megs and a geforce go 32 meg video card, an athlon xp 2700 2.1 gig w 512 megs and a 9600 pro, an athlon 64 2800 1.8 gig w 512 megs and a fx5700 video card, and finally, a pentium 4 2.4 gig w 512 megs and integrated video. It runs at a solid 60 fps on all machines except the pentium m, that one has to be run in 30 fps mode, though it is a solid 30. Puzzling. We even tested on a 1.4 gig athlon xp with a 9600 pro and 512 megs and it ran at a solid 30. I am quite puzzled.

The engine was not completely from scratch as the game was done in gamemaker. This would account for a lot of the overhead since anything really complex in gamemaker takes some horsepower. Anything outside of gamemakers internal functions were written by us though. And I would say we have quite a lot going on for a gamemaker title...

As far as I know there is currently no way in gamemaker itself to rotate the framebuffer, though maybe somebody has written a utility to do it. If not, I have some ideas.

Also, I know gamemaker is VERY dependant on the video card, this could explain why a 16 bit mode can speed things up a bit.

Still does not explain why high spec machines are running slower than my "wimpy" machines though.

Diabollokus: Glad you got it up and running and thanks for the compliment. We definitely have some plane type enemies in the queue for the upcoming levels, we just did not want to include too many on the first level. We have also been thing about a boss that takes up a whole level...

Landshark: I am completely baffled with your situation. Your machine should eat this game alive. The control issue is confusing as well. Would you be willing to test a version without the joystick code in it to see if that is the culprit? I am wondering if the joystick auto-detect is returning erroneous information and whacking the controls?

Thanks for all of the feedback guys, keep it coming.

battlegorge · Post by **battlegorge** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 2:33 pm

hyperdyne wrote: The engine was not completely from scratch as the game was done in gamemaker.

I knew it

I am working with gamemaker too.
How did you manage to make the gamepad jump around like that

I have a quite good gamepad script wich works at least at my computer.
http://host-a.net/getfile.php?usern=bat ... vement.gm6

To speed your game up, you could use object deactivation, if you not already did that.
And i suggest to load the ressources from external files.
I use the R.E.A.L. system.

AGC · Post by **AGC** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 3:20 pm

Game looks great. Very professional. I too have control problems though. With the gamepad connected it is as if up and left are held down the whole time. Without the gamepad connected and using the keys, the control is very laggy. It takes a while to respond and then you have to wait for it to finish your previous action before it will respond to new input. I'm using an Athlon XP 2000+ with integrated GeForce2 video.

Post by **Shatterhand** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 4:18 pm

Previous versions of gamemaker had a problem with the controller which I am not sure is still on the current version

If you have a controller driver installed, but the controller is NOT plugged, the game will lag, slowdown, and act weirdly overall

Though it doesn't seem the case here, it may be worthy to note that.

Gamemaker is a very powerfull tool, isn't?

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 4:50 pm

nice work. i had controller problems to start, but after recalibration, those were fixed.

like some others though, i had framerate problems. any more than 4 enemies on screen and it was cut in half or worse. on second though, less than half definitely.

i'm running:
Win XP pro
p4 1.8 Ghz
512 MB ram
geforce 4 mx 440 64mb

also, while i like the medal system (collecting to increase value indefinitely). the enemy positioning didn't seem to lend itself to collection, and i don't mind a challenge to get them, it just felt off. on the other hand i know that this trial is quite early.

Neon · Post by **Neon** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 9:29 pm

No need to add a tate mode. Runs fine and fullscreen if you tate your monitor and rotate 90 degrees under control panel.

arromdee · Post by **arromdee** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 3:15 am

All I get is a blank page with two embedded shockwave files that I can't run because I don't have a Linux plugin for them.

Is there a direct link to the download page?

Frogacuda · Post by **Frogacuda** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 6:13 am

hyperdyne wrote:Frogacuda and battlegorge: If you guys are interested, I will send a version over with the joypad code ripped out so we can see if that is the problem. If so, that would help immensely in getting it fixed. Let me know.

Sure, I'd be happy to help test it. It looks promising, bugs aside.

hyperdyne · Post by **hyperdyne** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 8:10 pm

Thanks for the suggestions battlegorge

Do you have a demo/game out yet?

Shatterhand, thanks for the heads up. I don't think this is the issue though, as it works fine on all machines we have tested on. Something to consider... Game Maker IS a very powerfull tool, sadly most people do not use it to, or even near it's full potential. Though I have seen some very promising looking stuff on these boards.

captain ahar, thanks for the compliment and suggestions. I will consider them for an upcoming release.

Neon, that is a good point. Though it would be nice to have a tate mode so you don't have to mess with monitor settings if at all possible. We will see...

arromdee, I will try to get a direct download link for you, you are aware that it will not run on Linux, correct? A bit up the page antron stated that it does not run under wine either.

Frogacuda, I will hit you with a pm as soon as I have a stripped out version for you, most likely this weekend. Thanks for the help!

hyperdyne · Post by **hyperdyne** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 8:37 pm

Here is a direct link if anybody needs it:

http://zerohour.pixeltheater.com/ZeroHour.exe