Laseroid^2

[Udderdude]

Can you put up a test version? :3

[worstplayer]

Yep, I'll clean it up a bit and upload it soon (tomorrow maybe), but it's in such half(quarter?)-baked state it's unplayable. Only thing it'll be good for is testing HW compatibility.

[worstplayer]

Here we go:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?da62yuyqrmz1bkh

Please report back if it works or not.

-If you see some weird squares on the screen, yeah, it's a bug, it should disappear after few seconds. I'm working on it. This is one of these evil bugs that sometimes appear, sometimes don't, and NEVER EVER happen when you have debugger turned on grrrrmurder.
-If it doesn't run smooth, try playing with config.ini, you can also adjust some other things there
-If you turned down everything and there's still slowdown, replace pipelines/deferred.pipeline.xml with included deferred.pipeline.xml.lofi
-If you experience input lag, turn on forcefinish in config.ini, it should fix it (at cost of lowering framerate)
-Menu, lives and bombs are not implemented yet. If you get killed, just press R to restart
-If it doesn't work at all, please send me Horde3D_Log.html, i'll see if I can do anything about it.
-EVERYTHING you see here is some kind of placeholder. Of course, if you have any ideas what it should be replaced with, i'm all ears.
-
EDIT: Oh, and difficulty doesn't increase, because i'm an idiot and forgot to set it. Sorry.

[Udderdude]

Ok, it runs fine on my system. I love how the explosions and other art look so far, very nice looking. Not sure how the scoring works but I was able to survive just by tap-dodging. I guess it's just a test version, though, not a big deal.

[worstplayer]

Yeah, all bullets shooting directly at the player make tap dodging piss easy. Maybe slightly randomizing the directions will help, but there's a thin line between randomized directions and spam.
Maybe if each enemy had some fixed offset generated when it spawns... i'll have to try that.
Anyway, some enemies will have denser, slower attacks that will require different tactics.

Scoring...I still haven't decided. At the moment it works like this: when enemy explodes, bullets near him turn into medals. These increase multiplier. Every time you hit an enemy, this multiplier adds to your score. There's a slight delay between hitting an enemy, and actually destroying him, that allows you to get more hits (it does almost nothing on current enemies, they have delay only 10 frames, giving you just 2 extra hits with spread or 3 with focus). Previous systems didn't really work, and I'm still trying to come up with something better. Or just grazing, that's impossible to fuck up.

[Dave_K.]

Also works on my Taito TypeX2 system. In 640x480 Hori fullscreen mode, I didn't notice any lag, but in Tate mode lag was noticeable at certain times. If you had an FPS counter I'd be able to tell you how much it dropped by, but actually found the slowdown similar to Cave shooters when there were the most bullets on screen things started slowing down a bit.

[edit] deleted question about bullet canceling, you answered it above [/edit]

[worstplayer]

[edit] deleted question about bullet canceling, you answered it above [/edit]

This was a good point. The game doesn't in any way show distance at which bullets are canceled. Maybe some kind of visible shockwave showing this distance would make it more obvious?

About the lag in tate mode...If it happens when there's a lot of enemies on the screen, it's probably caused by too many lights. if you turn down lightquality to 2 enemies will stop glowing, and it should lag less. If it happens when there's too many explosions, lowering maxexplosionlights could help too.

[worstplayer]

Added shockwaves showing cancel radius, and roughly half of the enemies now have their attacks offset by random amount. Both seem to work. Now I REALLY have to start adding more enemies.

EDIT:


And here's the promised bullet barf mode for ZOM

[Udderdude]

Yeah, needs bigger and medium sized enemies. And some well designed levels plz.

[worstplayer]

Well designed levels won't be easy with random generation, but i'll attempt to give it some kind of structure (at least alternating between popcorn waves and different kinds of medium/large enemies).

[ZarroTsu]

Ruling from example *COUGHRAZOR2COUGH*, It's probably in your best interest to attempt more or less structured stages. Popcorn waves aren't a terrible idea, but they have to be an addition to the stage; not vice-versa.

[alastair jack]

well designed levels > anything random

Looks nice though, just a pity it won't be well designed.