Jackal & Hound, inc.

[BPzeBanshee]

How did you end up coming up with those lasers? Stretch xscale of a sprite?

Switching between unguided and homing missile fire via the Pause Menu doesn't seem incredibly smart either. Surely it'd fit just as well being in a third button?

[ciox]

Switching between unguided and homing missile fire via the Pause Menu doesn't seem incredibly smart either. Surely it'd fit just as well being in a third button?

Have to agree with this, if I put anything in a pause menu it would be something that shows you where the destructible boss parts are, or something passive like that.

[Y2135]

How did you end up coming up with those lasers? Stretch xscale of a sprite?

No, it's the algorithm "for".

Switching between unguided and homing missile fire via the Pause Menu doesn't seem incredibly smart either. Surely it'd fit just as well being in a third button?

I think about removing choice of homing/unguided completely because I want player to stick with one mode, not switching between them every other moment. May be weapon mode menu before new game start will do the thing.

[BPzeBanshee]

I think about removing choice of homing/unguided completely because I want player to stick with one mode, not switching between them every other moment. May be weapon mode menu before new game start will do the thing.

That can work.

No, it's the algorithm "for".

Interesting. Are you able to elaborate? S20-TBL's Dodonpachi Laser system works but is pretty performance intensive. I'm interested to see how others do it.

[Y2135]

Not familiar with S20-TBL's Dodonpachi Laser system, but my version of code works like this:

spot_zero - point where collision with the target or obstacle occuring.

for i = (starting point) to (spot_zero) step (size of the sprite)
begin
drawinglasersegment (distance i from the barrel or whatever)
end;
drawinglaserflash (at the origin of the laser);
drawinglaserflash (distance spot_zero from the barrel or whatever);

like that. And yes, this method consumes some speed. Several very long rays across the screen with many segments make some slow-down.

[BPzeBanshee]

Hmm. Makes a bit more sense now.

Looking forward to seeing it in action when you get a release out. Videos while good just aren't the same.

[Y2135]

I will upload test stage soon - just to finger things a bit.

[Y2135]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV2n2p1nFGo
because of my slow pc video framerate is low, but game runs 60 almost always.
download and play here http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?7l7aeo1t4p3w8k7

you can change keyboard and joystick configs in config.ini. but you have to know key codes =)
default controls are E-D-S-F for movement and J-K for fire and second fire, Esc for pause, ALT-F4 for instant termination.
p1_joy_th and p2_joy_th are joystick threshold meanings. they must be from 0 to 1.

oh, and a pic

[BPzeBanshee]

Wow that's quite a step up from the previous screenshots. I'll give this a go later on today!

[ciox]

It looks cool but I can't manage to use the secondary weapon cause enemies and bullets move too fast to fiddle with it, it launches a splash-damage missile looks like but the targeting takes too long for me.

[BPzeBanshee]

Yeah, same here. The missile also seems quite underwhelming as it is for the amount of time required for not only launch but for it to get anywhere near it's target (which you have to account offset for because of the scrolling stage).

[Y2135]

This stage is in the mess, so secondary weapon is pretty useless for now. I'll try to balance and organize enemies for missile targeting. That's because of one feature to be implemented (already, actually): armor. All non-floating units are armored and can not be destroyed by primary weapon(s). On the other side, light floating units easily avoid heavy projectiles and only primary weapon(s) successfully deal with them. I want to force player to use missiles for survival and scoring.
Some incarnation of Xevious ideas here =)
I'm going to rework some visuals for an opportunity to identify whether on-screen targets are for machine-gun or for missiles.

[BPzeBanshee]

Ah, I see. That makes a lot of sense especially if future gameplay is slower than the massive hoarde of enemies I spotted in the test release.

One other thing, do we really need the countdown in *every single menu*? I found it more annoying than arcade-centric (which I guess is what you were going for) to be quite frank, and it certainly wasn't necessary in the Options menu of all places.

[Y2135]

yeah, put in this countdown thing just to put in will do something about it later (unnoticeable, longer and only in certain menus probably).
during the testings missile targeting annoyed me so hard that I remade whole thing into auto lock-ons. Don't know how much Xevious left here, but things become more... smooth
here is how it works now:

See the target:


Press button to lock-on:


Release button to launch (N max) missiles:


P.S.: Blue trails help to identify "owner" of the missiles. For the second player they are red.

[Y2135]

Have to downscale whole thing's resolution somehow.

[Ebbo]

Glad you decided to change missile targeting since as others have already mentioned, it felt really unwieldy in the demo.

Few graphical disparities bugged me. Like in that screenshot, you can see the tank-thingie is moving on the ground, yet the ground isn't solid and I'm actually able to fly below the tank. It isn't anything gamebreaking by itself but it still kind of confuses my gaming sensibilities.
While I do enjoy the overall design, some enemy sprites appear to have smoother anti-aliasing or thicker outlines than others and sometimes the explosions appear strikingly pixelated. And I wished the player sprite (or atleast the hitbox) would pop-up better from the background and enemies.

I can see promise in there. Hopefully we'll soon get to play a demo with actual level design in it

[Y2135]

Heh, not so fast
Pixellated sprites, tanks on the foreground and whole graphic part are the least bothering me things and the easiest to solve (because I know how). Level design, performance and compatibility - these aspects are more problematic in my case. To evade heavy, hi-res laggy unplayable Game Maker piece of crap and not to become a generic NES Final Mission clone is really tricky.

[BPzeBanshee]

Now you know why you're in the minority for having a hi-res GM game. GM is *really bad* for hi-res performance. Kinda like actual arcades from this era.

With the trail pattern, is that sprites you've got there as 'smoke'? I hope so because if they're particle effects that's a lot of them and GM is also *really bad* with its particle system. The GM devs have expressed as much and also want to eradicate it completely in future releases.

[Y2135]

yes, smoke trails are sprites.

about minority and majority - sine mora and omega five are really good in my opinion, but they are not welcome here. All right, these are major releases and 3d also. May be convert everything into 3d?

is it me or 3d is faster than hi-res raster?

upd: here is some gangster rap:

Now I've become an arcade-dev master
3d polygons are faster than raster!

*chicks sing* You are the best, give us the demo to test!

[BPzeBanshee]

Sine Mora fails hard for a few reasons:
- randomisation in powerups
- powerups move out of the screen in approx. 1 second
- autofire rate is broken
- wider-than-wide-ultra screen - a fucking widescreen TV will still have black bars on top/bottom
- furry pilot storyline with unskippable cutscenes
- all of these were warned to the dev before and after release, and devs didn't listen even so far as to saying that games like Battle Garegga were randomised too (it isn't)

Now, the thing with 3D in GM is that it's quite complex to actually code. Lot of effort. There are some tricks to improve 3D performance in some aspects but generally it's bad too. I'm talking strictly GM here: 2D stuff outside GM can be either amazing for speed or terribly depending on developer software and coding.

If you're gonna go the 3D route make it low res first. If you don't like the jagged look bump up the res to something like 640x480 but no more than that. I'd be going low-res regardless of using 2D or 3D.

[Y2135]

I think that I'll stick with low-res. One bad thing though, with scan lines effect GM exe lag painfully hard, so any filtering of the screen here is really bad idea especially for a shmup. 2d 640x480 for now... Lower lays CRT TV zone...

About unskippable cutscenes. Interesting that Gradius V being an outstandingly excellent scroll shooter of all times (again in my opinion) also have them. Moreover, they piss off so badly... Even whole MGS franchise (story based as f**k) has no even single scene that can not be skipped. Strange...

[BPzeBanshee]

Ah, scanlines. You're drawing them manually with draw_line which will cause severe lag. I figured out a better way: create a background for scanlines of something quite small, say a 32x32 image of just gaps with drawn lines. Make it a foreground, and leave the rest to GM. If you have moving stages and it affects the appearance of the scanlines set the x/y position to the same as the view. I find this method to be a lot more performance friendly than drawing the lines via code - GMOSSE used to go down to some 45 FPS when using vertical scanlines with drawing the lines via code and does not now thanks to the method I had figured out.

If you're going to any kind of video filtering though, the smaller the better (because less pixels to manipulate you see). 640x480 is probably still a little large but its a nice balance between going stupidly hi-res and going low-res enough that nothing looks as it should when you use complex filtering. I believe the Megadrive emulators upscale to 640x480 or something close to it (native output is not exact 4:3) and they seem fine.

[Y2135]

Method you described makes fixed "ironed" scaling and for monitors with higher resolution whole thing looks as ugly as scanlines in 320x240. My method did scanlines in native display's resolution, drawing 1-pixel fine scanlines over stretched 320x240 scenery so final result looked as playing game on various CRT TVs, but it caused great great lag. After some studying I think that scanlines are fine with emulators but with original game it's like some sort of bad taste. Anyhow, got rid of them and felt myself much much liter instantly =D

[BPzeBanshee]

'Ironed' scaling?

I suppose on hi-res monitors it does look pretty bad. I'll keep it in mine anyway for the feature.

[Y2135]

Currently upworking graphics for 320x240.

[BPzeBanshee]

Sweet! Redrawing everything by hand/however you were doing it before or just shrinking them down?

[Y2135]

Redraw from scratch, actually. For now, I'll make only necessary pieces. So, it will not take too long.