Beta Galactic Artifact - Release B

[hessiess]

Good to hear that a solution is in the works

...The real solution to FPS might be to move to SpriG, or to OpenGL...

Probably for the pc release, but I thought that the Pandora was only going to support SDL. Maybe I was mistaken and they meant the button inputs were with SDL, the graphics could use OpenGL. Or maybe you can use anything, but compile it for the Pandora. I'm soo confused.

Also:

QUOTE
...key panning speed to time... ...but wouldn't affect the speed of gameplay...

Sweet! Now my speed rush is left unhindered even while panning.


Pandora Supports OpenGL-ES, at least with regular OpenGL, alpha transparency causes virtually no slowdown at all.

 

[TrevorBradley]

Pandora Supports OpenGL-ES, at least with regular OpenGL, alpha transparency causes virtually no slowdown at all.

There are rumours (which are rumoured to be confirmed) that Pandora will support OpenGL proper.

It really is the way to go, but I'm going to need several days of getting to learn it and testing before I make the switch. Converting from SDL to OpenGL isn't going to be a mix and match, gradual transition.

 

[fusion_power]

AFAIK it was only a missunderstanding, there will be only OpenGL ES (1 and 2)
Is there no way for fast software transparencies? What makes transparency always so critical? I remember the GP2X in general had serious issues with that, SNES Emulator had transparency issues...
No other way than hardware supporting the transparencies for optimal speed?

 

[jook2oh]

QUOTE
...can you test the new 283 binary to see if the win is now consistently working...

I was able to inconsistently reproduce it by quiting the victory screen too early.

Yeah, that's the problem, no matter what I do, it just seems to be random. Maybe the time you leave the "You Win" screen has nothing to do with it after all. I just tried a bunch of times, nothing makes sense. Maybe someone on my lan is bit-torrenting or something...

Without clicking or exiting the screen at all, I just won a few and lost a few...
And just now I won a few and lost a few by exiting as quickly as possible...

Nope, I was wrong, it doesn't seem to make a difference. Ill keep looking, cause a "no-win" is a bad thing.

edit:
I just tried like 20 times to win, but lost every time. Its 3:52 PST if that makes a difference. Maybe the server logs will help.

After quitting the program, and reloading it, I was able to win on the second try. But that also could be random, I'm just grasping at straws right now, its definitely in the code.

Oh, and thanks for fixing that second window bug, I don't think anyone even noticed it missing.

Edit2:
QUOTE
...Just because a message is queued doesn't mean it's sent...

Could you make it send the win a few times until the server sends a message back letting the client know it got the message? I'm sure that would solve things nicely. Then again, I don't know if you already have a better solution in mind.

(On a side note, I type a lot of nonsense, then unequivocally I strike gold. I hope you read all my posts, sometimes I break the rambling to shed light on something important, I hope nothing important I said was overlooked. Partly because I can't personally tell the difference between rambling and something important. Maybe I just need sleep.)


That whole post was with ver 283. Sorry it didn't work.

 

[TrevorBradley]

Hey guys, sorry the beta server was down for a big chunk of today. I was hot on the trail of a bug that resulted in about 5% of all our traffic getting dropped.

Lesson of the day. Never ever take a TCP message and add the null char '\0' to the end to denote the end of a string transmission. TCP messages stack up, so char* 'Hello\0World\0' => "Hello" can happen

Good news:

http://games.randomlynx.net/GalacticArtifa...ct0302-TEST.rar

Great news:

I believe all the dropped packets are now history. Also several more features sneaked in since the last test, including:

Color coded artifact sell screen
Elimination of the "double red bug" when artifact cashed in in already red area.
Fixed bug where option on a new page didn't get reset to 0.
Hitting ESC will bring up a popup that will verify you want to quit (ESC y will now quit)
New Unicode Keyboard code thanks to Klaus in the dev forums. fusion_power, could you check out and see if this works for you? If not your sharp s, hopefully your question mark will work.
Added Poland's only cosmonaut (thanks to zear_ for all his help today)
New Ancient information. All info is given as a range... $$$ 1/10, $$ 1/5, $ 1/3... it's the only fair way upon reflection.

I've got very few fixes before release C:

Industrialist $$$ 22.5 degree bug
Find some way to log information so we can get a dump of info just in case the entire map is filled red.
Switch Artifact trade for information so "No" is selected by default.

For those of you who are keen, could you have a look at the new ancient code, make sure everything looks OK? I checked the mouse delay, and didn't see a significant problem in this release, but I think we need to retest it now.

Watch carefully for missing text messages.. they shouldn't happen anymore.

EDIT: Oh, one more thing. If you're using the test version, you MUST upgrade to connect to the network again. Network code alterations means that I have to kick out all old clients.

 

[jook2oh]

One real quick new bug. When you are fueling up, it keeps selecting the first artifact in the list. Then if you don't pay attention, pressing the enter key a few times, you will sell all your artifacts.

I like the colors for artifacts though. It doesn't seem like you did the auto-select "no" to the hints yet.

Edit:
Good news on the no-win bug. Its gone, Ill keep checking, but I haven't lost once yet.

Edit2:
QUOTE
...$$$ 1/10, $$ 1/5, $ 1/3...

Uhh
I-$ is 3/4 ,I-$$ is 1/4 ,I-$$$ is 1/8
F-$ is 80/81 ,F-$$ is 8/9 ,F-$$$ is 1/9

I just played a lot of games, and the A-$$$ seems fair now, but, can you maybe tone down the A-$ just a bit, I mean they are rather common, and 1/3 makes it almost as good as a I-2. Also the F-$ and F-$$ don't look that good right now.

Edit3:
I guess they aren't that bad, I mean a ring is really annoying, with the square grid and all.

 

[TrevorBradley]

One real quick new bug. When you are fueling up, it keeps selecting the first artifact in the list. Then if you don't pay attention, pressing the enter key a few times, you will sell all your artifacts.

I like the colors for artifacts though. It doesn't seem like you did the auto-select "no" to the hints yet.

Edit:
Good news on the no-win bug. Its gone, Ill keep checking, but I haven't lost once yet.

Aha! I knew there was a reason why I kept the page number the same between pages. However before you could, for instance, hit "up" on the intro screen and have the cursor disappear. I'll get a fix in.

I'm so happy that no-win bug is gone. It was a stupid stupid bug in my SDLNet_TCP_Recv logic that took too long to figure out. Hopefully anyone else working on a multiplayer server will not make the same mistake. On the plus side things should be a lot more responsive.

Is the cursor speed OK? I thought it was moving too slowly between stars. (You can hit enter before it reaches the star and start traveling there, for instance.)

 

[jook2oh]

(You can hit enter before it reaches the star and start traveling there, for instance.)

Yeah, I notice that now that you mention it. Not as bad as a slow mouse select/move in a thick area (EG: 555-5555).

 

[Klaus]

Finally I was able to test your game, and it's really awesome! What more to say? It already looks very balanced, length of one round seems perfect to me and it's a lot of fun! I noticed no glitches beside the "always select first item"-thing. The game even kept me from going out and spending a lot of money on a hangover.

 

[fusion_power]

One real quick new bug. When you are fueling up, it keeps selecting the first artifact in the list. Then if you don't pay attention, pressing the enter key a few times, you will sell all your artifacts.

Yupp, the selection always jumps at first position, very bad if you have to fill up a huge value of fuel. Normaly I slamm the enter Button untill the tank is full (nice feature ) So this version is not very useful if you have to travel a huge distance and you need hundereds of Fuel units.

But I like the new colours in the buying/selling stuff, indeed very useful AND ßÄÖÜ öüä is working, without problems, very nice. What was the trick?

Strange Bug in Single player. hitting ESC brings the selection up, you can return or quit. if you return to the game, you have a new start position and a new price artifact position. Updates and Cargo stay like before. Very interesting.

 

[TrevorBradley]

Yupp, the selection always jumps at first position, very bad if you have to fill up a huge value of fuel. Normaly I slamm the enter Button untill the tank is full (nice feature ) So this version is not very useful if you have to travel a huge distance and you need hundereds of Fuel units.

But I like the new colours in the buying/selling stuff, indeed very useful AND ßÄÖÜ öüä is working, without problems, very nice. What was the trick?

Strange Bug in Single player. hitting ESC brings the selection up, you can return or quit. if you return to the game, you have a new start position and a new price artifact position. Updates and Cargo stay like before. Very interesting.

Refuelling bug is fixed on this side. I just have a last few bugs to fix before a release candidate for Release C comes out.

Klaus posted some unicode key input on the dev forums. I was missing a few critical things. Basically instead of taking individual key input, it looks at the locale of the system. It's much cleaner code.. I don't even need to check if the user is hitting shift anymore to capitalize the letter, for instance.

I noticed that single player bug last night. If you win the game you should get dropped back to menu without asking, otherwise the game acts very strangely.

I started tipping my toes into the idea of game scores, and they work great for the first 80% of the game, then break horribly when the excluded region is so large you can't see any black on the minimap. Release D for that, I think.

I think I'm going to put this aside for a bit and try to tackle the remaining bugs on Monday, Working on this game is great fun, but it's starting to wear me down, and I need to pace myself if I want to keep my health up to somewhere above miserable. I'll target for a formal Release C close to Friday of next week. If I'm going to do this lemme put out a weekend interim release with that fuel bug fixed though...

 

[TrevorBradley]

http://games.randomlynx.net/GalacticArtifa...ct0310-TEST.rar

Latest bug fixes:

* Increased Cursor Speed
* Fuel bug fixed
* Swapped No/Yes on Artifact trade for info screen
* Fixed bug where if you were in chat mode while visiting aliens, text would not come up.
* Fixed the I$$$ 22.5 degrees bug: displayed as a polygon instead of a pie wedge that can't be rendered with the correct angle.
* Key repeat now much faster (default key repeat instead of /10)

Bugs left to fix (that I know of):

* Fast scrolling (with increased keystroke rate) has reintroduced the Babababa bug.
* Some sort of serious bug with the mouse cursor that infrequently causes the mouse cursor to dissapear.
* Minimap bug with Industrialist artifacts. Excluded region doesn't hit the end of the minimap
* Single player game should not ask players if they should quit once they've won the game.
* Perhaps some tweaking with Ancient Artifact size ratios.

I was considering adding a logging function so that if people said the entire screen filled up with red that they could send me a file with all that info, but I think I'm going to put that off for now. I'm going to guess this was either an Industrialist 22.5 degrees bug, or that they lost the black area while zoomed out (very easy to do). This hopefully will be fixed by a minimap zoom I hope to implement for Release D.

 

[fusion_power]

I noticed that single player bug last night. If you win the game you should get dropped back to menu without asking, otherwise the game acts very strangely.

I still have the other single-player bug. Why is the ship position and the artifact position changing when I just hit the ESC key but then press "N" to return to the running game? ^_^

Will release C have the other two missing guys in the Picture window? By the way, I like the drawing style, maybe the Future guy moves its jaw a little bit too fast but it's still ok.

 

[TrevorBradley]

I still have the other single-player bug. Why is the ship position and the artifact position changing when I just hit the ESC key but then press "N" to return to the running game? ^_^

Will release C have the other two missing guys in the Picture window? By the way, I like the drawing style, maybe the Future guy moves its jaw a little bit too fast but it's still ok.

I'll look into that other single player bug on Monday.

We likely wont see other characters by Release C. Pat's doing excellent work, but the drawings are difficult and time consuming.

We might see new music for each of the races though, depending on the release schedule.

 

[fusion_power]

We might see new music for each of the races though, depending on the release schedule.

I forgot to mention, that I like the general background music, not only the race specific Tracks. "Spacey" Stuff, quiet and a littly bit mysterious and athmospheric, fits very well into the game.

 

[jook2oh]

http://games.randomlynx.net/GalacticArtifa...ct0310-TEST.rar

Sweet. Didn't get to try it yet.

I forgot to mention, that I like the general background music, not only the race specific Tracks. "Spacey" Stuff, quiet and a littly bit mysterious and athmospheric, fits very well into the game.

Me too. Spacey music makes the whole game feel more spacey. Plus that astronaut guy talking, classic It is proven that music can help you be smarter... or at least feel smarter :lol:

Edit:
Got to test it out, didn't find anything wrong that wasn't already mentioned.
Good/stable release.

 

[zear_]

I don't remember if this was mentioned before, but I'm always starting in the same sector.
Here's a screenshot of me running 5 clients:

I tried to restart game many times but I'm always starting somewhere in that sector.
This bug (feature? ) is relevant to all the test builds since release B.

 

[TrevorBradley]

I don't remember if this was mentioned before, but I'm always starting in the same sector.
Here's a screenshot of me running 5 clients:

I tried to restart game many times but I'm always starting somewhere in that sector.
This bug (feature? ) is relevant to all the test builds since release B.



Zear, you're running on linux, right?

Randomization on linux, using rand() is pretty stinky. I've tried to randomize it a bit better, but I've not made much progress. I'll try to see if I can whack it a bit more.

I forgot to mention, that I like the general background music, not only the race specific Tracks. "Spacey" Stuff, quiet and a littly bit mysterious and athmospheric, fits very well into the game.

Me too. Spacey music makes the whole game feel more spacey. Plus that astronaut guy talking, classic It is proven that music can help you be smarter... or at least feel smarter :lol:

If you guys like the music, try heading over to soundclick.com. They've got some pretty decent creative commons licensed music. If it's any good, share it here and it might find it's way in.

Most of the games' music is from "Harmonics of Frequency Modulation" here: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=619407

 

[hessiess]

I don't remember if this was mentioned before, but I'm always starting in the same sector.
Here's a screenshot of me running 5 clients:

I tried to restart game many times but I'm always starting somewhere in that sector.
This bug (feature? ) is relevant to all the test builds since release B.



Zear, you're running on linux, right?

Randomization on linux, using rand() is pretty stinky. I've tried to randomize it a bit better, but I've not made much progress. I'll try to see if I can whack it a bit more.

I forgot to mention, that I like the general background music, not only the race specific Tracks. "Spacey" Stuff, quiet and a littly bit mysterious and athmospheric, fits very well into the game.

Me too. Spacey music makes the whole game feel more spacey. Plus that astronaut guy talking, classic It is proven that music can help you be smarter... or at least feel smarter :lol:

If you guys like the music, try heading over to soundclick.com. They've got some pretty decent creative commons licensed music. If it's any good, share it here and it might find it's way in.

Most of the games' music is from "Harmonics of Frequency Modulation" here: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=619407


Try generating your random numbers by reading from "/dev/random", which works on reading device drivers, instead of using pseudo random algorithms, so should be more random.

Whenever I play this game, I too always seem to end up starting in that general aria.

 

[TrevorBradley]

Try generating your random numbers by reading from "/dev/random", which works on reading device drivers, instead of using pseudo random algorithms, so should be more random.

Whenever I play this game, I too always seem to end up starting in that general aria.

Won't work on Windows machines, but that's what the pre-processor is for I guess...