Release Pandora Microbes!

[PowerGod]

In appdata/microbes I don't have a directory "levels" at all, I only have "savefile" and ".links"


EDIT: I looked in the PND and the "level1" file is not even there in the levels/3 dir...


EDIT: seems I had a previous version, 0.8.0, that's strange cause I updated with PND Manager yesterday just before starting to play... anyway, with the 0.8.1 there's no crush anymore, I just see the "Empty level" (spoken in german ??) screen when I select a "Self-made" level.

 

[_wb_]

OK, empty level screen is quite normal if you haven't made any levels yet


It's not German, it's supposed to be a scottish accent Blame eSpeak if the speech sounds strange

 

[mcobit]

German and scottish are really similar in terms of pronounciation

 

[Znirk]

Saxon, anglo-saxon, same difference.

 

[PowerGod]

Ah, about levels design, I liked both gadgetoid and askarus levels, but in a different way:


Gadgetoid ones where less hard and with more complex paths, while the askarus ones where more simple as design but harder to master...


The level "path 1 (by Askarus)" was for me impossible to win... I replayed it at least 20 times... and I was thinking to "hack" the savefile to proceed... the problem was the fact that I played all the levels before with just one type of unit... I never bothered to use long range unit or stronger ecc... I always built the "already selected unit"...


So I tried for the "last time" that damned level, playing with different units, and different dispositions... but nothing... I was going better, but at the end I was unable to stop the massive final wave...


THEN I finally tried to change the behavior of the units, using long range, multi-target, and so on... and after 2 other games lost, I finally won the level !! B) (In easy mode) :lol:


And now I MUST always think what type of unit/behaviour I have to use in every spot, it's like I just learnt how to play.


EDIT: Scottish pronunciation (damn I can't understand a word !! this really seems german !!)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LhiEsjsW8NM?feature=oembed

 

[Askarus]

My levels are not designed to be easy or hard.


They should look nice like the fortress and the body.


I want some theme into my maps.


The paths are not nice done.


If I wouldn't help out EvilDragon there were miuch more maps from me already.


Ther paths have to be reworked.

 

[foxblock]

Sigh, I tried a version of the game after GC, I liked it, though it had a few problems and comments I wanted to make. Due to the lack of time I totally forgot about getting back to you with these.


Now so much stuff has changed, probably everything I would have criticised, too


I will try to give the latest version another go this week and comment.


So far this is a nice effort, I like it. Keep up the good work.

 

[_wb_]

I'm working on a 1.0 release, which will be the first non-beta. Not much new compared to 0.8, just some small bugfixes and minor tweaks, and some new levels.


After that, I'll continue working on it, but at a (much) slower pace. I'm considering the game to be sufficiently finished now for a 1.0 release - more features can always be added later, but it already has enough ingredients to make a good game at this point.


Meanwhile, if somebody has a TV out cable and a way to record the video/audio, this would be cool - it would be nice to have a gameplay video available by the time the 1.0 is ready for release (so I can start a new Software News thread with a youtube movie). Please let me know if you can do this - I can send you my current working version so the video is up to date.

 

[sswam]

_wb_, my son Sean (4) loves your game and made some levels, he would like to play them!


Could you tell me how to unlock the self-made level pack?


Have to complete all "microbes" levels on "normal" is that it?


Is there some way to hack this easily?


I think should be able to play self-made levels any time, without need to finish the other levels first.


That would be good for keen level-designers like my son!

 

[_wb_]

Like I said on irc (but I repeat it here for the record), you can cheat by modifying appdata/microbes/savefile

 

[sswam]

Thanks Jon


My son's has made 10 levels now, some of them are tricky and different. I'll post them later,


I noticed a few bugs in the latest version 0.8.1:


- it runs out of ram after a while (mentioned that before)


- sometimes, maybe if you accidentally start two instances at once, it clears appdata/microbes/savefile


- there are a few ways to crash it by abusing the editor (kids are good for discovering these things!):


- changing the level dimensions can upset it I think


- if there are too many microbe sources, it crashes too (I think)


- one other level he created crashed, but I don't know why


suggestions:


- in the editor, let us type the number of epidemics; it takes a while to change it using the D-pad


I've done all the levels now, so my previous cheating can be forgiven


I will have to try to get through them all on very hard / insane if possible. The insane mode can be very challenging!

 

[_wb_]

I hoped I had fixed all memleaks in 0.8.1 already, but maybe I missed something. Do you have a way to run out of ram fast? (I haven't been able to observe this yet, but then again I do only short test runs)


I wonder how it can clear the savefile, that should not be possible. Maybe starting it twice could cause some weird behavior - I should probably add a mechanism to prevent that.


Changing the level dimensions caused some problems, that bug will be fixed in 1.0.


Too many sources - I think that is probably fixed too.


If you could send me the level that causes a crash, I'll investigate it. It could be related to the level dimension change bug - this could cause some grid cells to be uninitialized memory, which of course can result in invalid levels.


Good suggestion - changing that number with the dpad is a bit tedious indeed. Is it OK to make X/Y change the value by +-10, instead of typing the number? (it's a bit easier to implement )


There are probably levels that are just impossible on insane - it would be good to know which ones are possible, so feel free to share that info

 

[Askarus]

I'm back from pandora's office and will start to rework my levels now.


There's one thing I noticed:


When starting Deadbeaf with some nice music in the background Pandora Microbes won't start. Could you fix that please?

 

[_wb_]

OK, will be fixed - if it cannot open audio for playback (because something else is occupying it), it'll now just continue without sound, instead of producing a fatal error and stopping. Also I just noticed that the version of SDL I'm putting in the Microbes PND was not compiled with ALSA support - I'll try to fix that, so you can have your own background music and still get the sound effects/speech.


Edit: fixed it, in 1.0 it'll use ALSA so it will work nicely with other background music running - you'll just have to set the volume of the Microbes music to 0 to avoid having two background tracks at the same time

 

[sswam]

New Microbes Levels!

My son's has made 10 levels now, some of them are tricky and different.

Here they are, well five of the more finished ones.


sean.nipl.net/microbes/


You can plug them into appdata/microbes/levels/3 if you'd like to try them out.


My nearly-five-year-old son Sean made these.


I didn't help much, just typed the names and set the number of epidemics to what he said.


_wb_ made a nice usable level editor; even little kids can use it!


The speech makes microbes good for kids who can't read yet.


If you like a challenge, try to beat Sean's level 4 "Poison Eject" on the "insane" setting.


I did it, but only after several hours of trial and error!


I hereby declare myself microbes champion of the world until someone else can do this!


I had 4 cells and about zero energy left.


Another unusual one is level 6 "ESP B", there are a lot of safe places for the microbes, so it can be hard to kill them. I haven't tried that on a hard setting yet.

 

[sswam]

I hoped I had fixed all memleaks in 0.8.1 already, but maybe I missed something. Do you have a way to run out of ram fast?

It takes a while, maybe half an hour or more on my 512MB Pandora. One unixy solution would be to re-exec the program with certain arguments for each game! I did that in my rescue game, but it caused a few problems on Pandora, worked ok on PC Linux.

I wonder how it can clear the savefile, that should not be possible. Maybe starting it twice could cause some weird behavior

I'm guessing it might be due to some weirdness with pnd_run, and the appdata union getting unmounted and mounted at the wrong time. Maybe you could keep a flag that says the savefile was not found in the first place, and in that case when saving use O_EXCL or stat to make sure you are creating a new file as expected, not overwriting a better one.


Here are three levels that caused a crash in either the editor or play or both:


sean.nipl.net/microbes/broken/


I edited 7a from 7b by hand in vim to try to fix it, but it still crashed. 7b and 10 came from Sean in the editor.

Is it OK to make X/Y change the value by +-10, instead of typing the number? (it's a bit easier to implement )

Sure, that sounds good - you're the boss!

There are probably levels that are just impossible on insane - it would be good to know which ones are possible, so feel free to share that info

Ok... so far, tutorial 1-4 are possible, and my son's "level 4" is possible.


I think I did some others on insane, I forget which at the moment.


I'll try to do them all, and let you know which ones are too hard for me.


Then maybe you can give those more starting energy, if no one else can do them...


or leave them as-is - it can be a good challenge to fight a losing battle, like Leonides and the 500 Spartans!


I've got a couple suggestions to make things difficult for you _wb_


* A high-score / achievements file. Scores can be recorded for each (level, difficulty) setting, and sorted by (remaining cells, energy, time elapsed). If no one beat the level yet, the longest time survived is the winner! We could enter our names too, hopefully using the keyboard and not like in MAME.


* I also would like a log / replay function, to record how I beat the level and play it back!


Could save these for each entry on the high score table, and the previous game.


I guess it wouldn't take much space, something like a midi event log and gzip it.


Would have to record the random seed (if the engine is stable) or else each random number chosen.


If the game logic changes I guess the replay logs would not work, an alternative might be a frame-by-frame record of what's where. Well don't worry about this I guess, unless you're really bored.

 

[Askarus]

OK, will be fixed - if it cannot open audio for playback (because something else is occupying it), it'll now just continue without sound, instead of producing a fatal error and stopping. Also I just noticed that the version of SDL I'm putting in the Microbes PND was not compiled with ALSA support - I'll try to fix that, so you can have your own background music and still get the sound effects/speech.


Edit: fixed it, in 1.0 it'll use ALSA so it will work nicely with other background music running - you'll just have to set the volume of the Microbes music to 0 to avoid having two background tracks at the same time

Ah, that's great.

 

[_wb_]

These levels will be included in the 1.0 release - also thanks for the broken levels, maybe I'll find new bugs with those. It's good to know that the level editor is easy enough to be used by 4 year olds


About the memleaks: actually I don't think they were fixed in 0.8.1 already, now that I think about it - so they are probably already fixed now.


To avoid the simultaneous running problems I could perhaps just edit the runscript to do something like ps aux | grep microbes and exit if it's already running - does anyone have a good bash oneliner for that?


High-scores / achievements is not difficult to add, just a lot of boring work - actually maybe I should try to find some existing code I can reuse for that.


Log/replay is not that hard actually, it's just a matter of recording pairs of (framenumber, keypress/nub/touch event) - filtering out only the events that go to the actual game, not the menu and pause/unpause stuff - and then playing them back. I might implement that at some point. It would also be useful to produce gameplay movies: first record a game by playing it, then replay it, saving each frame as a raw image (this will take some time and lots of space) - perhaps I could even pipe it to a movie encoder so the raw images can be removed as soon as they've been processed, and then in a third iteration, replay it (no need to actually draw the frames this time) and use the write-to-file SDL audio driver to record the soundtrack. That would be a way to produce an accurate movie - in fact even if things are too dense at some points to play it without framedrop at the highest gfx setting, you could still get a full quality no framedrop movie out of it this way.


Of course if the game logic would change, these logfiles would not necessarily make sense - you could still play them back, but it could be that e.g. a tower is now destroyed before you attempt to upgrade it, so the sequence of keypresses might cause the tower to be rebuilt instead of upgraded, or give a "sorry" because there's not enough energy. Or "game over" instead of "level completed".

 

[konqithedragon]

well you would just have an error that says: "The version of this logfile is incompatible with this version of the game"

 

[zLouD]

​

_wb_wrote a tutorial on how to create your own level with your own theme for his game Pandora Microbes​

Follow the links

​

.openpandora.de/buchse/en/pandora-microbes-custom-level-tutorial

(English - English)​

.openpandora.de/buchse/pandora-microbes-custom-level-tutorial

(German - Deutsch) *​

(

= buechse)​

*Note: the german version is automagically translated(google translate) and has errors in the translation. (if you want to help to fix them, contact me)