Some Progress
I have made a little progress with the bat game and it’s turning out to be more of a headache than I anticipated. The game engine is more or less done other than optimizations that need to be done. Right now the engine renders 256 tiles as well as 12 trees each of which has 40 limbs and it seems to be running rather slowly. I don’t know whether it is all the computation that is slowing it down or if it’s all the shapes being drawn. Either way I’d like to know how well it performs on your computer as I’d like to have an idea how heavily I have to optimize the engine.
Other than the engine, I still have to create all the art for things such as the title screen, the menus, buttons etc as well as program the actual game play. Finally I will have to look for some ambient music and sound effects to bring the game together. But right now I am focusing on the technical aspects of the game to make sure everything is running smoothly in the background. The final piece to be added to the engine will be collision detection but that won’t be too big of a deal (to implement or speed-wise) because of the way I have designed the engine.
One thing I am happy with is how the erie atmosphere came out. I was originally going to use some form of raytracing to generate the view but quickly abandoned that idea knowing that flash couldn’t handle it. Instead it is coloring the objects based on distance. So if the object is far enough, it wont be visible to the bat (and its echo location). The sight factor is a variable which will allow it to change during the course of the game with power ups and upgrades. Once I have the bug sprites floating around as well as a big full moon, I think the game will look pretty nice.
*UPDATE* I have finally finished most of the optimizations. The trees seemed to be the biggest problem and I’m happy to say that I was able to double the tree count from the last demo as well as make it perform better with those extra trees!
View Engine Demo.
I probably won’t release the source for this game unless I decide to scrap it or no one is interested in licensing/sponsoring it (which is more than likely).
July 30th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Hey, pretty good job! Umm, so, yeah, a few bugs, one, there appears to be clipping if I hold down the left or right arrowkey long time. This could just be a problem in flash. As well, when I was holding down the arrow key, then was dealing with the screenshot dialog, the game kept turning, even after I let go of the key.
My platform: Ubuntu 8.04, Swiftweasel32 3.0.1, Flash 9, AMD x2 5600+, 2GB Ram.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Thanks for the bug report XD Can you explain the clipping part a bit better? As far as I can tell holding down left/right for a long time has no different effect than tapping it many times. I’m guessing the clipping you are seeing is some of the near tiles not being drawn. This is because I am employing a couple of methods to cull unnecessary objects and some of them are a bit rough. The clipping in this version is particularly bad you are close to the landscape but all that is fixed in the newest version (not posted yet).
As for the game continuing to turn when a dialog appears, when flash loses focus it stops registering events so I guess it is missing the key up events to stop the turning. The solution is to simply clear the keyboard array when focus is lost. This is an interesting bug that I would most likely have missed which proves the benefits of public testing
Other than the bugs, is it running acceptably?
May 9th, 2009 at 8:22 am
It does run fine on my computer, although I wouldn’t bet on a 3D game, basically because the result will never match the ammount of work spent.
August 13th, 2010 at 6:58 am
It looks really atmospheric like a haunted forest mixed with Tron