Really nicely done. I like the mixture of arcade and sim elements. Maybe it could do with more of a one-shot-one-kill feeling to make the stealth part feel more intense. What's the difference between the normal and wire-guided torpedoes?

Managed 17/20 with 7 mistakes, average time 9.1s on medium.

I have to say this feels like it's been made hard in rather arbitrary ways, such as all the long straight lines in the radar display that don't seem to be connected to the shape of the target, the way the old returns take so long to fade, and the absence of anything giving context in the recognition manual, like the name of the type of ship and its usual speed. Also I missed having anything on screen that indicated what kind of time pressure I was under, or more weighty feedback from when you press the "designate" button. These things all made it take a long time to work out what the game was about. Once I had worked it out, though, I did get a sense that this could be a nice piece of a bigger submarine-style game.

I'm not sure what you mean by team creation. A standard way to play Combat Mission multiplayer is for the players to pick a certain kind of engagement; this gives a number of points to each side, which they can spend as they want on units. Is this team creation?

Combat Mission. The series high point is probably Barbarossa to Berlin. This is turn based tactical combat (up to three or four companies a side), modelling the whole of the eastern front, for every army and every period, detailed down to the angle of the sloped armour on a tank mantlet. At the start of each turn both sides plot their moves, then the game runs by itself for one minute. It's made by a couple of guys.

This is really nice, and beautiful. I did find the gameplay a little disappointing after a while; to avoid a squid sneaking up on you, it feels like you have to keep spinning around the whole time. So I had one guy fully on the right, and used the other one to occassionally level out, fire shots or jump for the bonuses, and that was it. But I haven't actually beaten the game this way, so maybe I'm missing something.

One of the best flash chicken fighting games I've played. I like the KO effects, although I'm not sure how much damage I'm doing before that. The nose meter is a great idea.

I really like the gameplay in this, nice work . I just spent a long time struggling against level 4; it felt pretty epic. I agree that it would be good if the game gave you some sense that you are getting close to the end of a level. Some other small complaints are that the sprites feel a bit mismatched in style and scale, and I think the power meter is hidden a little too far away from where the player's attention will be. But overall, great game. Kudos for the way it pauses when the window loses focus.

I like the graphics and how the game feels really bright and enthusiastic. And I'm getting a Fruit Mystery vibe off it.

As a player I felt a bit detached from the game, though, because of the lack of sound and maybe a lack of feedback (partly because of the lack of sound). The thing telling you whether food is good or bad blends in with the background; maybe it would show up better closer to where the pigs are? Also C and V feel fiddly for sending the food to the pigs; I felt like I should be pressing left and right shift, like in a pinball game.

Cute. I really like where you're going with the terrain graphics. It's a bit hard to decipher the HUD and what's going on around you.

Okay, I updated my drivers and now version 1.2 works. I had been using the Omega version of catalyst 7.11 . From reading some forum posts, it sounds like ATI went through a patch where their drivers had some problems with opengl.

Incidentally I also tried this at work today, where it ran, but only after it made me update my version of directx. It seemed like the startup process for ogre wanted it.

Does anyone know how he does his wonky edges? On the blog he says:

Most games have detailed surfaces, but sharp edges, so my goal became to make flat surfaces but have organic edges. This was done by using edge polygons with alpha tested textures.

http://news.quelsolaar.com/#post41

I don't know what to make of this. Maybe an edge polygon is a long rectangle that you place along the edge, at a suitable angle; it has a texture on it containing all the wonkiness, and the game uses this texture to blend somehow between the two faces meeting at the edge? 

Or maybe, looking at the image in that post, the wonky edge is just a flat polygon, given a funny shape with an alpha texture, that sticks out perpendicularly from the edge, and is coloured somehow so that it looks like part of the faces meeting there?

The most interesting way of projecting 3d things into 2d that I've seen recently was in cactus' entry for the Lovecraft competition:



This both shows you the faces of the things around you in a 3d-ish way, and comes with a built-in way of showing you an overworld map at the same time. It's not really clear how you would deal with something on the scale of mountains. As a first, crappy, idea, I would be tempted to: have them as little sprites on the overworld map; then have them as big sprites when they get on to the "horizon" around you, which sink into the ground as you get very close to them; and not to worry about showing physical elevation changes on the small-scale stuff that you actually walk over, but instead showing elevation by the palette and the type of vegetation around you.

Nice atmosphere and the rumble is really effective. Like mjau I just ended up staring at the map on the top left (since it gave me an immediate feel for what was going on around me where the central display didn't), which I feel took me out of the game a bit.

Great game, I just played it with my girlfriend and we both enjoyed it. I'm not completely convinced by the 3d graphics, though; the soundtrack and some of the other art were suggesting something more vector-y to me.

Great colours, nice effects (trails and air particles) and a good flight model too. However I got an honest-to-god BSOD when I got close to the baddies. It was a bugcheck 1000007f, I'm guessing a driver problem of some kind but I don't know which module faulted.

Yikes, sorry about that. My first guess is that it's the sound system. One of the optimizations I did in the latest version is that the alien sounds only start playing when you get close to them. If you want to have a crack at dogfighting, maybe one of the older versions that I posted above will be more stable: http://willhostforfood.com/access.php?fileid=61783

I just tried the 1.1 download and it runs fine.

I like the cockpit graphics and sound a lot, and the cheap-but-effective animation for the beetle. I think the delay when you collide with something is a bit too much; since it's going to happen quite often on a cluttered course like this, I would prefer something that feels like bouncing and then zooming off again, rather than like being brought to a halt.

I've uploaded a new version. I did some optimizations; the biggest one was drawing the instrument graphics on the HUD by a blit command, rather than as a sprite. My profiler was showing me that the set and unset state commands (I think) for the sprite was taking a very long time. Something is still going on with these commands that I don't understand; it seems to be calling the set and unset commands for some HUD elements even when drawing other things, like the scenery. Perhaps I have got my groups and batches mixed up.

Looking through the code, I realized that bullets are not actually drawn as single primitives. So maybe the problem Melly (and I think some other people) were having really is about their computers not liking single primitives. So I have added dummy primitives to the offending HUD elements that were causing crashes before. Can anyone tell me if this works for them now?

Also I have changed the internal view key back to you having to hold it down, rather than being a toggle. It's a little awkward, but I really like the feeling of physically knowing which view mode you are in.

I still can't run this. I made sure I had the vcredist thing installed first. The game opens a console, whirrs for a little while, and then I get a windows message box "The procedure entry point _except_handler4_common could not be located in the dynamic link library msvcrt.dll"

[Venus Patrol]

Venus Patrol

Good:

Satisfying an ambition - I had been thinking for a while about doing a small flight-sim project, with the goals of just having a realistic-feeling plane, mouse control and a simple AI which could at least fly a plane and navigate. I am pleased that I achieved at least this much.

Libraries - Using the Pyode physics library was a big timesaver. I didn't use much of the joint or collision stuff, but it took care of all the differential equations for me and meant that I didn't have to look at a single quaternion.

Lighting - I'm happy with the cheap environmental lighting I used for the plane, with one light the colour of the sky and one the colour of the ground, both changing with height. These do a good job of making the plane look like it belongs in the world, and I am glad that I resisted the temptation to spend time getting into shaders and GLSL to "do it properly".

Sound - Most of it is some pink noise I made in audacity, modulated based on the total drag on the plane (for the wind noises) or by doppler shift. These were pretty easy to do and work well, although it would have been good to spend more time making the engine sounds more rounded and less grating.


Bad:

Time - This was my first proper 3d project, and I must have spent about 90% of the time worrying about technology and framerate. In the end most of these things didn't matter, but it gave me very little time to spend on gameplay stuff.

Gameplay - Even if I had spent the time better, it's not clear that I could have made a complete game that would satisfy me in a few weeks. I didn't want to make an arcadey game where you shoot down dozens of enemies and rack up points, but rather something with a larger, more serious feeling; but I had no practical, realizable idea of what this could be.
 

On the first question, I put everything I wanted to save into one of the data structures, then got GM to convert it into a string and saved the string in a text file.