increpare and
agj,
hey, i really appreciate your honest feedbacks! and in fact, i also have similar issues with that game like you've described, in all mentioned areas...
@camera:
the third person camera remains an unsolved problem, esp. when there are multiple layers of platforms (like in the purple/tower levels). only flat levels really worked glitch-lessly... backface culling helps a little, but it looks still messy, when the camera collides with some geometry. the denser the world, the harder it is to avoid those camera problems. maybe, a half automatic camera would have been a solution (similar like in Mario 64), which automatically searches for valid viewing spots (via ray casting/interpolation), still with the possibility to interact with it, when necessary... i thought about that, but it's pretty difficult to implement right for me... anyways, i wouldn't try it again full 3d. third person views seem to work only well with restricted player movement, like in 2.5d.
@WASD + mouse steering: from a design point of view, i think it's not so good, cause two different inputs control the same parameter. but in practice, after some testing, i found out that much nicer jumps are possible that way... you can jump and turn the cam around freely with the mouse, and still let the tank move in another direction. it's also possible to move around, and see it from the side, while driving a curve... with only WASD, the cam always stayed more or less behind it, which was quite uninteresting to look at. but it needs some time to get the hang of it.
(edit: nonsense. WASD -> steer / mouse -> look should basically work the same way, don't remember what the problem exactly was there...)
but possibly you're talking about another camera error, not sure... once, the physics behaved very strangely here, and made the car jump like crazy, by no reason. maybe that happens more often somewhere else? i don't know.
@jump pads:
oh, i do also remember Donkey Kong Country, with those barrel chain reactions...
still one of my favorite SNES games from the old days. but the jump pad idea came mainly from Quake 3 Arena, i think, to be honest
@levels: they are not so interesting right now, that's true... they were mainly created for testing purpose.
@look and feel: although i really like the 3d models overall, i think, the rest of the assets didn't fit so well together with them... the loud background music, and the sparse surrounding makes it feel cheap somehow. still, i did my best to pick out fitting assets from the huge archive from part 1. it wasn't that easy to find the right material... the overall cheesy feel was kind of a failure too. it's not really my thing, i guess, and not really my preferred type of aesthetics for sure... probably, as a one-man-dev, there's really no way around being honest to oneself, cause otherwise one loses just too much will-power throughout the project... and things end up dull and uninspired. there's always that vague feeling of uncertainty about the result, when done just with the attitude of a "product maker"... the candy problem: sweet and yummy maybe, and everybody likes it, but unhealthy, synthetic, cheap, and puke provoking when it's too much. probably a bad comparison...
but i've decided to keep away from just doing something the "producer way", from now on, no matter how shiny and tempting it might look at the beginning... the motivation must come from somewhere else. - still nothing against candy jump worlds, when done right...
at least it all works! Hell, it ran almost perfectly in Wine for OSX!
you really played it on OSX? wow, that's great! ...when it works under Wine, then the basic window handling/OpenGL setup should be okay by now, and i should probably stop begging people about technical detail tests.
I'd be interested in seeing how you made the levels ... doubt I'll make something ... well, I might ... but sure! I'd take a look.
cool! so, i'm packing up a small dev zip then... and post it later.
it would be really cool to add new custom levels to the final version...
but there's no pressure at all, really. probably i would let it stand like it is right now...
but if you and others would make some new level(s), i would be also willing to continue with it of course.
My only complaint is that I wish the mouse didn't steer, only looked.
i see what i can do about this. maybe it's still better with separated controls after all...
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