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[Pishtaco]

A NEW WORLD ENTERS THE JET AGE
Fly Meteors and Vampires above the sulphur clouds of Venus



MARVELS OF BRITISH ENGINEERING
Control fully physically modelled aircraft using only the mouse



RED TERROR IN THE SKIES
Develop your dogfighting skills to hold back the communists


Videos:

,



DOWNLOAD VENUS PATROL v1.1
(Alternate download)

Edit the file settings.txt to change resolution and switch to fullscreen

(Changes in 1.1: new tracers; should now be less weird on high-res widescreen monitors)

[kidchameleon]

Will not run on my system, completely unplayable 

[Pishtaco]

Will not run on my system, completely unplayable 

Yikes! What kind of system is it, and if the game's crashing, what does it say in log.txt?

[kidchameleon]

Hi,

Its running but unplayably slow. Id love to play it, looks fun! Doing about 1 frame per 2 seconds! Core 2 Duo, 2gb ram, gforce 7600gt, windows xp sp3. Perhaps my graphics card drivers need updating?

Here is log.txt after running the game...

Aliased point size range: 1 - 63
Smooth point size range: 1 - 63.38
Aliased line width range: 1 - 10
Smooth line width range: 0.5 - 10
Available OpenAL sound devices: DirectSound Software, Generic Hardware, Generic Software,
Using sound device: DirectSound Software
Messengers reset
Loading image new_terrain.bmp for heightmap ... OK
Setting up framebuffer... OpenGL framebuffer setup okay
Loading image instruments.png ... successful
Loading shader island...


Loading shader aircraft...


Loading shader post...


Loading shader sky...


Loading shader speckles...


Loading shader effect...


Clearing level...
Messengers reset
Loaded sound: sine
Running script intro
- colour top 190 200 190
- colour middle 197 188 106
- colour bottom 190 81 9
- lightning 0
Loading aircraft resource meteor ...
Loading mesh meteor
Mesh meteor loaded, with 852 triangles and 11 submeshes
Mesh added to resource
Finished loading resource meteor
Loading aircraft resource rocket60lb ...
Loading mesh rocket60lb
Mesh rocket60lb loaded, with 78 triangles and 2 submeshes
Mesh added to resource
Finished loading resource rocket60lb
Loaded sound: wind_whistle
Loaded sound: jet2
Loading shader cloud...


Loading image grit.png ... successful
Creating mipmaps
Loading mesh flame
Mesh flame loaded, with 8 triangles and 1 submeshes
Loading image gradient.png ... successful
Loading mesh sphere
Mesh sphere loaded, with 960 triangles and 1 submeshes
Loading image sharp_circle.png ... successful
Loading mesh exhaust
Mesh exhaust loaded, with 20 triangles and 1 submeshes

[knight]

It runs at 10-13 fps for me on my windows 7 running 64 bit laptop which is pretty new.

[deathtotheweird]

it's an awesome game. glad to see it finished.

[Pishtaco]

The game was developed to run at 60fps on my six-year-old laptop, which had a decent graphics card for its time (Radeon mobility 9700). So I'm hoping that any gaming computer since then ought to be able to run it.

Hi,

Its running but unplayably slow. Id love to play it, looks fun! Doing about 1 frame per 2 seconds! Core 2 Duo, 2gb ram, gforce 7600gt, windows xp sp3. Perhaps my graphics card drivers need updating?

Here is log.txt after running the game...

Thanks! One thing you could try is pressing V to turn off the post-processing, in case that's the problem; a more extreme one is to go into the graphics directory, and swap the names of the files new_terrain.bmp and tiny_terrain.bmp, which simplifies the clouds so that the game has fewer polygons to render. But honestly neither of these things ought to be a problem, since it sounds like you have a good gaming card. It could be the drivers; can you normally run opengl games okay? (One other thing you could try is to enable the use_point_sprites option in settings.txt.)

@knight - What sort of graphics card do you have?

[kidchameleon]

Ok Pishtaco ill try those things when I get home later. Yep, OpenGL games usually run fine.

Cheers.

[J.G. Martins]

Tried it!

It's pretty awesome! I really enjoy flight simulators, and had good fun just looking at all the forces being applied to the plane during the tutorial. The keymappings are really weird though. Don't know if I can think of anything better, but I have a hard time shooting while pressing SPACE etc. Maybe cockpit view could be toggled, like the SHIFT lock-on? That would be a big help.

Does it work with joysticks? Don't have the time to try it with mine out right now

[fraxcell]

Awesome! I really love it, though it's pretty hard to figure out. I don't have much experience with flight sims, and spent about 10 minutes trying to shoot down one sukhois in the second mission, and immediately afterwards, I crashed. I'll keep trying though.

[Danmark]

Went on free flight mode and tried crashing the Tupolev into the middle hangar on the airfield to see what would happen, and the game crashed. Did it again to see if I got the same result and I did:

assertion "bNormalizationResult" failed in _dNormalize4()
[../../include/ode/odemath.h]

Also, I just went free flight mode, and pummeled the rear zeppelin with rockets. On my second pass of doing so, the game crashed with no message.

[Nix]

This is really neat  .

The music is great and the graphics are very nice.

It also runs fine at full speed on my PC, by the way.

[kidchameleon]

Pishtaco,

Good News!

Use_point_sprites + pressing V sorted it out. Runs Perfectly! Well I love it, its not usually my genre but the attention to the training is excellent, the game is very enjoyable. My father was a pilot and would have loved this!

Regards,

Kid.

[Pishtaco]

@J.G. Martins, ninjutsu63 & Nix: I'm glad you're enjoying it. I like the thing with the spacebar because of the feeling it gives me of tensing and looking forwards for a shot, or relaxing and looking around. With it on toggle I keep forgetting which view mode I'm in.

@Veracity: I can reproduce your problem with the Tupolev. I've seen something like it before, which was caused by the physics engine not liking some degenerate, 0-area triangles in the meshes. But that doesn't seem to be the problem here - at least, I fixed all those triangles in the objects involved, and it's still happening.

About the rockets - were you firing a LOT of rockets? I left in automatically reloading rockets, since it doesn't really matter in any of the missions, but maybe I should put a delay in to keep things under control now.

@kidchameleon: I'm glad it works now. The point sprites thing is some kind of voodoo about driver bugs; but I'm surprised that turning off the post-processing made a difference. With it turned off, you'll get weird distortions from the large field of view - I should shrink it a bit for this mode.

[J.G. Martins]

I played some more yesterday! Took me ages to get past the convoy level, where 8 Yaks attack. I finally realized that there's a lot more depth, and that the planes aren't equal at all. It seems like the one I was flying was based off the P38 and was a much better climber than the Yaks. After I figured that out, I managed to take'em all out.

Perhaps these differences could be made more apparent? The briefing could let you know not to try to out-turn the Yak, but use boom'n'zoom tactics? That would definitely help!

I also miss some sort of information about how well I performed each mission. Times attempted, times completed, time it took, etc etc. Stuff like that! The mission selection screen just seems awfully empty at the moment.

[Pishtaco]

Perhaps these differences could be made more apparent? The briefing could let you know not to try to out-turn the Yak, but use boom'n'zoom tactics? That would definitely help!

I also miss some sort of information about how well I performed each mission. Times attempted, times completed, time it took, etc etc. Stuff like that! The mission selection screen just seems awfully empty at the moment.

Thanks, those are good suggestions. If I have another crack at this, I will probably put some flying tips in the debriefings.

[Danmark]

About the rockets - were you firing a LOT of rockets?

Yeah, I was firing as rapidly as I could.

So far I've finished all the missions except the zeppelin escort one. It's a fun game, and I seldom care much for atmospheric flight sims (the only other one I can recall enjoying is the original Red Baron).

[Helmeted]

Love flying the skies of Venus, so majestic.

[Capt. Haddock]

Apologies for resurrecting this old thread, but I've just discovered Venus Patrol (a good 3-4 years after its release!) and I just wanted to say thank you!

Words cannot describe the pleasure!

Everything is spot on. The classic sci-fi book-cover look, the fonts, the theme, the hazy almost hand-painted look when you play at 640x480, the choice or aeroplanes, the music, the physics, the game cameras, and the sublime mouse controls.

It has the most important things modern flight sims usually miss in their quest for realism: An evocative universe and a great feeling of flying.

And it's doesn't feel like a simple retro game. The mouse control is a huge improvement over what's been tried before, and he visual style is a gauntlet thrown to the resolution-hungry next-next-gen games out there. Sometimes less is more.

I guess you've moved to pastures new by now, but have you considered re-releasing it on Steam or even iPhone/iPad? I'd gladly pay for it.

Many thanks!

[Pishtaco]

Thank you! It's very kind of you to write all that.

I had originally planned to make it into a bigger game, that I could charge something for. But I had trouble thinking up missions that would strike the right tone. I may come back to it some day.