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[xandlex]

Hey, I feel for you. I switched my game from xna to mono last year shortly before publishing and I wish I had done it sooner. Issue after issue but it kinda was my fault 

I've played almost all versions of lode runner of the years so I tried yours and I gotta say that you've done a fantastic job 
Apart from the monk guys, nothing jumped out at me bugwise but i'll test again this weekend.

Read this thread (only skimmed your blog), but this is ground up but using old assets?

It looks like your on the last legs so good luck!

[quarkrobot]

Hey, I feel for you. I switched my game from xna to mono last year shortly before publishing and I wish I had done it sooner. Issue after issue but it kinda was my fault 

Nice to hear someone else is having the same issue. It may just be me, but MonoGame is nowhere near as polished as XNA was.

I've played almost all versions of lode runner of the years so I tried yours and I gotta say that you've done a fantastic job  Smiley
Apart from the monk guys, nothing jumped out at me bugwise but i'll test again this weekend.

Thanks! Glad you didn't find anything major. The monks is on my to-do list. I think that is the key thing to making the games match.

Read this thread (only skimmed your blog), but this is ground up but using old assets?

Yep, ground up. All the resources - except my new mods and the music - are loaded directly from the original 1995 resource files.

It looks like your on the last legs so good luck!

Thanks Xandlex. Not too much to go, monks and networking are the main things. Let me know how you get on over the weekend. Thanks for testing!

[xandlex]

Hey sorry for the delay, got caught up in easter holiday mode!!!

Few things stood out to me -

1) monks are obviously still being worked on you did say that though
2) I was trying out old levels I had from years ago, they load which is awesome but can you add double click to load?
3) the music is cool, I don't think I remember hearing it back in the day
4) the player disappeared a few times when going down a ladder and appeared again elsewhere but very hard to get it to do so again

Even with the monks going spaz a lot, your game is very fun to play and brings back the good memories!!
just for a comparison, I downloaded the original and tested both. your editor copy is much easier to use, you've clearly been putting a lot of detail in to it.

I look forward to the next demo which will be soon I hope!

[siskavard]

Lode Runner was my first game design experience.

I will follow this

[quarkrobot]

Lode Runner was my first game design experience.
I will follow this

Nice 

1) monks are obviously still being worked on you did say that though

Yes, they are a little rough at the moment.

2) I was trying out old levels I had from years ago, they load which is awesome but can you add double click to load?

Done. I did that months ago but for some reason I commented it out.

3) the music is cool, I don't think I remember hearing it back in the day

If you didn't play with the original CD you wouldn't have had it. Only The Legend Returns had the MIDI score.

4) the player disappeared a few times when going down a ladder and appeared again elsewhere but very hard to get it to do so again

That seems to be an issue quite a few people have. I'm looking into it.

Even with the monks going spaz a lot, your game is very fun to play and brings back the good memories!!
just for a comparison, I downloaded the original and tested both. your editor copy is much easier to use, you've clearly been putting a lot of detail in to it.

I look forward to the next demo which will be soon I hope!

Thanks! One of my main goals is to improve and update the old Windows 95 style of doing things while still keeping the same feel to the game. Glad you like it.

Hopefully I'll have a Mac OSX demo within the next few weeks as well as a Windows copy.

[quarkrobot]

We've had a busy last few weeks:

• ditched MonoGame for FNA- MonoGame really doesn't seem that finished
• fixed several bugs
• improved the goo and pick-axe
• added the old checkerboard highscores transition effect
• added the YOG cheating - you can now control monks
• tried to get an OSX version working - Bass seems to be the issue so I think we'll just remove the audio so we can continue testing

Some screenies from the blog of some recent deviations from the original and WIP:

LEFT: original, RIGHT: goo now falls down ladders


LEFT: original, RIGHT: runners turn to face the hole rather than jerking backwards first


Schematic tooltips now show available exits


Testing gassing monks


Bounding boxes added to debug mode

Just curious, what do you all do with fullscreen and smaller screen resolutions?
I'm currently just going 640x480 fullscreen but is this what I should be doing or use the native resolution and just scale to size?

[quarkrobot]

[JobLeonard]

I bet all those little changes to the animation will (ironically) make people go "it's as gorgeous as I remember"

Anyway, yes, a windowed mode would be nice. Especially if it had 2x and 3x nearest neighbour upscaling options.

[quarkrobot]

I bet all those little changes to the animation will (ironically) make people go "it's as gorgeous as I remember"

Anyway, yes, a windowed mode would be nice. Especially if it had 2x and 3x nearest neighbour upscaling options.

Yeah, unless you were an absolute die-hard fan, I'm sure that people will think those mods were in the original 

I'll look into scaling. Not sure how it would go though, my first test looked kind of rubbish. I'll try again later though.

[quarkrobot]

Anyone one to try out the latest demo? Head over to my blog and give either the Windows and Mac OS X copies a go.

Would anybody like to volunteer testing a Linux x86 copy?

[Lavi]

Hello everybody ! First time posting here.

At first, thanks quarkrobot for the amazing work ! Unfortunately with this demo I have a pop-up error saying :

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByjrSSn5dm_ib09MN2R0M2toOWM/view?usp=sharing

My PC run on Windows 7 without service pack.

Here the content of err.txt :

Code:

Le contenu ne peut pas être converti en type Decimal. Ligne 4, position 20.
   à System.Xml.XmlReader.ReadContentAsDecimal()
   à MMR.Profile.LoadConfig()
   à MMR.LR.LoadContent()
   à Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Initialize()
   à MMR.LR.Initialize()
   à Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.DoInitialize()
   à Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Run()
   à MMR.Program.Main(String[] args)

Then, I have a laptop available with Ubuntu 14.10 64-bits installed for Linux testing if you're interested.

At last, I have an idea: displaying the name of the current level somewhere outside the level box

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByjrSSn5dm_ic0pqd3htWDZCS3c/view?usp=sharing

[dweedes]

this is wicked! awesome game, thanks for doing this keep it up !!

[quarkrobot]

Hello everybody ! First time posting here.

At first, thanks quarkrobot for the amazing work ! Unfortunately with this demo I have a pop-up error saying :

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByjrSSn5dm_ib09MN2R0M2toOWM/view?usp=sharing

My PC run on Windows 7 without service pack.

Here the content of err.txt :

Code:

Le contenu ne peut pas être converti en type Decimal. Ligne 4, position 20.
   à System.Xml.XmlReader.ReadContentAsDecimal()
   à MMR.Profile.LoadConfig()
   à MMR.LR.LoadContent()
   à Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Initialize()
   à MMR.LR.Initialize()
   à Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.DoInitialize()
   à Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Run()
   à MMR.Program.Main(String[] args)

Then, I have a laptop available with Ubuntu 14.10 64-bits installed for Linux testing if you're interested.

Welcome to Tig and thanks a lot that your first post is for Lode Runner!
Thanks too for the Linux test offer. I'll make sure the build works first then let you know when you can take her for a spin.

That bug is the game trying to load the configuration file that stores all the game settings you can change (replaces using the Registry like the original). It may be because you are using a French copy of Windows? Would you be able to email me your config file to hello at quarkrobot dot com?

You can find it in C:\Users\YOUR NAME\AppData\Local\LODERUNN for Windows or /Library/Application Support/LODERUNN if you are using the Mac copy.

[quarkrobot]

this is wicked! awesome game, thanks for doing this keep it up !!

Cheers, mate.

[quarkrobot]

I've had another busy few weeks. Apart from outstanding work items on my TODO list, I've been playing my Lode Runner: The Mad Monks' Revenge rewrite. Ignoring the monk AI that still needs plenty of work, the game is very playable and fun.

• Ubuntu x64 testing
• numerous bug fixes
• identified issue with 14 of the original sounds that required me to resample and repackage them (see below for more)
• several AI tweaks for the monks
• all the tools now behave like the original
• a whack of new stuff added to match the original gameplay

A special thanks to Lavi for helping me this last week with Linux and Windows testing. He found dozens of issues and gave me valuable feedback. Thanks Lavi!

Ubuntu
After days of testing, the game won't run with Ubuntu Linux x64 using VirtualBox or VMWare. Lavi kindly tested it for me on a normal install and it works. Or at least it does to some degree. There are loads of issues which is very odd considering it is the ONE execute for all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) so I'm not sure why two work and one won't.

I will install Ubuntu on an old laptop and see if I can work out why.

If you are feeling brave, head to the downloads page and try the Linux build for yourself. If you are a regular visitor to my blog, all three platforms are week #18 - none of the last two weeks are available to test yet except for the FNA Ogg mods.

Audio
The main thing done since the last demo was to replace my custom Ogg audio file playback with FNAs inbuilt method. This required mods to FNA to allow it to stream from Presage resource files. It works well on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can read all about my sound woes here.

There is also a download link to the original Ogg decoder (100% C#, no libs needed on any platform) and player. This might be useful for others.

The other audio mod I made was added support to use 100% of the original Presage resource file that contains the audio effects for the game. This worked 100% when the Lode Runner: Mad Monks' Rewrite was Windows only and using XNA. As soon as I switched to MonoGame and then FNA, the problem was still there.

I can only guess it is a MonoGame/FNA sound effect issue or Open AL can't play the effects as well as DirectX can. Anyway, I identified the issue and fixed it so 100% of the original Presage files will be used. My resampled one can be ditched.

Tool mod
In the original, if you used a tool on a ladder, it would be used to the right and only if the tile was free. I've made a small mod to this. He will still favour the right since you obviously can't choose a direction on the ladder but if the right is blocked and the left is free, he will use the tool in the left direction.

I haven't explained it too well so here is a nice picture showing what I mean:

[quarkrobot]

It's been another bumper few weeks. Head over to the downloads page and try out the Windows, Mac or Linux builds (or all three  )

• 55 bug fixes, tweaks and improvements
• new options dialog
• the credits added when you finish a game
  
  

I'm going to spend most of my time now fixing outstanding items and reworking the monk AI. It's not very good at the moment. Okay, it is rather shit. I think I'll redo it from scratch.

I've also gotten a request to start LAN games and Lavi came up with the idea of language translations. What languages would you like to see apart from English?

[JobLeonard]

Linux version?! DOWNLOADING AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT ADSL

EDIT: Hmm... I wonder if ALT+ENTER gives me proper fullscreen

[quarkrobot]

Linux is really starting to annoy me. I think I'll set up a dual boot Ubuntu on my old Win7 laptop this week so I can work out why it is so unstable.

It's very odd since the code is identical on all platforms and it works on Mac too.

Thanks for testing though JobLeonard! How else was it apart from full-screen?

[quarkrobot]

@JobLeonard: are you able to test this patch for me? It should fix full-screen on Linux. Not so though since I don't have Linux to test with.

[JobLeonard]

The only other bug I found was saving progress. It seems to be stuck then. I'm downloading the patch now.

EDIT: Hold on, that's a .exe file? Should I remove the extension? Because otherwise Wine just wants to load it.