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[Ivan]

SHIT! I was so out of it that I included the old assets with the new build. That's why it's crashing! Fuck.

I'll put up the correct assets when I get home tonight.

[nihilocrat]

This is a common mistake I make as well. 

[Melly]

Working version pleeeeeease.

[Ivan]

 

After a long battle with linking ogg vorbis in windows, I emerge victorious!!!

Details and download link in the first post.

Here it is just in case anyhow:

http://www.ivansafrin.com/games/Landfall_alpha.zip

[Melly]

Played it for a while and actually beat a game.

Aesthetically it's superb. I love the bot designs, though I feel the landscaps could use twice as many polygons. the flat untextured polygons on high resolution look you got going works very well.

One thing I remember is that in one of the earlier screenshots of the menu it was glowing a good bit. In my PC I only see the flat shapes with no lighting. Is that how it should look?

The gameplay is pretty simplistic yet, but I can see this being expanded. Being able to strafe would go a long way too.

Overall it's pretty impressive. The weird background voices in, what, french? where kinda unusual, and I'm not sure what the networking part of the coding you did actually do, but still fine effort.

[Ivan]

Hey thanks, Melly!

I took out the glowing shader from the menu because it didn't really fit the game's aesthetic and for people with no shader support, it would be impossible to even quit the game, because you wouldn't even see the menu at all, so i took it out.

The landscapes I'm going to optimize and refine in the future too. There is absolutely no culling going on with the main landscape mesh, so it's kind of pushing the amount of polygons that can render ok on an average computer already. But i hope to add some culling techniques so that I can make it more refined.

The networking part is the basis of the engine. The local bot game is actually a networked game with bots connecting as clients to a local server. I just didn't have the time to implement and test actual online gameplay, but that should be in in the next few days.

I will add more interesting gameplay details as I update it, but the bulk of the work was getting a solid networking engine together, which I am pretty proud of.

Anyways, I'll definitely work on this to make it more fun.

[Melly]

Please do.

[Chris Z]

Finally got to play this as well along with a bunch of the other entries I couldn't play that used OpenGL.  Ended up having to install the version of the ATI driver with all the extra crap that somehow included the OpenGL ICD.

Anyway, I really like the way the cockpit moved with the mech walking.  Reminded me a lot of Mechwarrior 2.  This game and Vessel IV really made that aspect of the game really immersive and it added to the atmosphere.

[Ivan]

Here's a short and shtty quality video:

[Farbs]

"This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem."
 

[Captain_404]

"This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem."

I also get this error, have since the beginning, and still do even with the newest version. At this point I'm thinking it's most likely some hardware issue on my end, but I really have no idea how any of that stuff works anyway.

[Alex May]

I found the sounds to be quite abrasive. Also the collision seems to be a bit sketchy - when rubbing against a slope that can't be walked up the mech seems to judder back and forth, and in normal walking seems to jump up and down erratically beyond what one would expect of footfall shaking. I don't mind not being able to strafe as long as I can point my gun some other direction to where I'm facing, or maybe jump/jetpack, otherwise the battle just becomes "walk toward enemy while firing".

But the visuals and style are so awesome, and if you're happy with the netcode you wrote then that's a great thing

[Ivan]

Yeah, that's a good point.

Collision is kind of sketchy because it's networked. So it has to reset player position based on server data and so even when it's local, it's a bit funky right now.

[Alex May]

Really looking forward to seeing where this goes.

[Will Vale]

The latest version works well here - the stuttering is gone and it looks really nice. I like the MG impact squibs a lot - they capture the motion of dirt kicking up without adding too much particle clutter so they sit well within the low-poly style.

I think the cockpit animation/camera shake is still my favourite - maybe you could also drive a little fritz animation on the holomap (or just scale it randomly a few percent) to really sell this?

I may have found a minor bug: I played two games in a row (menu -> start game during the first game) and one team seemed to start with rather fewer than 50 tickets - it might have been the state of play at the end of the previous game.

Look forward to seeing what comes next. Are you going to add different chassis and weapon choices so you get some more tactical variety? (e.g. slow/fast, weak/strong, mg/missiles/beams) At the moment it's a bit of a race to the flag.

Cheers,

Will

[Ivan]

Hey thanks, Will!!

And yes that is definitely a bug. It doesn't seem to unload the other level correctly, so I think it might actually be running the old server when you start the new game. I really gotta fix that 

And yes, the plan is to add two more game modes, a few levels, two other chassis(es?), a couple of different weapons and work on the movement so you can maneuver better.

Farbs: I'm gonna include an MSVC redistributable in the next build, so hopefully that will fix your problem.

[Farbs]

Farbs: I'm gonna include an MSVC redistributable in the next build, so hopefully that will fix your problem.

Awesome, thanks dude.

I snuck in some play time on my work machine earlier in the day, but only against 1 bot with negligible intelligence. I loved the radio chatter, and like everyone says the lowpoly grit is very appealing.

Have you prototyped many other control schemes for the machines? I spent some time doing similar stuff a few years ago, and we found it cool to have A and D turn your walker rather than strafe, and limit the mouse to moving the torso/head in a fixed range on top of that motion. The fixed rate of turn added a whole bunch of positional play, since anyone who snuck up behind you would be able to get a few shots in before you could retaliate. Unlike normal fixed turning systems though this didn't destroy your accuracy, as that was still handled by the mouse.

I also tried using LMB to turn left and RMB to turn right, with mousewheel setting the throttle. I thought it was really cool loading all the movement controls onto one hand, leaving the other hand free for funky weapon/shield/energy management. Sadly the idea did not catch on.

[Ivan]

Yeah, I've been thinking about some different ways of control. I think I'm leaning towards A+D to turn + torso controlled with mouse. I haven't tested it yet though as it will require rewriting both the network packet structure and the bot AI. But as Alex said before, the current control scheme really is too simplistic, so I think I'm gonna do it.

[Melly]

You could always have different bots with different types of control schemes, like basically different versions of cockpit controls for each. A pilot that used one robot and then exchanged for another would feel that controlling the other is very different.

[salade]

hmmm... I keep on getting one of those "THIS PROGRAM ENCOUNTERED AN ERROR! SEND ERROR REPORT?" whenever I try to start a game. maybye it's just me? I don't know right now.

it's a shame, cause this looks superawesome