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[Pishtaco]

Amazing aesthetics, nice feel, though I have a hard time getting the plane to go anywhere but down...

Try just flying straight, without banking to either side, and experimenting with different throttle and elevator settings. The plane should be pretty stable, particularly as I cheated and put in some forces to automatically cancel out small amounts of banking.

I just spent a night trying to come to grips with using Numpy for rotating and translating a couple of hundred flying triangles. It turns out that numpy can't do lots of linear algebra operations in parallel (which is what I was hoping to use it for), and in fact that it is crap at linear algebra in general. It's running slower than the straight python version -- although this would probably change if I were transforming more complicated shapes, or if I knew what I was doing. There is some kind of fortran library accessible through scipy that is better at matrix multiplication; but if I import it, there is a conflict with pyglet's sound library; and to get it to work well I am going to have to fiddle with memory allocation and suchlike, and might as well just learn C.

[ras]

I really like the visuals and the feel you get from them. Keep up the good work.

[muku]

I just tried to try this on a Vista laptop with a crappy integrated Intel graphics chipset, and this is what I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 9, in <module>
  File "C:\flight\buildflight\out1.pyz/pyglet.window.win32", line 423, in __init__
  File "C:\flight\buildflight\out1.pyz/pyglet.window", line 644, in __init__
  File "C:\flight\buildflight\out1.pyz/pyglet.window", line 290, in get_best_config
pyglet.window.NoSuchConfigException

 

[Pishtaco]

Here's a new prototype: http://www.willhostforfood.com/access.php?fileid=59583
I see that the executable size has grown a lot. I'm not sure why; probably it's some new python library it is including. Muku: I hope this one works for you. I think the problem before it that I was tring to force anti-aliasing.

Space fires the guns (which are anemic at the moment) and control goes to gunsight view. You can press m to spawn some flying black triangles. These follow you around, but don't do much else right now.

A screenshot (already posted in the art subforum):

[Fuzz]

It's looking nice, although I would rather play it in fullscreen, especially with the problems that come with windowed mouse control.

[nihilocrat]

I like the new model! I wonder what it will play like once you get enemies / prey / whatever in...

[Pishtaco]

I've found a python particle engine that I would like to use, but it only works with Python 2.6. Whereas the physics engine I'm using only works with Python 2.5 . And the author of pyglet has some kind of philosophical objection to getting things to run at lower resolutions in fullscreen.

[nihilocrat]

Are you referring to Lepton? I'm sure you can install it from source, but on Windows that's probably gonna be harder if it's not a pure Python library. I'm betting the dependencies are really low though, so you might be able to build a lepton DLL and then just "setup.py install" to install it using your 2.5 install.

Interesting, I didn't know that about Alex. Honestly, I haven't tried getting any of my pyglet games in fullscreen because developing in fullscreen is a pain... you have to wait for your computer to switch video modes and all...

[Pishtaco]

Are you referring to Lepton? I'm sure you can install it from source, but on Windows that's probably gonna be harder if it's not a pure Python library. I'm betting the dependencies are really low though, so you might be able to build a lepton DLL and then just "setup.py install" to install it using your 2.5 install.

Interesting, I didn't know that about Alex. Honestly, I haven't tried getting any of my pyglet games in fullscreen because developing in fullscreen is a pain... you have to wait for your computer to switch video modes and all...

Yes, Lepton. I had a go at compiling it, but it seems to want Visual C++ 2003, or something like that. I tried compiling PyOde (the physics engine) for Python 2.6 instead, but it's all looking rather complicated so I've given up for now.

It seems that he thinks that the fullscreen stuff is very clunky, especially for something that's meant to be crossplatform; and that it shouldn't be necessary for games written nowadays. I can see the first part of this, but his workaround (drawing to a texture and then blitting a scaled up version to the screen) seems slow and isn't working well for me at the moment; something weird is happening with the alpha values. Anyway, sorry to be petty; kudos to the guy for writing pyglet and making it available.

[nihilocrat]

Hehe, I didn't mean to call you out for being petty or anything, I guess what I wrote ("I didn't know that about Alex") looks funny, like it was a personal attack or something. I agree that it's bogus that he hasn't got a good solution for fullscreen and doesn't seem worried about it. It might be the case where fullscreen is much more clear-cut in Linux/Mac but gets more complicated in Windows.

It's stuff like this why I keep to bigger engines like Ogre3D or Panda3D for my 3d stuff... it's easier to do everything, though honestly they have their quirks where the developers decided to completely leave out or half-implement something you feel is critical. Downside is, the applications are beefier, slower to boot up, take up more disk space, etc.. In this day and age my game (weighs in at 78 mb of RAM fully loaded, 63 meg on the disk) isn't exactly breaking the scale, but is a complete porker when you compare it to 2d indie games that are 10 meg or less. I don't want to get in a tangent, but my experience with Pyweek suggests there are people out there who are apparently disgusted by compo games of this size.

[Mikademus]

the applications are beefier, slower to boot up, take up more disk space, etc.. In this day and age my game (weighs in at 78 mb of RAM fully loaded, 63 meg on the disk) isn't exactly breaking the scale, but is a complete porker when you compare it to 2d indie games that are 10 meg or less. I don't want to get in a tangent, but my experience with Pyweek suggests there are people out there who are apparently disgusted by compo games of this size.

Oh shit, that's bad news for me, my games are generally in the range 50--100 MB, a project from two years ago was 600 MB

[Fuzz]

The thing is, my computer only has 37 GB of total space. I can't really afford to have games that are too big, especially as I'm already using 8 GB for games.

Maybe I should delete Quite Soulless.

[Pishtaco]

I've been working on AI. Putting in a dumb-but-effective turn-and-burn drone plane is surprisingly straightforward. And the time I spent arranging things in an object oriented, model-view-controller fashion is now really paying off; it took just a couple of lines to add a new plane and transfer the camera and hud to it.

It looks now as though to have something for Sunday, the gameplay is going to end up cut back to just a few dogfights with aliens and maybe a rocket attack, and that I need to do more work on the camera and the controls for these to feel right. I may end up having to go to a mostly first-person view, which is something I wanted to avoid.

[trabitboy]

you know, even basic flight had such a cool feeling, you could have gotten away with it 

[nihilocrat]

They say "cutting is shipping"

The more I noticed I bit off more I can chew with this compo, the more I keep that in mind.

[Pishtaco]

They say "cutting is shipping"

The more I noticed I bit off more I can chew with this compo, the more I keep that in mind.

I'm actually finding myself enjoying the feeling of needing to cut things ruthlessly as the deadline comes up. It's exciting.

New prototype: http://www.willhostforfood.com/access.php?fileid=59972
Now you can spar with your wingman above the Venusian sulphuric acid clouds. Tab to select a target, shift to switch between free and target tracking camera, control key for awesomecam, space to fire. It should now be in ropey full screen. On a whim I put in a doppler shift effect, thinking I was probably wasting time, but it actually comes off rather well.

[nihilocrat]

Dang, it's hard to get that plane in your sights... I never managed to. Look like it's going along pretty well!

[Pishtaco]

Collisions, at least between bullets and planes, are now in, thanks to Pyode. For safety's sake, the bullets are 40 meters long. I have also just about sussed out how to integrate Numpy with pyglet, thanks to the posts here. I'm using this for particle effects, and will have a go at doing other things with it; I have an idea how to cheat to get nice matrix multiplication. But I confess that at the moment I don't have much idea how much speed I am gaining through this.

I spent a lot of yesterday working on effects for when you fly into clouds. Then in the evening I realized that, due to some design decisions I had made, the clouds may as well just be a few textured planes.

I have got the controls into a shape I'm happier with. Now you can hold down the left mouse button to roll; this keeps the elevator mostly centered and gives you more steady control over the ailerons. I've put in some more visual feedback in the hud, and decreased the roll rate to something more in line with 1940s aircraft.

[Pishtaco]

New version: http://www.willhostforfood.com/access.php?fileid=61029

I got sick of the red and orange. Shooting at and damaging enemies is now in, but your plane can't be damaged. Tab to choose targets, shift to switch cameras, left control for internal camera, space to shoot, mouse to control the plane, left button to roll, right button to move the camera.

[Ivan]

Wow, the game looks great, I really love the graphics. It's really really hard to control though. Maybe I'm just terrible at it, but it found it almost impossible to get a shot at anyone.