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everyone loves active 2

Download

active2b.zip - v1.0 (http://www.kylepulver.com/download.php?file=active2)

High Scores

available here (http://www.kylepulver.com/active2.php)

(http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/3323/proc10by7.jpg)

(http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/4488/proc8yx7.jpg)

LiveReceiver Errors
Try installing this: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32bc1bee-a3f9-4c13-9c99-220b62a191ee&displaylang=en

Or this: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=200b2fd9-ae1a-4a14-984d-389c36f85647&DisplayLang=en

 :-*


RomeoPie Software FTW!

I see sex

Very cool look!  How much of that is procedural?  That background is slick even if it's done by hand, but it's super slick if that's actually being generated by code.  ;D ;D

the background is being painted IN REAL TIME, my friend. ;p

I love you. Now give us more info! ;D

looks sweet!  love the color scheam,. what is the game play ?

Excellent use of puce.

More games should have it.

This looks utterly delicious.

Reminds me of Mojib-Ribbon.

The general jist of it is a 360 degree shooter.  Crosshair, mouse, movement with wasd, shooting things, but I may have thought of an interesting mechanic to make it a little bit more interesting than that.

Its basically just going to be about blowing stuff up and shooting to paint on the backdrop. ;D

Like Mono?

Mono was awesome.

(http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/7325/proc2ya5.jpg)

some work has been done.

Pretty!

Please continue.

(http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/1122/proc3dz2.jpg)

Hm.. I'm trying to make this look somewhat artsy and cool.  I think I have a neato idea for some enemies and how to attack them with your bullets, but we'll have to wait and see if that works out.

This looks really good. Reminds me of Spheres of Chaos.

That game drove me to madness...

I feel vibes of Everyday Shooter.

Those are awesome vibes.

Me too, but I don't know about the awesomeness. I haven't tried Evereyday Shooter yet :(
Looks great though!

I've not either, but those screenshots are enough to give me awesome vibes. :P

Even if the one at the top of this page does begin to look like a London Underground map.

Whoa whoa now, everyday shooter?  You guys are my own personal PR department here. ;p

I should have something playable around monday.  I'm graduating college this weekend sooooo kinda busy :B

I'm telling you chaps, Mojib-Ribbon.

This is a compliment.

But we are an AWESOME PR department.

By the way, needs more Cave Story.

Is that some kind of mutant two-tongued smiley right there?

No, its like nerdy buck teeth.  :D

Hey, that's great! Congratulations, man ;D

Ah, thank you!

Well, the dark deed is done.  I am done with college! (for now?)  So now, lets work more on this game.  So heres a quick status report.  I'm trying to make the game generate the enemies and background based on what you enter into the title screen.  But.. the issue is that I dont want all random numbers to be generated based on that seed... so I'm tinkering around in the ole multimedia fusion to get this working the way I want.

Some form of playable demo will appear when I feel like it will be good enough for the public eye ;D

This is a lot better looking than Spheres of Chaos. That was your one stop trip to damaging your eyes! ???


Xerus, this looks fantastic! It'll be great to see the background painting in motion  :)

just how, exactly?

My sex detection abilities have been honed for many years. It's not something that can simply be told. It must be experienced.

Congrats!

Does the procedural generation continue throughout the game, or just at the beginning? If it's just at the beginning, then you can probably get away with reseeding the random generator with the current time after generating what you want. If not, maybe you can use the built-in seeded random number generator for the procedural parts and MT Random Object (Mersenne Twister, I think it's in one of the bonus packs) for the non-seed-based random numbers.

Ah, this object seems interesting...

I actually started to pursue this a little, I'm using the random pool object now, but I think thats lagging the crap out of it.  Maybe I'll switch to this MT random thing instead.  I want the paint and the enemy patterns to be the same for each string, depending on how to player plays (I'll have to cap the amount of enemies on screen obviously, as things can get pretty intense.)

sex

(http://img329.imageshack.us/img329/6883/proc4ad3.jpg)

Heres some progress, and a quick demo: here (http://people.clarkson.edu/~pulverkl/active2.exe)

The demo is awesome  :o a bit laggy, but awesome nonetheless (maybe it's laggy cos my computer is ooooooooooooooooooold  :D)

I'm loving the engrish too

I entered different names at the start, even some random leters, and I've seen my colour and the background change, but have not seen any change in the enemy patterns

sugary sweet!  it is a difficult game.  perhaps a bit too tough to see the shots at times,. they could have a more distictive look, flashing perhaps,.
also, fullscreen would be very nice,.  ;) it is small to see here. 
oh, and how about having it rememeber what you typed last time so you dont need to type every time you die., . great sounds too!  roc.

Enemy patterns should be the same for each string you can type in, I guess I'll have to look into that.  Keep in mind there are only two enemies for this little demo.

Making the player more visible is something that I found to be troublesome... I was thinking about giving it a glow of some sort, but I'm not sure if that will begin to lag poor old multimedia fusion more than necessary.

I'll make it remember the previous string inputted, and I'll add fullscreen.

Any other feedback is appreciated ;p

edit: I changed the current build (check the demo link at the beginning of the thread)
The string should now save
Fullscreen
I increased bullet speed by a lot, let me know what you think of it
Tried to make the player more visible
Fixed bug with string of block enemies always appearing on the upper right when the game started.

update: (check first post for link to download)

changed the black and white strobing explosions to black and white flashes followed by yellow.

nobody should be having siezures, now.

That's awesomesauce used the right way.

Foward this to Clickteam. ;D

Is this supposed to lag? ;D

i love this game, btw.  the colors are beautiful


i wish i didn't suck at shmups as bad as i do. ;-;

i do even worse at this then i did at diamond rider 2.

In a perfect world.... no.  It should run at 50 - 60 fps.

Well it doesn't anyway. That's what I get for having a crappy computer, I guess.

Have you tried running it with the HWA beta?

All the background effects are so sexy :-*... How do you do that anyway?

nice thnaks for the fullscreen,. and name memory!  I still have a bit of difficulty seeing the bad shots !  a couple suggestions that could help would be to mute the contrast of the backbround,. i.e. tune the colours so they are closer or just desaturate them all,. otherwise you could try adding a flashing border (or center) to the shots,. i like to do a red/yellow/blue change on each frame,. . but it is fun,. not sure about he combos when the little guys just walk right into them ??

HMM; two considerations if I might

1: the ship's movement could do with being a bit zippier
2: some reaction from enemy ships when you hit them might be nice (slowing them down say, or making them wobble)

At first I was turning off "save background" for certain objects, but that was glitching and making random holes over objects that did have "save background" checked.  So I went with the "Overlay Redux" object and I just paste the painter objects into it on every loop.

Unfortunately, HWA does not support full screen or the overlay redux at all, so no dice on HWA.


Interesting.. I like the wobble idea.  I'll see what I can do for the player's speed.


I'm working on the enemy fire.  Right now I've made the entire bullet flash, but we'll see!

Thanks for the feedback so far ;D

A slight update!

* The player will be able to recover from a death if their explosion causes a chain reaction of 20 kills
* Cool effect on health bars of enemies or something.
* No new demo for awhile.

Basically what I have in front of me is adding just a bunch of enemies, working out some patterns, and perhaps adding an online score table of some sort.

Right now I'm trying to decide if there needs to be a way for the player to defend themselves better than just dodging bullets... any ideers?

Pick any from:
Shield
Mirror shield
Absorbing your colour bullets
Your bullets cancel enemy bullets

Also, when an enemy dies, it breaks into pieces, and the bigger enemies break into bigger pieces, I thought that maybe you can make it so that if you shoot this pieces it breaks into further pieces, because otherwise they travel very little distance (IMO)

I think I'm going to go for shooting enemy bullets... that seems to work out nicely.

Very nice. Looks really good! The only thing I don't like is the unpredictability of the bullets; it gets very hard to dodge them when you have only a hint about where they're going. Maybe the update will solve that, though. Good work! ;D

Heres whats cookin TONIGHT:

* enemies dont hurt you until they've been on screen for a little while (this is variable between foes.  the hearts that come out of nowhere really fast dont hurt you for a full second, then they fade in and they can kill you.)
* online high scores! :D
* you can destroy enemy bullets now

coming along nicely now ;D

It looks lovely, but it runs at a crawl on my laptop :(

Yeah, MMF is fun like that.

I'm not really familiar with MMF, but isn't there anything you can do about it? Say, implementing frame skipping?

That must be annoying :(

Theres a check box that will drop frames, but it may be worse that way because bullets will then skip around and such...  I can release two versions.

I thought this looked kinda cool.

(http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/4682/proc6rr2.jpg)

and this

(http://img234.imageshack.us/img234/9148/proc7xx1.jpg)

Another Grid Wars?
I say: why not!?

Im a fan of Xerus (Bonesaw - what a licking! and your concept art definetely worth a see). Reason im looking forward to your new project.

Conceptual thing about Active2 makes it quite a hardcore through; which is great. Also i really enjoy the oldskool kind of style - i would absolutely add some freaky funky music into it! As well as some heavy power-ups, just for the feeling of playing something big. Geometric patterns of Love are just fine (hearts beat my beat and squares do the rest). Maybe i would put more love out there (more motion, more patterns, blur?) Otherwise no complains so far.

Active2 looks like one of the sunniest / summeriest cocktail game in whole competition. And i do like cocktails.

I really should start making the music.

Hmm... power ups... yesss... *gets working on that*


I actually put out a few requests for music.  First one to write some (or the best) wins! ;D

Okay heres a new build: here (http://people.clarkson.edu/~pulverkl/active2.rar)

The high scores table doesnt work for some reason, so dont get your hopes up until the next build ;p

edit Don't hit spacebar, thats a debug key to spawn an enemy for now :B

post edit edit holy shit high scores work now.  current build is "build 8"

Goodies! I won't rush then

Is it just me that cannot run your new build?
"Cannot load LiveReceiver.mfx. This object might need an external program or library not yet installed." - it says.

Why does MMF do stuff like this? Why? :'(

Hmm... well, you have to be in Windows if you're trying to run it in a Mac with one of those fancy crossover programs.  If not, you might need to update DirectX or something? (the last time I had this problem, this is what fixed it.)

I'll have to pass this along to the extension developer and get back to you.  Sorry!

As it goes - the last score I submitted didn't keep the seed it was generated with, which was... some random string of symbols which I've forgotten. But it was a random string of symbols!

EDIT: Also, I just got a "Multimedia Fusion has stopped working..." crash. At the time I was submitting a score with the same seed as an existing HST entry, but of course I have little idea whether that was what was responsible. 'Net connection was up and everything at the time, just that, WinRAR and Opera running.

Because our Beloved Billy?

No sorry, no big deal! DirectX updated and still no change. Guess i should wait for another build. And in the meantime, im gonna prepare for my university exams.. or not.. cactus released two new games, ive heard...

Regarding the symbols:  the php script as it stands right now dumps any characters that aren't 0-9 and A-Z.  Symbols and other mark up wont show up.

There shouldn't  be a problem with any duplicate entries into the score database, each entry has its own unique ID.  It may have just been my webhost crapping out temporarily, and then when the game didn't get any response it probably just froze up waiting for it.  This is the first time I've tried any online high scores, so I guess there's going to be some bumps along the way.


That's very odd... what are your system specs?  And anyone else having this problem, system specs! :D

Standard windows XP - SP2
Pentium 4 CPU 3GHz
3.5GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT - updated drivers, updated DirectX (today)

I think the bug wont be here, your 1st release worked pretty fine anyway; there is something wrong with my system library. And what the heck is LiveReceiver.mfx?? Absolutely no idea.

LiveReceiver is an object in Multimedia Fusion that connects to a php script, and I use it to create the high scores table.  Your system seems normal, so I'm not sure why it wouldn't work for you.

Are there any others having problems?

Its been determined that you need this: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32bc1bee-a3f9-4c13-9c99-220b62a191ee&displaylang=en
installed for livereceiver to work correctly.  ... don't ask me.

Anyway, heres a new build for you suckas with some enhancements requested by Annabelle (although I dont think I really accomplished what she requested, it still looks cool.)

(http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/4488/proc8yx7.jpg)

Download Build 9 (http://people.clarkson.edu/~pulverkl/active2.rar)

Alright, to keep bumping my own thread... ;D

I updated to build 10.  I'm trying to improve visibility without messing with the style of the game.  I added a glow and a flash to the main crosshair, a glow to the curving crosshair, and also increased the visibility of the lines that center on your active 2.

As for enemy fire, I changed the sprite slightly to look a little spikey but it was a little hard to modify a 8x8 sprite.

Another addition is a smaller hitbox for the player.  Now you have to take a hit to your center 4 (or so) pixels to die.

In the art side, the background now blurs and shakes with the camera, and smoke from killing enemies also ends up in the background as well.

Alright, give me some feedback tiggers :I

same download link, same bat channel (http://people.clarkson.edu/~pulverkl/active2.rar).

i really like it, i can survive slightly longer now!

which is saying a lot.



i still have got to believe in my heart that the 'tunnel blur scroll' effect has gotta be doable somehow.

I like your latest visibility updates. Definitely makes it easier to tell what's going on. I was able to survive up to seeing a few of the propeller-shaped enemies, while in the early builds, my lifespan was significantly shorter.

quick question for those who have played:  you do know that you can move with WASD, right?

The first box on the title screen has "W A S D" on it, but some people I send the game to will say "Wow this game is hard I wish I could move" ... is it really that hard to understand?

Man, this game looks awesome.

I find it's really fun so far, though it requires a lot of focus.

Are you sure enemy bullets are always at the highest depth (always drawn on top of everything else)?

Also, is it me or do the enemy's explosions actually kill me?

Really fun, good job.

It's awesome! One problem: on most levels, there comes a point when I'm facing one of those shielded enemies, and there are no other enemies nearby I can blow up to defeat them, and I die helplessly.

You can curve your bullets' trajectory by right clicking while shooting and aiming somewhere else.

Funfun game. Gets a bit chaotic at times and I usually die in the midst of a bunch of 'splosions, not because I can't see the bullets, but because I myself get lost.

Yeah, I just worked it out :-[

Though sometimes, even then, my bullets won't kill the bastards.

I haven't got lost yet, but I've lost my crosshair a few times.

The thing that makes hitting those shielded bastards so hard is that your bullets disappear upon reaching the target reticule when on a curved trajectory. So even when my bullets would be getting a direct hit from behind the thing, since the reticule isn't exactly on top of the enemy, the bullets disappear just before hitting. It's kind of annoying.

Indeed, I'm trying to figure out the math to stop that from happening so that they'll fly off according to their angle at the last bit of their curve...


I can double check the depth thing, but bullets should be above all...

Enemy explosions do not (read: should not) hurt you.


It does require that dual focus skill that took me awhile to develop playing Noitu Love 2, but this game is probably a lot harder because of all the shit going on.

--

I'm going to add some more big enemies with shields, and then just work on making it crazy as hell the further you get, and probably release whatever I have on the deadline.  Weeeeee! ;D

I am seriously having trouble dying, even when the game turns into a four heart multi-propeller bullet hell. It's just too easy. I wound up just letting myself get shot because I had been playing for like 20 minutes without dying. I actually almost had a hard time GETTING myself killed, let alone dying unintentionally. Being able to shoot down bullets is a big factor in this I think. I might go back and see if by the time you get to where the high score is it gets any tougher.

Make it harderrrrrrrrrrrr. Or at least throw in a difficulty adjustment or something.

Regardless though it's sutpid pretty. I almost creamed myself from all the color.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that even when I DID manage to get myself killed, the dumb game would bring me right back because I died in the midst of like a million enemies. And I couldn't just quit out without saving my score! :/

Oh ho!  Be careful what you wish for.

I'm making more enemies that can be as nasty as you desire...

But your main concern here seems to be a quit button, yes?  I can rewire esc to be quit back to the title screen + save your score.

To take care of the infinite respawn, I'm increasing the combo needed to recover each time you die.  First its 20, then 40, then 60, etc.  You'll see why when I release the next version (whenever that is.)  I put a lot more enemies in that are easy chain bait.

Like this:
(http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/1307/proc9sh2.jpg)

As far as easiness goes, I think the game became a lot easier with power ups as well as the shooting of enemy fire.

Yes those all sound like good ideas.

Seed: "WRECKMYFACEDAMNIT" was a bit tougher, it spammed more propellers.

Uh, yeah... I don't have Lazer's problem.

Noted ;D

It should be taken into account that I'm really bad at Everyday Shooter and Geometry Wars to less of an extent. Level 5 and 420k points are my high points on both respectively.

Although yes I could just be freakishly good at the game.

Heres a new buildo http://people.clarkson.edu/~pulverkl/active2.rar

This is getting pretty close to done at this point.  There should be plenty of enemies to kill you in many different assorted patterns.  Enjoy.

(http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/3323/proc10by7.jpg)

Theres some stuff coming for the final build to be released before the deadline.  Music, some visualization for the music, higher intensity of enemies if you live long enough, and some more drawing effects on the background.  And thats pretty much a wrap! :D  Or... a RAP?  ICE ICE BABY.

yay version 1.0 is up.  :O  check the first post.

Man, I love the whole feel of this game. So colorful, and the music and the enemies are awesome. Gotta love what those hearts say.  :D

Wow! So pretty! I'm still confused completely, but it's fun. And colourful. I think I don't understand the curve mechanic. For Excellent.

The Hearts disturb me.

Hold both mouse buttons to curve the shot.  Enemies show up with shields and such that you have to curve your shot around (although, most of the time you're lucky enough to catch them in an explosion and they die before you have to fight them.)

I love this latest build. The music and extra enemies really bring it together. ;D

Dude, The music is sweet!

I almost cried a little bit.

Excellent... ;D

Playing this game long enough will draw you into a Zen state - whereupon the secrets of the universe will be revealed to you...

Bravo, such an excellent entry. I just keep marveling over how brilliant it looks and plays. Many explosions/enemies affects the performance in high-graphics mode a lot, though, but the lower style looks very pretty too.

Phew! Thought that was just me! Downright bizarre atmosphere, this has.

End-game paintings are great, too!

Awesome sauce. I tried to submit my score and your dijipen coding skills made it crash!!!

ffffffuck.  Why is that happening.

Its actually not my digipen coding, because I'm using an extension developed by someone else to submit scores.  I will pursue this problem.

Yea you better get on that. My score was probably shit at around 16000 but still I want to be immortalized on your dijipen enabled high score board.

Download link doesn't work?

Here's a mirror if anyone's having trouble with the original link:

http://www.bit-blot.com/active2/active2b.zip

God, the music... I've had it looping in the background for a very long time now after I finished playing.
The game was also fun to play. I don't know if Lazer still is a god or if you actually made this game harder, but I had problems staying alive. As it should be :)

Now if only I can bring myself to turn the music off, I can go on to test other games aswell.

Hm, works fine for me.

Mine works for me as well but Annabelle couldn't get it.

Mirrors would be good to prevent such issues.

Amazing game! Very balanced and fun. I love the hearts - they remind me of Portal. The colors are also really good.

Only one request, though - could you make it so that the cursor gets locked in the window when playing in windowed mode? Many times now I've lost high scores because I accidentally clicked outside of the window while playing.

Hm, I think I can do that... I'll get back to you on that ;D

Aww... I really want to play this game, but I can't...


Was there ever a solution to the "LiveReceiver.mfx" bug?

Theres two download links on the first post to some windows library that livereceiver uses apparently.  You can try installing those.

Kweh, it works perfectly now!  Thanks!

Quite the awesome game, as expected.

QFT.

Holy shit.  Was this your.. 1000th post?

Another game that I can't play because of WASD.

It's not that hard to set up different keyboard layouts and have hotkeys for them so that you can change to whatever you need quickly. Atleast in windows it isn't. I know because I have shortcuts for american and finnish layouts and I use both all the time. Don't ask me why, I just do.

Sure, the developer should include an alternative to WASD but it still doesn't completely stop you from playing games that use WASD.

...Actually, as this is made in MMF, you can press Ctrl+Y to change the controls.

Hot damn, it totally was. :)

Ah much better thanks.

Hey Dijipen, you fix that problem with your high scores yet?

no :(

Played the game, and I generally liked it.  The background is pretty cool, and I'd say the main problem I notice in-game is that it can get a little busy. It can be distracting, hard to focus on what's really going on, what with the explosions and crazy dancing colors.

 :gentleman:

Yes, but I always liked how that added to the difficulty.  With thousands of explosions going off, yes, you're getting thousands of points, but at the cost of visibility, thus increasing the risk of you getting hit by a stray bullet.  Usually if you keep firing though, you'll get lucky and take down enemy fire before it gets to you.

The high scores table can now display all scores if you so choose, so you newbs that cant get on the top 50 can still feel accomplished.

Its a style called "Obfuscation" and J. Blow loves it.

If you can't handle it, you can try to handle his massive biceps instead.

Great music, fits the game perfectly.  I love the sketchy style of art.  Overall a fine entry!
Cheers,
--Zack

Thanks!  Alec did a fine job indeed.