I don't know if this is the right thread or not, but is movement going to stay like this in the final game?

It just seems a little button mashing intensive. Like, if I run into a wall with a gap underneath, Baldo doesn't go into a crawl automatically, I have to press the down key. Same for hitting up for walls with gaps at Baldo's chest height. I got stuck in the attic on the title screen the first time I played because of the latter instance. I dunno; the controls just feel a little verbose. It feels like I have an almost excessive amount of exact(ing?) control over the players movement, but I never found any situations where all this extra power would come in handy.

Also, there are a few places where movement doesn't "flow" quite right. Like, you can climb up stairs in a small tunnel just by holding up and a directional key, but you have to repeatedly mash down when climbing down them.

Oh, snap. FreeSpace 2 is no longer free?

Alas poor "friends clause", I knew thee well. Oh, well. It's still a steal at $6.

I played FreeSpace 2 and everything else sort of paled in comparison.

Oolite - Elite clone?
Universal Combat - Crazy "do anything" type of game. Reviewers hated it. Insanely complicated; vertical learning curve. I have a friend who loves it; he said the easiest way to get into it was to spend about four hours playing through the walkthrough in the manual.
Allegiance - Combination space fighter RTS. Online.
I remember having fun with a WWII dogfighting game called Fighter Ace eons ago. It's apparently still around as Air Attack.

Starlancer is not free, but it got good reviews at release and can be had for cheap. I saw it for 99 cents last week.

This sounds amazing. Have any additional drool-worthy details or code happened in the last month?

Edit: Oh, it's still in the planning stages and whatnot. Huzzah, etc. I shall observe with considerable interest.

Win! 

(No, actually, I lost. Repeatedly. The same way.)

The automatic selection of "retry" after the first replay made me laugh.

I too learned to program in QBasic. I made a two-button, four player Tron game. I have a vague idea that I started working on something using sprites, but it was a while back. Scrolling levels seemed really confusing at the time, and anything using 3D was essentially magic.

Did anyone else learn the language using the RadioHands tutorials?

Made a video of the game I'm working on (the same from the screenshots I posted a few days ago).

The gun(?) was pretty meh, but the diving attack looked like a lot of fun.

Also on the matter of My Documents, does anyone else really hate how Windows is set up to all be running in the same partition/hard-disk? It always makes me really nervous when it's updating, because if something goes wrong the registry is screwed over. Ultimately it would be better to have the core system components on one partition, and everything else (like the registry) in another partition, so you could reinstall and just re-insert the core OS back into your personalized files and settings.

I hate the Windows registry. Fortunately, far fewer programs use it than you would think. With the Windows 7 betas and RC, I've become a huge fan of portable apps. You just copy them over and they magically work! For non-portable applications, a few games need version numbers or paths inserted into the registry (for the patches), but it's not a huge deal.

On the other hand, I use mostly freeware and free (as in freedom) software. Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop probably aren't as forgiving.

I know you can do this to an extent in Linux, with the /home and /bin directories...

Sort of. It's harder to do with program files because they tend to get put all over the place. /bin is usually either a link to /usr/bin, or a collection of random console commands; it just holds binary files; none of the data or libraries (think dlls). /home is definitely worth putting on another partition, just because it has all your documents and non-system-wide settings. That's not a big deal, though; most software can generally be installed from the repositories with little fuss if you've got to rebuild a system fast. Most commercial software *is* self-contained, however. It tends to live in /opt.

I think the problem is that 2D rendering techniques are more primitive than 3d techniques. I don't think efficient 2D rendering has been as well researched as 3d rendering as the mainstream usage outside of video games for 2d rendering the way games are do it is quite small. There isn't much usage for layers of bitmaps outside of games, and if there are uses, they aren't nearly as time dependent as games are.

I think if there was some research in the area we'd figure some better techniques out.

Just a thought.

Keep in mind that when 2D rendering came along, we didn't have much RAM at all. Given the limited resources of older machines, everything had to be optimized for 2D and 3D. The limitation for 2D was RAM, the limitation for 3D was clockspeed. I bet you'd find some crazy optimized stuff on old C64 and NES games.

(Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm reasonably sure a significant portion of 3D optimizations have come from game-related development.)

There's actually quite a few time-sensitive non-game applications for layers of bitmaps. Right now I'm working on a word processor, batching up vector drawing into stacks of bitmap buffers to eliminate flickering when the user starts typing stuff in the middle of a complex document.

I love the back cover on that.

[Monty Fall Problem]

This thread wouldn't have been inspired by Coding Horror, perchance, would it?

If not, there are also two variants he mentioned which I feel are a tad more interesting than the original problem.

    Monty Fall Problem: In this variant, once you have selected one of the three doors, the host slips on a banana peel and accidentally pushes open another door, which just happens not to contain the car. Now what are the probabilities that you will win, either by sticking with your original door, or switching doors?

    Monty Crawl Problem: Once you have selected one of the three doors, the host then reveals one non-selected door which does not contain the car. However, the host is very tired, and crawls from his position (near Door #1) to the door he is to open. In particular, if he has a choice of doors to open, then he opens the smallest number available door. (For example, if you selected Door #1 and the car was indeed behind Door #1, then the host would always open Door #2, never Door #3.) Now what are the probabilities that you will win the car if you stick versus if you switch?

"Job system" to me invokes memories of Ultima Online or the Elder Scroll series. Though Final Fantasy's system might fit the term "Job" better. FF's has explicitly defined Job classes, while the two games I mentioned you sort of roll your own class by using the abilities you like.

Either way, the previously mentioned iji is the only thing that really springs to mind. Perhaps a roguelike? NetHack and Crawl have classes, and Dwarf Fortress has "jobs".

So, when is this new competition starting?

Has anyone used those GameCube controller to USB adapters? I have heard good things about Super Joy Box 13, but for the prices I've found, it seems like it might just be cheaper to buy a PC gamepad.

current texture progress

This is awesome. Looks like a next-gen Mega Man Legends or something.

The texture isn't high-res enough to be next-gen, but that's actually the same thing I thought, too. I love that artstyle.

I saw one of these super cool Bionic Commando trailers... Woah
But I don't have/want a Xbox360 or PS3 and I doubt that there will be a PC or Wii version of it

pretty sure there is a pc version coming out/already out

I'm pretty sure my powerhouse of an integrated graphics card can't run it. I like grappling hook games. :-(

Joe, your game looks a little like a cave story clone. Not as much as the underside, but a little bit. You being Super Joe, will the game have a grappling hook?

What's with the descriptions? If that's a launching screen, I'll probably already know what each game is about and the descriptions take up too much space. If it's a "download and install" screen, the descriptions are cut off and not as helpful as they might be.

I saw a review of that Saitek on... NewEgg? It was either that or Amazon. They said it didn't have a start button, and the d-pad disk actually fell off after a few days.

I'd got with the Logitech, just because the company has been making input devices for so long.

It's been a while since I used Game Maker, but I'm pretty sure that you can set the z-depth manually.

You might try doing something like depth = self.y; every time a block is moved. I don't remember if lower depths are in front or higher depths, you may need to experiment on that.

How much is it going to cost? Or is that still to be determined? Or is it going to be freeware on PC and payware on consoles, like Metanet's N? I mean, it looks like it's being made by a professional team, but there's also a donate link, which confuses me.