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[dustin]

yeah it shouldn't be running that bad.  My computer is only a little faster then your's and it only uses like 30% of the processor and you have more memory then I do.  I just tested it on the school's xp computers and I got the same performance your getting pretty much.  I'm not sure why but it seems to run really slowly on window's boxes.  At first I thought it was just that our computers lack video cards so maybe it was doing all the rendering in software which would cause some serious slowdown.

As for why it's too easy that is probably because all my rendering at the moment is done assuming 60 fps.  I'm changing this at the  moment so you're playing the game at like half speed.  Also since if it's the same in yours as it is on the school one's here it drops down to 24 fps when you enter rage mode (I guess maybe it's the extra particle's) so it seems like it's lasting longer.

Anyway I'll add in some easy performance fixes and also add in an option not to display particles which is like the only thing that takes up any power anyway.  Hopefully it's just something stupid I've over looked  .

If anyone has this working at a steady 60 fps (on my computer it's always 59,60, or 61) Please let me know.

[C418]

How's the difficulty?
Not easy for me. I die pretty fast :D

Do you think the rage timer/cooldown period should be longer/shorter what?
Hm, maybe a little longer rage time?

Does it run at 60 fps on your computer?
Yes. Mostly 62. Core 2 Duo 2,66 gigs... and a geforce 7900... I think.
Does it run on your OS?
Win XP. Everything is fine.

Can't wait for the full version!

[Farmergnome]

cool demo man, runs pretty good until about 7 bees (bees godamn it) are onscreen, then drops from 61 to like, 24.  I got a 2ghz core duo, 2 gig o ram, 1700 radeon mobility i think it is.  Difficulty was sort of good until my comp lagged up, and im running xp and it started and everything fine, lookin good so far, just a minor performance thing for me

[dustin]

looks good ands working well on my macbook unpro. difficulty is good too, at first i sucked, now im getting better.

my only critique is that the bees do not look like bees

Sweet I'm glad it works.  I know what you mean about the bee's.  My heavily stroked style didn't work well with things so small so I'll have to change it.  Need to get some more yellow visible.

Does it run at 60 fps on your computer?
Yes. Mostly 62. Core 2 Duo 2,66 gigs... and a geforce 7900... I think.
Does it run on your OS?
Win XP. Everything is fine.

him that's weird everyone elses xp seems to croak with it.  Perhaps it's a graphics card thing.  I'm doing my rendering with openGL so if your card has a bad openGL driver I can see it doing badly.

then drops from 61 to like, 24.  I got a 2ghz core duo, 2 gig o ram, 1700 radeon mobility i think it is.

Yeah that seems to be the problem.  Seeing as your computer is pretty similiar to the one above except for the graphics card I bet that's it.  Either I'm doing somethign in openGL it doesn't like or the radeon opengl drivers are just bad but that seems unlikely.  But yeah the other guy with a radeon card it also doesn't work so good for



Anyway I improved performance a little bit but probably not enough to make a difference for any of you.  I have some idea's I guess so we'll see how it goes.
Also I added the menu, it's pretty simple as of now I might make the clouds float around a bit but we'll see if I have time...



Hit detection circles are still on so that's why it looks kinda weird.  The buttons hit detection circles don't really even do anything so yeah...

[moi]

What do you use for your display routines?
Java is known for having very bad performances if you use the native drawing functions.
The best option is generally to use OpenGl.

[dustin]

yeah I'm not using java for the drawing.  My drawing routines are bound to C opengl calls through lwjgl

http://lwjgl.org/

[dustin]

I fixed the windows some graphics card's run slow bug! 

It turned out that rendering particle's as points is just ridiculously slow on some graphics cards or something.  It's either a library error or an opengl thing or something.  Anyway I simply replaced that with an image and now it's running super here on the xp computers at school which before could only get like 20 fps.  Playing it for a while it never dropped below 60 I don't think.  So please if you had an error with it before if you could tell me if it now works that'd be great.

here is a screen shot with the new particles in...

[dustin]

Added in the instructions.  It doesn't look very good but oh well... it will get redone if I have time and if not well then at least I have one.

[dustin]

OK I added the bee hive that comes at the end of the level...

[dustin]

I just realized I never actually uploaded the new version... so here it is, the only real difference is that it should work well for all you guys who were getting such low fps now.  The link is...

http://nitsud.rhodes.googlepages.com/SavageBalloon3000.zip

[thief0]

where's the actual .exe file to run the game???

[seregrail7]

It's an executable Java file. It's named savageBalloon3000.

And it works fine for me now, too.

[dustin]

Yeah like seregrail7 says there's a file called savageBalloon3000.jar in there, double click it and it should run.  For the final version I'll probably make a .exe and a mac .app for it so it looks a bit prettier but I can't be bothered to do that everytime...

And it works fine for me now, too.

Excellent!  I was really hoping that was what was causing the slowdown but to tell the truth I still don't know really why it was.  Something about not liking to render points or some nonsense...

[Ciardhubh]

How's the difficulty?
Do you think the rage timer/cooldown period should be longer/shorter what?
Does it run at 60 fps on your computer?
Does it run on your OS?

I just downloaded and played it. It's a neat little time waster

1/2. Seems about right.
3. Had around 85 fps on an AMD 4400+ dual core with a rather weak integrated motherboard graphics chip.
4. Runs fine on my Win XP Pro. I encountered a few possible bugs though. The credits/instructions image doesn't enlarge to full window dimensions. Due to that the top left is obstructed by the FPS counter. Also, clicking on the options menu item seems to crash the game. It just locks up. The only thing still running is the FPS counter. It's a bit hard to describe. Drawing seems to stop and the frame counter constantly overwrites its old image. Clouds, bees and the balloon just stay where they are and nothing happens.

Two small semi-transparent wings for the bees would probably look nice

To solve the confusion of starting a .jar file you could include a one-line ("java -jar YourJar.jar") .bat file for Windows, a shell script for Linux and whatever Macs use. That's easier than making executables.

[dustin]

I just downloaded and played it. It's a neat little time waster Wink

1/2. Seems about right.
3. Had around 85 fps on an AMD 4400+ dual core with a rather weak integrated motherboard graphics chip.
4. Runs fine on my Win XP Pro. I encountered a few possible bugs though. The credits/instructions image doesn't enlarge to full window dimensions. Due to that the top left is obstructed by the FPS counter. Also, clicking on the options menu item seems to crash the game. It just locks up. The only thing still running is the FPS counter. It's a bit hard to describe. Drawing seems to stop and the frame counter constantly overwrites its old image. Clouds, bees and the balloon just stay where they are and nothing happens.

Two small semi-transparent wings for the bees would probably look nice Wink

To solve the confusion of starting a .jar file you could include a one-line ("java -jar YourJar.jar") .bat file for Windows, a shell script for Linux and whatever Macs use. That's easier than making executables.

1/2 ok sweet the final version will be a little different but yeah I'm glad the times seem ok and everything
3. 85+ is pretty strange as it's set to synch with your refresh rate I would have guessed it would be 60 for most everything but I guess it was more
4.  Glad it seems to run on xp ok
I know the fps counter is pretty crazy right now I won't have it in there on the final version most likely or move everything.  The menu isn't really supposed to work at the moment, just playing.  I checked out what you mean and the options menu does do something weird but no worries it'll be fixed soon.

I like the idea for wings for the bee's that would look pretty cool

As for the jar file, right now all you have to do is double click it and it will open (it's a fat jar or whatever)  I thought that was pretty easy, but do you think shell scripts would be more understandable?

Thanks a bunch for the comments.

[dustin]

Just a progress update



game over screen It's not done yet but at least I have one
menu  again not done yet but it's in there
tweening collision detection done
lot's of balancing done but can always use more

things I want are...
cooler looking timer's (I want a bar type thing)
something that happens at the end of the level added
high score things
add in wobbles to the string physics
draw more clouds and make them more varied

In addition to this I added in the saving mechanism which I wasn't sure if it would work and a way to differentiate between levels.  I still need to do the options which will probably be...

fullscreen on/off
fps meter on/off
particles on/off

[dustin]

just stopped the collision boxes from being displayed seeing as I'm done with that code and so I wanted to put up a screen without them

[Crash]

This is pretty screwed up on Vista. It is unplayably fast (fps counter reads around 1000fps ). I'm not running a supercomputer or anything, just a Core 2 Duo 2ghz, Nvidia 7900gs, 2gb ram. Looks nice though

[dustin]

This is pretty screwed up on Vista. It is unplayably fast (fps counter reads around 1000fps Shocked ). I'm not running a supercomputer or anything, just a Core 2 Duo 2ghz, Nvidia 7900gs, 2gb ram. Looks nice though Smiley

10000 fps that's nuts!  I mean I guess it's not that unreasonable for a hardware accelerated 2d game but still I thought adding in all the particles I could would slow it down at least a little.  And people say java is too slow

Anyway I can see how that would be unplayable.  The game should sync with the verticle refresh rate meaning 60 fps at all times pretty much but yeah.  I'll add in code telling it to max of 60 fps even if the vsynch is crazy and I'll also make the code frame independant that way it won't matter if you're getting 1000 fps

Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad it runs on vista!  It's nice to know that all the major os's have been accounted for now (well not really linux but yeah)

[dustin]

ok made the code framerate independant although if you have it running at much less then 60 it looks kinda jerky but no way around that really.

I also re did some of the graphics and added tried to polish it as much as I could

Still a couple more days left to just polish