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[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

UPDATE JANUARY 2014

it has now been six years and six months that i've been working on this game

- website: http://studioeres.com/sd/
- mini-trailer 1:


- mini-trailer 2:


- facebook: http://www.facebook.com/saturateddreamers
- daily devlog: http://rinku.livejournal.com/
- FAQ: http://rinku.livejournal.com/1961204.html

[valkrin]

Very interesting. Its definitely got personality. Reminds me of old school snes rpgs. Looking forward to more. BTW I am totally blown away by your massive design document. That is awesome.

[Fuzz]

So, it's an exploration... shooter? That sounds pretty amazing. I'm loving the artwork, both in this topic and on your blog (Orchard-L's?). Is Walter Eres your brother?

[Inanimate]

Interesting idea, I am keeping my eyes on this.

[William Broom]

This sounds so great! I can't wait to play it. I especially like the nonviolent nature of the gameplay, and the crew portraits.

[Bones]

I think I'm in love.
This is all so beautiful.

Seriously this is something I like a lot. 

[JLJac]

Looks super great!!

But honestly, a framerate of 40/sec isn't so bad, is it? A game i playable at 25-30...

[TeeGee]

Wonderful to hear you're back working on it! Keep it up! 

But honestly, a framerate of 40/sec isn't so bad, is it? A game i playable at 25-30...

But 40FPS on his PC might be 15FPS on a weaker one. 40 doesn't sound like a nice enough buffer.

I dunno, maybe you're doing something wrong, Paul. I still manage to get ArcMagi to cap on ~550FPS when idle and around 100-200 during the heaviest effect fest (on a similar range PC as yours). Maybe some of the procedural effects you use could be emulated with sprites or particles without much of quality loss?   

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Fuzz: There's exploration, but not exactly "shooting" -- although you certainly do shoot things at creatures, you don't do so with the intent to kill them. You have different 'functions', and each of them have different effects: a line that attaches to them to pull them around, a web that slows them down, and other various effects. It's in the design doc. And Walter Eres is my father, he's been a music composer for around 40 years so knows how to do it well by now. He also composed much of the Immortal Defense soundtrack. However, most of the music for this game is by Long Dao, who arranged and composed some of the music of Immortal Defense as well. Most of the game's music has been completed, it has about two hours of music right now, which is about four times more than Immortal Defense did.

TeeGee: Possible -- when the game goes into playtesting I'll send you the code to look around in and see if you can spot anything I'm doing wrong. I also have triggers to selectively disable different parts of the game (trails, different types of particles, and so on) so we can play around with that and see which ones are causing the problem. Also maybe you just have a better computer than me? Could you unframerate trigger AMagi and send it to me so I can see what fps I get, for comparison?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Oh, and JLJac: The game is intended to run at 60fps, and the speed is locked to the frame rate (I know that's not professional but it's what most indie games do and it's very hard to do otherwise in Game Maker), so going to 40fps would slow the game down by about a third, which would make the game play a lot slower. Yes, it'd still be playable, and all the options will be adjustable so people can turn stuff on and off to get it up to a frame rate they like, even the trails can be turned off as is if they're too slow.

[Alex May]

With the trails... maybe this isn't the right place for this, but can game maker draw polygons? or triangles? Those trails in the pic look like they're done with many rectangles or rectangular sprites - there might be an faster way than that but it depends what can be done in GM.

[battlerager]

Whoa, sweet visuals!

Colour me highly interested! 

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

With the trails... maybe this isn't the right place for this, but can game maker draw polygons? or triangles? Those trails in the pic look like they're done with many rectangles or rectangular sprites - there might be an faster way than that but it depends what can be done in GM.

That's a good point -- I could probably modify it to use triangles rather than rectangles (since drawing triangle primitives is fairly fast -- you can even draw triangle strips using GM's draw_primitive functions), but the math for that may be a bit too advanced for me. But it'd definitely be worth pursuing to see if I could get it working, thanks for the recommendation!

[moi]

Awesome, I like your imaginary worlds, keep it up

[TeeGee]

Have you thought about using particles for the trails? It won't look exactly the same (possibly better), but should be much faster.

Sure, I'll send you an uncapped AM build later.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

That might work, though I'm not sure it'd be any faster. I already do use some particles for the trail (those little white dots and those ripple effects). I do get slowdown to around when there are around 600 particles or more though, and on most screens the particles already are approaching that number even without the trails.

[TeeGee]

Ouch. Then again, the game's 640x480. Even with lots of stuff drawing on the screen, the fillrate shouldn't be too high. Have you checked what's the bottle neck - the graphics or the CPU?

[Fuzz]

Fuzz: There's exploration, but not exactly "shooting" -- although you certainly do shoot things at creatures, you don't do so with the intent to kill them. You have different 'functions', and each of them have different effects: a line that attaches to them to pull them around, a web that slows them down, and other various effects. It's in the design doc. And Walter Eres is my father, he's been a music composer for around 40 years so knows how to do it well by now. He also composed much of the Immortal Defense soundtrack. However, most of the music for this game is by Long Dao, who arranged and composed some of the music of Immortal Defense as well. Most of the game's music has been completed, it has about two hours of music right now, which is about four times more than Immortal Defense did.

Well, I understood that there wouldn't be shooting, but it seems like a shooter without shooting from what you've described. Or something. Also, it's really cool that you're getting your father on board with your games.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Ouch. Then again, the game's 640x480. Even with lots of stuff drawing on the screen, the fillrate shouldn't be too high. Have you checked what's the bottle neck - the graphics or the CPU?

Pretty sure it's the fill rate. But I've a fairly mediocre (not bad, just average) videocard (NVIDIA 8500 GT), and a fairly good CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0 ghz, it's even one of the newer 45nm things). On other computers it may have different bottlenecks. But it depends on the specifics of the area, they vary a lot. Sometimes it's just the large number of objects, which is more a CPU problem.

re Fuzz: It's similar to shooters in that you control a ship, and may give that shooter feeling just for that reason; I think that's the biggest similarity. It's a bit risky going for a ship as a main character in a story-based game: will people actually care about characters that they won't actually see except in the form of text box portraits? We'll see.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I tried haowan's suggestion about the triangles. Here's the result:

new triangle method:


old method:


I'm not actually sure which looks better. I think the first method is faster, but I haven't tested it enough yet, so I'm not sure. I think they both look okay/acceptable, but not spectacular. The first method has too much overlap, and the second method has too many breaks/fragmentation. Getting it to fill perfectly is something I'm not sure how to approach. I'll try TeeGee's particle method tomorrow probably.