please test my New Clone - a final year uni project

Lesser known clone projects or isolated news items about rare or unusual clones.
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toby
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Post by toby »

cowsmanaut wrote:Well when you change your mind I have some tips that would greatly improve your mines of moria inspire scene. :)

I'm not nasty about it.. just straight to the point..

moo
I'd like to keep this thread orientated on my clone, but wouldnt mind some suggestions or suggested techniques to use on rendered art. Theres so much to learn. I taught myself during a year off, but its hard work. I wouldn't mind seeing some of your work, I give anyone skilled in digital art full respect from realising how hard it is 8)
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Post by toby »

beowuuf wrote:Just so you don't give up hope, I will try to test it this evening, but I am one of those people who don't yet have .NET on my computer, as there was never any need to install it.

If it messes up my computer in any way, bad karma will will happen to you! : )
Thanks man, I will accept the bad karma if it does mess up your computer. But I think its unlikely. :D
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beowuuf
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Post by beowuuf »

Computer seems fine, played the demo to a few times, only once to completion though
Commented on your page, but I can summarise again and point out a few other things:

a) Feel of movement. I like, really really like, that you created the 3D environment and kept the tiles. There have been debates over the years about 3D DM and this subject, and I agreed with the argument for tiles - without tiles the puzzles become much less DM like and lose the connection. I don't think they can be as complex involving the party.

Niggles with the movment are, as was mentioned earlier, no strafing - this is a killer. Combat doesn't feel right without it, nor does even walking around . It doens't feel like DM, nor does it feel like other modern games without this. The spin rate is too slow, and the mouse clicking is too pin-pointed. It makes it hard to pick up objects.

b) World mechanics: A niggle more with your demo - you aren't showing off the AI you have developed - there is nowhere I can get a spider out in the open to see its AI - it just attacks me. I tried to see more behaviour, but couldn't : (
Pads still activate even with dead critters. I couldnt' do the end puzzle sometimes because a dead spider locked a presure pad into position. This means the end puzzle couldnt' be completed sometimes, again ruining the point of your demo.

The feel of objects in the air seems wrong, as do spells. Some 'weight' - a fast start tailing off, maybe with some parabolics for objects - would just make it seem more real.

Collision detection - the screen gets partially filled with the wall when you get too close...just seems wrong if you are suppsoed to be representing a whole party to have that close to the all view. Also, you can walk through door posts.

c) Graphics - I had a 50 - 65FPS on my computer, so no worries there. But I noticed that a sword placed on a plate allowed part of the plate visible through the sword blade. Didn't spot anything else, seems fine function-wise.

d) Interface mechanics - not sure what other people make of it, but I think the floating windows are ok, a nice feature. But ones that cannot be removed, liek the text window, should maybe not have the removal cross - just cosmetic really!

Umm, so that's that - hope the comments are of some use!
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Post by toby »

Thanks for the comments beowuuf, they are all very objective, and useful. I'll attempt to answer some now:

a) I agree, it isn't really DM without tiles, and you can see which tile you are on in the bottom corner, but havent read the whole debate on this. Strafing will be an easy addition. Spin rate is something I found difficult to perfect, but after playing other clones I think you are right, it is too slow. I'm afraid object picking is not yet perfect, which is why you experience problems with it. It is actually determined by which square the game thinks is infront of you rather than where the mouse is, and I know there are inherent flaws with this reasoning.

b) Problem with demonstrating the AI is most of its other goals are based on a player not being on screen - therefore impossible for you to witness. But I also have not given them a full compliment of goals yet, as I could only think of a few. Oh, and I got stuck on the dead critters problem to hehe! Then realised if you killed them all first it was better. Did you work out how to open the last door, I wondered if anyone would get that. Not that its that hard, just some might not expect it. Parabolic projectiles would be an improvement, and not hard to implement. I shall do that when I get a chance to continue the development. But I think sounds would make a difference to all of these things.

c) Your right about the sword, I should fix taht. Maybe if I animated teh pressure plate I owuldnt have that problem

d) I had missed the cross on the notice window. And the collision detection is the cause of getting too close to the wall and walking through the door posts. This is due to it being done through the squares and not the actual graphics. When I originally designed I thought this would be acceptable, and that graphics could be written around it. But if its not then it could also be changed.

thanks for all your coments and keep them coming. At this stage I want to get the functionality and not hte graphics right and it seems to be acheiving that :)
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Post by beowuuf »

The last door - I almost backed away from it to look for more pads, but you had been quite insistent on trying out the spell system on the intro splodge, so I twigged : )
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zoom
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Post by zoom »

Yesterday I wanted to play/test the game.
I already downloaded a 20 meg file and a 120 meg file to no avail.
I was able to decompress the dm2005 files, but it won´t run.

Now i will try the last version, it´s 1.1 of this .net development stuff.
i had already 1,0 and 2,0.

I think it must be some faulty .net environment or sth.
So i think i need version 1.1, since the programme told
me " you need more or less version ...1,000654 .

Microsoft redirected me to the download area, so i assume
there should be the right stuff somewhere!
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Post by zoom »

At first i had a bit of a problem to use the sword; it was in the wrong hand!
So you should maybe alter the help text!
normally, you have kick punch ect to actually being able to attack without a sword.
If you make that possible, people will know when they are able to use the weapon
It would change to sword´s options, now there is no options at all at the start.

Another way to deal with that would be the activation of the eye - tool. There you could examine the sword and tell the user that you have to do it into the action hand or sth.


I like how the sword is displayed when it rests on the floor.
--Right size proportion

But the icon of the sword when you pick it up is too meager. i mean it should be the size of
the mouse pointer and be more "solid".Just make it larger. But you said graphics you didn´t concentrate on, not finished.

When i throw the sword, it flies off to nowhere and is gone.

Moving: Overall movement speed is fine, but you could experiment with movement decrease and acceleration bcs, there are (later on) altering dexterity scores, so characters tend to get faster with more experience.

the monsters and combat:
i only met a spider and i was able to attack and retreat tactic it, so i didn´t loose any health, i think.
Yeah, the stats of the champion aren´t really well visible, because only in inventory mode possible. There is no connection to the on screen display

The textbox would be better to be scrollable down and upwards. I think when there is more happening, it gets a bit overflowed. and you cannot "look back"

That´s my first impressions.
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zoom
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Post by zoom »

Well, i could not really reproduce the loss of the sword. Strange, somehow i must have thrown it into the pit, not realizing it flies diagonally or sth... after all, it just a test version..
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Post by toby »

Hi zoooom and thanks for testing, may I ask you to fill out the review form when you get time :)

as ever, here are some answers to the points you made:

1. Not sure what your .NET problem was, there has been an issue with the different versions, but I think I've fixed it to support all now. Sorry you downloaded so many, especially the 120mb v2.0 which I don't work with anyway. If you downloaded one last night it has been updated since then due to others experiencing similar problems. Sorry for any inconvenience it may have caused, but only testing can find these problems. I hope that one is solved now.
zoooom wrote:At first i had a bit of a problem to use the sword; it was in the wrong hand! So you should maybe alter the help text!
This is true, but I thought DM1 only ever let you attack with weapons in the right hand?
zoooom wrote:normally, you have kick punch ect to actually being able to attack without a sword.
This functionality would definately be on the todo list ;)
zoooom wrote:Another way to deal with that would be the activation of the eye - tool.
as is this.
zoooom wrote:But the icon of the sword when you pick it up is too meager.
hehe I agree, i thought it looked like a stick rather than a sword. The graphics are easily changeable if you look
zoooom wrote:When i throw the sword, it flies off to nowhere and is gone.
It must have fallen down from a pit
zoooom wrote:Yeah, the stats of the champion aren´t really well visible, because only in inventory mode possible. There is no connection to the on screen display
I meant to connect the bars to the stats before release :S
zoooom wrote: The textbox would be better to be scrollable down and upwards. I think when there is more happening, it gets a bit overflowed. and you cannot "look back"
Couldn't figure out how to get the game engine to do it, but its a point noted, I should start compiling a list of them. Make a to do list :)

Thanks for taking the time to point these out

Toby
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Adamo
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Post by Adamo »

YEAH I would take a look, but my machine... 366 Mhz, antique graphic card, is that sufficient? luckily it is enough for CSBwin (it makes my computer usefull in some way).
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Paul Stevens
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Post by Paul Stevens »

366 Mhz, antique graphic card, is that sufficient? luckily it is enough for CSBwin
Thank you. Makes all that worrying about CPU/graphics worthwhile.
I hope you will be able to run ConfluxIII.

Zyx: any chance of getting extended recordings to test on
my old machine?
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Post by Zyx »

Yes, when the next playtest phase begins, that is when you finish some features, he he... Plus I still have to change the masks to optimize then.

But maybe Trantor or Beowuuf can already provide you long recordings...

During the playtest I'll test Conflux on a 166MHz.
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Post by PaulH »

I can run Quake quite happily on my 9 year old P75 with stoneage innards. In fact that machine does some stuff better than my AMD2000+, but then again, so does my mobile phone...
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Post by Tom Hatfield »

The control is rather sloppy. What I mean is, you're using the ancient arrow keys. Modern gamers (including me) tend to prefer the WASD keys for movement so we don't have to slide our arms over our bodies and bend our wrists unnecessarily. When I used to play Quake with the arrow keys and mouse, I would slide my keyboard to the left to accommodate, but nowadays I just don't have the room. Besides, I like being able to use all those wonderful keys like Tab, Shift, Ctrl Q, E R T, F, G, Z . . . well, you get the idea.

I don't like double-clicking the X's to close the windows. That should be a single click. Even better, a right-click should close the top-most window, and spacebar should close them all (Diablo-style).

The GUI looks nice, but it's a little too modern for DM. I would expect something more decrepit. by the same measure, using the entire window as your render target eliminates the claustrophobic feel induced by the original, which occupied only a small part of the screen. In essence, you're not recreating DM . . . you're making a new game altogether, and you should give yourself due credit.

The graphics are pretty much crap, but this is an independent project, and I won't hold that against you (unless you plan to release it like this). Worry about that once you get the mechanics down. Here's the number one key for versatile software: let the user configure everything. Controls, interface, graphics . . . absolutely everything. The best applications in the world follow this principle.

For a third-year project, this is not bad. Don't expect to gather a fan-base, but if you stick with it, you may produce a decent game. Seth Robinson made over a hundred-thousand dollars on LORD, and that was just a bunch of text.
__________

I don't use .NET. I'm a Visual Basic developer. I tried to move to C#, but there's no point in even learning the language unless you plan to use .NET, which I absolutely don't. The principles behind .NET are sound, but it's going to take a long time before the average developer adopts them, if it ever happens at all. (Most international corporations use Windows 3.1, while the more "modern" ones use 2000. Virtually no one uses .NET because they feel about the same way as Cows and PaulH.)

I had Visual Studio 2003 installed for a while so I could teach myself C#, but I gave up on it after a few days. I now write my programs in Visual Basic 6 and VBScript. It's slow, but it's easy, and it's what I know.
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Post by Adamo »

sorry, cannot install your program on my computer (I have tried both, DM2005msi and low-res version). But I can tell you now (as I saw DM2005 pictures on the net, that I hardly prefere original DM with it`s graphics structure, system and look. But so far I dont have a possibility to run it on my machine and test it.
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