Messages

16

AI War / Re: Poll: MUSAK!

« on: August 19, 2011, 03:36:45 AM »

Your homework assignment is to go make a procedural music creator that won't cause earbleed

Yes, it is possible, but the result is very, very different than any of the composition in our game.

Ball Blazer does a wonderful job with its fractal music. This seems like a perfect fit for the next expansion!!

17

Off Topic / Re: Forums are now running SMF 2.0!

« on: July 19, 2011, 10:39:12 PM »

It's not perfect, but the old Arcen theme works well enough and has the previous/next page links.

18

Off Topic / Re: Forums are now running SMF 2.0!

« on: July 18, 2011, 11:37:33 PM »

Yeah, I just cleaned up a lot of spam posts and accounts. Very frustrating. I wonder if adding a simple question to registration would help at all.

19

AI War / Re: Mantis: Issue 0003094: Teleporting units don't respect group move

« on: July 18, 2011, 01:32:58 PM »

Personally, I think any other behavior would be preferable. Teleporting units moving at group speed, unable to shoot while moving and with some amount of paralysis when stopping depending on how far/fast they were moving seems great to me. Hopping at intervals dependent upon group speed would work fine, too (and would perhaps be easier to implement). Even making them sit where they had been until the group reaches its target and then teleporting over would be an improvement, though certainly not without its problems. At least then, these ships would jump to their death the moment you accidentally ordered them somewhere. There are things that are less micro-intensive that have been automated in the past, but this one still sticks out like a sore thumb.

20

Tidalis Technical Support / Re: Backing up Tidalis data

« on: July 16, 2011, 04:57:47 AM »

I also suggest backing up your settings.dat file, located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\tidalis\RuntimeData\settings.dat, but if you're getting all of steamapps, it sounds like you're good to go. The game's data is all kept in its game directory.

settings.dat contains license key, game settings, stats, and achievements information.

21

Off Topic / Re: steam sale: Summer camp special

« on: July 14, 2011, 01:09:42 AM »

I've not tried Beat Hazard Ultra. It sounds like it addresses at least some of my complaints, so that's good.

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AI War / Re: Just bought the game; some questions and thoughts

« on: July 13, 2011, 02:31:29 AM »

- Glad you like the AIP mechanics, it's definitely a favorite around here.  I'd not encountered any "rank" mechanics in other games before, so it was something that I put in to address the sort of game flow that I wanted to have.  Then it wound up becoming the central feature of the game, that all others orbit around.  Who knew!

You might have encountered it and just not noticed. Have you played Kid Icarus for NES? It has a secret rank statistic referred to as "skill" by hackers. The player can level up in that game by entering specific chambers and collecting a new type of arrow, but the chambers are empty if the player's skill isn't high enough. Skill is gained by killing enemies, collecting hearts or mallets, and entering chambers, and skill is lost by shooting arrows and taking damage. Keeping that information from the player is pretty unfortunate, in my opinion, since if you don't know you're penalized for shooting arrows, why not just shoot them all the time?

23

Off Topic / Re: steam sale: Summer camp special

« on: July 13, 2011, 02:23:13 AM »

I like shootemups a lot, but Beat Hazard turned out to not be the game for me. It has a pretty solid sense of style and presentation, but beyond that, I think it gets a lot wrong and has little to encourage me to continue playing it.

If you'll be playing with keyboard and mouse, I immediately recommend against Beat Hazard. While I'm told that the gamepad controls are like what you'd expect if you've played Robotron 2084, Smash TV, or Geometry Wars, the keyboard and mouse controls are an awkward design where WASD controls your ship and your mouse controls a cursor which your ship aims at. All shots you fire will hit wherever the cursor was when they were fired, so if the cursor is below your ship and you move your ship right, you'll go from shooting straight down to shooting down-left. This setup means that you're controlling the direction in which you're firing with BOTH keyboard and mouse, while with a gamepad, you'd only be doing this with one analog stick (the right one, used for aiming), as it should be. This one simple issue does a lot to drag down the experience, as it muddles the controls and makes it too difficult to hit any ship you haven't explicitly put your cursor on as you're trying to dodge everything that's flying at you.

The presentation is slick and the colors sure do look good on my Trinitron tube, but the game does way too much flickering that makes me feel a little uncomfortable as I play it, despite lacking any sort of epilepsy problems. Furthermore, the enemies' shots can be rather hard to see against the exploding colors that make up the background. Also, for a game supposedly based on your music, I can't really tell what it's using my music for. Yes, my music plays during the stages, but it never feels like the game is really driven by what's playing, unlike games like Audiosurf, where there is a clear correlation.

Finally, as a shootemup, I feel this game really falls short. It doesn't feel at all like most games of the genre, with enemies that take way too many shots and don't shoot back nearly enough. It also has not nearly enough enemy variety; expect to mostly see the same ship over and over for each of the 3 classes of small, medium, and large ships. I love the variety of enemies in Geometry Wars and similar games, but this definitely does not have that. Additional variety would contribute not only to making each stage more enjoyable, but improving the game's longevity, as well.

There may be something to the game I'm not seeing; it's a pretty popular game, and if you're playing with a gamepad, you're already set to have a lot more fun with it than I did. That said, I don't have any reason to recommend buying the game.

24

AI War / Re: Cant download the updates :(

« on: July 10, 2011, 06:44:07 PM »

Apparently running the osx-intel file in "ai war fleet command/AIWarAutoUpdater-osx.app/Contents/MacOS" installs the updates.

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AI War / Re: Cant download the updates :(

« on: July 10, 2011, 06:31:39 PM »

Another Mac user has hit this same problem on IRC. The updates download, but the updater does not run. Trying to manually install updates returns this error: "LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810". Trying to run the updater directly reportedly does nothing. The user found this error in his logs: "command/AIWarAutoUpdater-osx.app/Contents/MacOS/installbuilder.sh", ...): No such file or directory".

26

Tidalis / Re: Steam Summer Carnival

« on: July 08, 2011, 01:13:19 AM »

My insight this evening is that it looks like there's a bug in triggering achievements. I did multiple tests, starting with a fresh copy of Tidalis that lacked any achievements or play stats:

With Vinraith's puzzle, which should work perfectly fine, I was not able to trigger the achievement on multiple attempts. I decided to try failing the puzzle while still meeting the requirements for the achievement. By doing that, I was awarded the achievement on all three of my attempts. Meeting the requires for the achievement, winning, and then losing without meeting the requirements did not grant me the achievement, and the game stats show the depth of my deepest combo as 0, which can't be right at all.

When I won, I was given three achievements: the achievement for winning one round and the first two Score achievements, which are for a certain number of points from a specific chain. If I lose by not clearing one of last cyan blocks in his puzzle, I'm granted FIVE different achievements related to combos.

What I think is happening is that winning causes the stage to end before some logic has been done related to completing combos. Therefore, the game stats don't include that combo and the achievements are never given out. I don't recall what it was, but I remember that Keith hit some complexity with tracking combos in some fashion. Maybe he'd have some insight into fixing this?

27

Tidalis / Re: Steam Summer Carnival

« on: July 07, 2011, 04:35:22 PM »

You should earn achievements at the end of the current stage, and can earn them in any mode except the test mode in the level editor. Simply completing a combo that is 6 levels deep should do it (which may not be the same as seeing x6, depending on how we eventually made white blocks affect score; I can't remember off the top of my head and will check later). You can use any game mode or number of colors. If you're using zen mode, you need to use the cup icon on the top right to end the stage.

If you're still having trouble, I can help out more later tonight, or you can check the Tidalis Steam forum where there is additional discussion.

28

AI War / Re: Don't scroll the game when the cursor is outside the window

« on: July 06, 2011, 10:55:08 PM »

Yes, there is. I ticked the mouse panning off, but I do like that control and find it limiting to have to use the keyboard. Then again, it's apparently a limitation of Unity and nothing can be done about it.

You don't have to use the keyboard to pan if you disable edge-of-screen panning. Moving the mouse while holding the middle mouse button will pan the screen, much like panning in map software.

29

Off Topic / Re: I'll never be able to remember that password

« on: July 06, 2011, 03:55:45 AM »

For this forum.

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AI War Technical Support / Re: Alien Bundle on Steam validation issue

« on: July 06, 2011, 01:02:16 AM »

There was a report of this on the Steam forums, as well: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1977252. If you can't figure out how to crush this bug, perhaps the license key error message should suggest restarting the program and trying again?