nannerdw's Evo Tracks- New vid: Shantytown w/ glitched Gecko | Forums

[nannerdw]

Coming soon:
What could it be?

[nannerdw]

Youtube video added to first post.
Also, my skill game is coming along nicely. I've got the framerate mostly under control (for now )

[mrcarnage666]

Voodoo is one hell of a artwork. stunning visuals. Love the drive it. Well i what can i say i admire your decoration since THD
Cant wait that crazy looking skill game or what that is

[nannerdw]

*LynxBall* (Current version: 4)

Platinum: 730,000 points
Gold: 600,000 points
Silver: 400,000 points

This is a clone of the old PC game, Jezzball. I really pushed the editor's limits on this one (probably too far ), since I had to keep adding delay filters between most of the huge number-crunching code to give the editor enough time to update all of its variables.

It was truly a nightmare to debug. There are still some very minor bugs due to weird timing issues that I couldn't ever figure out, but for the most part I'm pleased with how it turned out. I was especially impressed that the editor was able to handle so much data at once without any major lag issues.

I doubt I'll be making another skill game any time soon, but this was definitely a fun challenge. Now I can get back to making the trials track that I've been putting off for over a month, lol.

Random info:
*Over 3000 events, triggers, filters, etc.
*The balls are moved by object position events, and each ball has two collision planes for inverting the x and y components of its velocity each time it comes in contact with a block.
*The balls were originally going to be placed randomly on the grid, but since the random number generators have to update continuously, they ended up slowing everything down too much. Now each ball just starts in the same spot every time. I figured it would be more fair that way, anyway.
*Surprisingly, the placement of triggers and filters in the editor can actually have a very noticeable impact on performance. Once I moved them far away from the camera, I noticed an immediate framerate improvement. I'm not sure if this issue applies to tracks once they have been uploaded to the server, however.

I realized after uploading that I probably should have left the bike as the game character, so that other people's ghosts wouldn't clutter up the play area when you have ghosts turned on. I might want to just fix that one thing and reupload it, though I was really trying not to have multiple versions of tracks on my shared list.

Also, after watching some of the replays, it's kind of funny to see how many people don't read the directions. It clearly says "Press LT/X to rotate the cursor." Maybe I should have spelled it out for them on a giant flashing billboard, lol.
At least they're greeted with a nice big "Epic Fail" when they lose the first round

[rlmergeuser]

Very nice!

As I have something bit similar with the editor (snake and tetris), I can appreciate the work spent in this. I'm still thinking how to efficiently implement few things in this game. I would have probably done collision checks with "code" and use my bit mask based collision grid. Finding the areas where there are balls is probably one of the most interesting parts. I would have probably used the separate bit mask grid and flood fill the areas where there are balls, then the reverse of this would be the area that needs to be filled.

This really is not a trivial game implement with this system, and contrary to my little games, this actually looks really nice

[Jarr3tt88]

Ill give more detailed post later (if I remember lol) but just wanted to say that Lynxball is amazing! Even tho it was on my list of tracks to do, I don't think I could have done it as nice. Bravo man! Brilliant coding!

Everyone needs to check out this game if you like skill games or not! Jezzball FTW!

[nannerdw]

I've uploaded LynxBall V2 (Edit: Now superseded by version 4) to get rid of the ghosts from the playing field.
I also changed the music to all instrumental, because it just seemed like a better fit.

Very nice!

As I have something bit similar with the editor (snake and tetris), I can appreciate the work spent in this. I'm still thinking how to efficiently implement few things in this game. I would have probably done collision checks with "code" and use my bit mask based collision grid. Finding the areas where there are balls is probably one of the most interesting parts. I would have probably used the separate bit mask grid and flood fill the areas where there are balls, then the reverse of this would be the area that needs to be filled.

This really is not a trivial game implement with this system, and contrary to my little games, this actually looks really nice

Thanks, Jorm4
The area fill was definitely the hardest part to implement.

I ended up splitting the impulse from each ball to a logic gate at each surrounding square, but I'm sure your bit mask idea would have been more efficient.

I was also trying to think of a way to store the state of multiple blocks into a single integer variable and retrieve them with with bitwise operators, but I found that my brute force method of updating 128 variables simultaneously really didn't have as big of a performance hit as I was expecting. It only took 3 delay ticks to give all of the variables enough processing time to update their values.

Each square on the grid has a variable for the line color that last passed through it; and another variable which gets set to 1 upon collision with a ball, and 2 upon permanent placement of a block. Unfortunately, with the way the hit triggers worked, I had to add about a 1/3 second delay to give the balls enough time to exit their current hit trigger and enter a new one. Each square ended up having two separate hit boxes to cut this travel time in half.

I might have been able to avoid this 1/3 second delay by using custom collisions instead of hit triggers, so they could be glued together, and then activate physics on the whole thing. I was concerned that would really impact the performance, though.


Also, thanks Jarr3tt88. The old Win 3.1 games like Jezzball, Ski Free, and Chips Challenge were very memorable to me, since they were some of the first games I ever played

[nannerdw]

Version 3 uploaded to fix a major scoring issue with the final level.

I wish I could report the old versions as offensive. I'm offended by their bugginess, lol.
Jk, I wouldn't really do that

I just noticed another weird bug. When you move the camera during a replay, it thinks it's trying to aim at the rider, and just spins around like crazy, lol. It's not really an issue, though; more amusing than anything else.

[jook13]

I am VERY impressed by the programming you achieved in this game mate, very nice stuff! Brings back memories of my "cutting edge" 486 with windows 3.1 back in the day. I remember my dad paying like 4 grand for that computer and the only thing we did with it was play minesweeper, solitair, and jezzball.

[Jarr3tt88]

I just saw the pic above, holy **** nanner! I thought my minesweeper was pretty bad haha Simon says was def my most difficult coding, but that jezzball sure takes the cake! That, snake and tetris by jorma, and barrel apocalypse by ricky are the most complex games to date!