VladR
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Everything posted by VladR
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Gee, you wonder why ? It is incredible you actually think nobody sees through your BS
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It is obvious that you decided to troll instead of acknowledging that I said many times that flatshaded look will be in my first game. Reporting your trolling...
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I don't mind if people constructively, without being dickish, specify what they dislike. However, I have been saying for last~2 years that my first game will be flatshaded. I wrote multiple posts explaining that I feel this style was unfairly ignored and want to explore it further. So, anybody, who says I am not delivering what I said I would, will be reported to mods for trolling.
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I wasn't talking about you. You didn't overreact at all actually, you don't put a spin on things, just say it straight, as it should be. However, if two sides are at war, they could be in same scenario forever. So, this is me, declaring peace and trying to install a filter on my sarcastic mouth.
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Hmmmm, I just woke up (I sleep a lot after the expo and barely drive 400 miles a day) and it appears there's a storm brewing. Week ago, I would have picked up the glove thrown in the ring and start concocting some ultra sarcastic/dickish remark. But I shook hands with Albert during PRGE on Sunday that I will not engage in these fights anymore and instead report those posts so mods can clean them up. If I loose my cool, feel free to report my post. Guys, please, we're in our 40's-50's, this is ridiculous. JagChris said something to me on Sunday about people who argued like this a decade ago here but now they're not here (as in dead). Took me two days of driving to fully comprehend what he meant. I implore you to please do the same.
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Not Dos. It was DirectX 8, pre-shader tech running on GF2 and around 500 MHz CPU. Both games were top-down view, slightly angled like in Dungeon Siege. First was action game with puzzle elements, levers, switches, etc. Second was action RPG in Western environment, that I later massively upgraded and rewrote into XNA to support shaders and I had a build running on X360 at 1920x1080. I also had a build running on Windows Phone 7, but once the real sales numbers leaked out, I stopped as the sales were absolutely abysmal even for the best and AAA games. Around that time company transferred me to u.s. so I stopped indie dev. and slaved away in corporate environment. If you're interested, I could pull out some screenshots off the hard drive when I get home?
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Thanks for explanation, I will read the full article later. So, if I get it right, they planned to finance a full multi year development cycle of a team that had more than one person? With an untested cart expansion? I would dare something like that only after I build one or two full games and even then, it would be much smaller scale. 6-month dev cycle, not more. I've had my fair share of internal and external employees and contractors when I worked on PC games so I understand very well that you totally cannot count on anybody else except yourself. Everybody has its own life and goals, that's the nature of things. There will be a longplay video showing full area, maybe more when I get to pre-orders, so everyone can make their own decision whether it's realistic to finish the remaining features in two months or not. Regardless, anybody can wait till the actual final cart is for sale, but: - at higher price - no bonus content - no future lifetime discounts on my games I can absolutely sympathize that given the ratio of failed crowdfunded games, there are many angry people unwilling to take any risk, even if it's just few months. Those can simply wait it out and sacrifice things listed above. Core game will be identical anyway.
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What exactly happened with Paprium? Got some summary link? Spring 2020 would infer Midwest Gaming Classic, which is April 03. To be able to sell carts there I would need to have a final build on March 15, which is two weeks more than with current estimate. Two weeks more is basically nothing. So, before end of this year we shall know if I will only have a vendor table there with a playable version or if cart there is even possible.
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You are correct. There's no real world pressure. I'm not running out of money in 2019, not in 2020 nor 2021. However, I once fell for the feature creep in past and declined a publishing offer from Top 3 publisher who was ready to accept the game in state it was in, because it was good enough for him. I cleared my top 10 features, then another one and then another one. Then another one and also another 10 features, till it became a completely different game, way more complex than the publisher was willing to put in front of their audience. With RPG games, you can literally keep doing that forever and keep implementing new features on and on. I have a pretty extensive wishlist and I am sure I could burn another year going through it, but that won't sell more copies in the end. I have to stop bleeding money at some point. Let's see where I am at in December.
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No worries, this is a road Rash thread where there was a video of textured road and buildings, so it's understandable there's a confusion. Regarding box/manual - I believe that people who don't have the space or inclination to store the boxes, should not pay for them. So, there should be a cheaper cart-only option. As for the release, as of now I still believe I can make the Jan-01 pre-order start - the 60-day campaign. The single biggest unknown right now is the music component- that can swing the date by couple weeks in itself easily. In the middle of December I will know for sure based on progress and remaining features. For sure, I want to avoid a scenario where I would ask for money and then take another 4+ months as then I would be pressured to release unfinished game, so unless I am reasonably sure that there's no more than two months of work remaining, I am not starting the 60-day pre-order campaign. For the last 60 days I don't intend to do any new gameplay or engine features - just art assets and gameplay balancing.
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Thanks man, I appreciate it. I'm still driving home, a bit slower than going here, so I don't think I will resume coding sooner than this Friday. After about a week of coding I should have a new video with at least one new environment and the ship, plus enabling the shooting enemy, track Ypos following and other features.
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1. Textures - we had this discussion in this thread long time ago but my position hasn't changed - I still feel like there's too few games that used flatshaded polygons and the ones that are, aren't as colorful either. Jag was built for this style and I intend to explore it as far as I can. Textures will never give you this vibrant color look, you can't have such stark contrast between surfaces, unless they are extremely low resolution at which point their performance impact is not worth it, imo. 2. Yes, people played the demo - from 6-year olds to 60-year old 3. Road Rash - I know for sure it's not No 2 in my Roadmap, neither No 3. Maybe No 4. But, I might have a playable demo on next expo.
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1. Ypos / Vertical alignment of ship with track : yes, this was disabled for the demo. I made some changes to the handling of lasershots recently that require update on the ships as well. 2. Xpos / collision detection - this is just optical illusion due to the Ypos feature above. Once ships are at proper Ypos following the track curvature, it looks correct. 3. Physics - each game has it's own implementation of the physics. There's a huge difference between simple linear strafing and the inertia based one - in how it handles. That's not something that you see on YT vid, you feel it when controlling the ship. It doesn't simply"skate like on ice" as would be the case if there was no physics- it has weight and when you change direction, it first must slow down the current direction and only then accelerate in the opposite one.
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Nah, it was the other way around - I needed a Jag to test the avp cart on without disturbing skunk, so I went and bought a new Jag under $300 None of that would have happened if you hadn't found out about the Avp producer panel. I clearly missed it when checking out the Sunday lineup previous evening. How crazy it is that two hours prior to that I didn't have a second Jag, Avp nor producer-signed cart That panel alone was worth the trip ! This PRGE, for me, is definitely up there with the best ECTS expo in London, before ECTS went down hill. Hopefully the August schedule for PRGE'20 won't screw up their incredible run!
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Literally everything you described is in my to-do list, but it's fairly low in priority. But I agree, those features would be great, but they're not a two-day effort, unfortunately. Doubtful any of them (except the jump buoyancy) will happen. As for the procedural generation, I can't store 500 tracks as a 3D mesh on cart. It must be procedurally generated at loading time. Right now, at loading time, I extrude the track's 3d mesh along the curve displacement points. But, so as not to have a completely random aesthetics, the curve points will be done manually in 3dsmax. But, yes, I could spend 2-3 days and generate bezier curves and avoid manual track creation. In future, there could be an endless mode, running till the Jag overheats
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Vehicles should not pose the same performance problem as tracks, so six is a very minimum. As for backgrounds, I obviously have a lot of features in my wish list, but at the very minimum: - terrain - buildings - fog - clouds - antialiasing - some sort of daylight/ sun color - e.g dusk, Dawn, midday, afternoon, etc. This is the reason why I had 16-bit background bitmap from very start, just with skybox gradient, even though it took few years to get to this feature. Think of the backgrounds like it was some modern open world 3D game, where you put the camera at any spot in the world, take a snapshot, and use it as a background. Performance of rendering is irrelevant, as it happens at loading time. Object processor doesn't care if the bitmap it fetches is just some skybox gradient, or a full blown 3D render of a large world. It's still the same amount of bytes being transferred each frame.
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Yes, I was a hardcore PC player. There were very limited arcades in Eastern Europe when I was growing up. So,he only said the truth - I finally got to play those games on real arcade and not some emulator. I now understand that the 40-minute outrun playthrough on YouTube requires quite a skill to pull off.
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Thanks, I am indeed trying to make sure the technological side of the game doesn't suck for the player. I could have gone with the typical excuse of "first game on the target HW", and have released it 6-12 months ago, but I will rather put in a lot of work into it. Gameplay, of course, I don't really expect too many people to truly enjoy it the same way I do, since I was always a fan of games that weren't exactly popular. As far as success, I obviously don't expect it to be nowhere near financially rewarding as a financial industry in New York. But in my current stage of life, I will much rather earn 10% of money I could have had at a job, but do what I love, as crazy as it sounds. In last two years, during transition from highpaying job, there have been many crazy amounts flying around, in terms of my living costs. But, two months ago I paid off one card, last month second and this month third one. In 4 months, another one, which should coincide with the pre-orders, at which point I should fall under $1,000 per month, though that still includes some remaining payments to IRS. So, nobody has to feel like they are supporting some extravagant American lifestyle by buying the game.
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No, that would be crazy. There will be 6 different environments spread across the 500 levels. Then again, now that I have real-time engine preview of the currently edited 3dsmax mesh, I might be willing to burn more time on the environments. However, it's not easy to design something jag-optimized. I could easily create 20 environments in a month, but they must confirm to the strict 60-fps requirement, so I can't just smash polygons together so they look nice. That's easy. Plan B is to implement user choice of level of detail. Thus, unlike all other games on Jag that forced their compromise between visuals and frame rate, I will leave it up to player. I know for sure now that I can have two more 60-fps environments. And this is where my PC-based real-time preview comes in - it gives me real-time update on scanline count, so now I don't have to wait till I import the mesh to my source code to find out how it behaves , performance-wise. Oh, and I will absolutely not allow the frame rate in game to drop below 30 fps. The hangar is high poly, so the frame rate there doesn't matter much, as it's mere script. But the game itself won't drop below 30 on Ntsc (25:PAL). If you ask how is it possible to ensure that then it's actually simple: At the start of each new frame I check the last frame time and if it's below 30, I halt with a debug message, so it's unmissable during overnight automated tests as I simply find the game halted in the morning. I still need to implement the option of vsync, as currently it is forced. Then you will be able to have a frame rate of 57 or 43 or 39( unlike Vsync's 60 or 30), if you desire to do so.
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20 areas with 25 levels per area. No, the levels won't be as short, though at Max speed you obviously fly through the track super fast. Technically, there's no max speed, it just keeps going higher without any cap. However, the gameplay changed from racing at top speed to RPG grinding, so there's no objective reason to fly so fast, as enemies must keep up with you, otherwise there's no point if you were allowed to just run by them. But, based on the feedback, I will seriously consider some kind of additional racing mode, which should make happy both camps. That's assuming it won't take more than two weeks to implement.
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You could drive. Surely it's less than a 5,000 miles road trip from your place
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Thanks for sharing the same issue with electricity. I, of course, had my own extension cords. Just wasn't allowed to use them. It turned out ok, but could have done without the overnight stress that I might have not been able to run it. Once Chris cleaned it, Jag suddenly became shiny. That was news to me, honestly. I'm too paranoid of static electricity, so I Never touch it when I clean dust at home. I talked to Albert two days ago, haven't seen him yesterday.
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I just played my Lynx game over at Karri's vendor table. It was pretty cool to see it running on real HW. I didn't get to buy Lynx yet and was hoping to get one here but so far no luck. I guess , eBay it is
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I don't want it to be a racer, even though it has the speed and frame rate. I am still debating whether to allow damage from hitting the track sides as it takes away from the combat too much. I would probably allow some small non lethal damage. It's still open to implementation. Although, there could be a racing mode without enemies, but that's best left for a different game focusing fully on racing, including tracks designed for racing.
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Yeah, I guess I should be happy that with the crowd here there's some signal at all I'm spoiled by the fact that Verizon has a tower in my village and there's less than 20 people within 15 mile radius using it at daytime...