X-Bomber v068 Onwards Devlog - Please comment!!

[Crash]

I was kinda shying away from another colossal spriting job but I managed to find some time...Hopefully you can see where I'm headed with this one. The idea of a huge space-specialised robot with no legs really appealed to me. There are a couple in Rahxephon, which I watched for the first time yesterday. That makes the idea even cooler. I'm nowhere near done with it really - it still needs a head and details and guns. I was kinda given the idea by this guy's game http://translate.googleusercontent.com/ ... httpExcept mine's a better design. It's gonna have individually destructible parts, handheld rifles, cannon turrets, remote weapons, homing missiles and enough beam weapons to bring about Ragnarok.Here are a couple of sketches: http://xbomber.co.uk/iv/?/content/B%20D ... pt.jpgIt's worked out cooler than the first draught: slimmer and more complex.

[Bradster]

Crash, do you happen to know if your X-Bomber game is compatible with 64-bit Windows 7? I installed the DirectX 9 runtime and looked around to see if there was anything else I needed, but I can't seem to get it to work. The app opens, but the window is empty.I think I'm going to try wiping this box (it's new anyway) and see if I can get 32-bit Windows on it, as I've heard that other older games seem to have issue with 64-bit too…

[Crash]

Is this an Intel Mac running Windows 7?The thing shouldn't care whether it's an x86 or x64 environment because the program just runs in x86 regardless.As far as I'm aware, it ought to run in x64 Windows 7 or Vista but I've never had the means to test it.I might ... procure a copy of 7 x64 and run it on my old desktop. I'm not terribly impressed with Vista or 7 so I'd rather not purchase a copy yet. If anyone else could help you test it, that would be brilliant.If you don't have any luck, I'll post a topic in the Clickteam forum.In the meantime: check that you're running v0.76 as Admin. Obviously you need a half-decent GPU in there to handle the DX9 acceleration and see if pressing up/down arrows while the window is open makes the menu "pinging" sound which would mean that the program is running even if you can't see any output.Even without DX9, the program should then search for DX8 and without that it runs in software. It runs slowly but it should still display.Thanks for persevering. This latest version is really something. We're getting close to finished although this law conversion I start tomorrow will slow me down a lot.

[Crash]

Just to let everyone know: I am still working on the game.I did lots of work in recent versions, playing with bullet sprites (which actually make a big graphical impression on shootemups as you end up seeing a lot of bullets). I'm going even further with that; making the bullets really look like real weapons fire as much as I can and making them really smooth and attractive.To this end I turned my attention to X-Bomber's turrets again, the Enemy Death-X's weapons (Mission 05 Boss) and a few others. In order to kinda see the difference, I played some levels I hadn't really looked at in ages, such as the MoonBase training level.Actually, that was really enjoyable. I kinda forgot about that mission after I wrote it because it gave me SO many problems when I was converting across to MMF2 from MMF1.5. But those are long since sorted out and obviously, changes that you make to sprites in one level that feature in others are imposed on the other levels' sprites as well. So it was really nice to play that level with all the new refinements on show. It's actually quite fun MoonBase ... once the shooting starts.

[Bradster]

(Sorry I haven't had a chance to really dig into identifying my apparent compatibility issues. Not a whole lot of time for gaming things outside of the weekends. Maybe this weekend! Just posting to show I haven't forgotten…)

[Crash]

Not your fault. I even MSNd Matt Darcy. He runs an IT business and must have 7 64 on a machine somewhere but even he didn't get back.

[Crash]

Dai-X's "Buster Cannon"; a pair of rifles that lock together, charge-up and fire a huge, purple fireball, is finished. The fireball gets bigger, the longer you charge it. It fires automatically once the charge reaches full and starts a new charge cycle automatically while the trigger is held down.When the weapon is on-board, but not selected the two rifles split and fire in support of your main weapons.EDIT: I did some work on Alliance Ships; centering the hotspots and action points of the Astrofighters and Carriers.The attacks on various Mission 2 enemies now look really beautiful.I got the Simetra Astrofighters rolled into a single object and gave them some general improvement.I'm also looking into making the Alliance DeathBall shoot its gamut of different weapons from the right points on the sprite. This is tricky because the turret, on which all the weapons are mounted has to rotate 360'.The Deathball in Mission 3, 8, 9 etc has always had the 3 weapons demonstrated in the show;- Flamethrower, - Machineguns,- Grappling hooks with power surge.plus the missiles visible on the show's shooting model.I'm also putting in laser torpedoes because the shooting model has a fairly unmistakable laser torpedo launcher at the top.

[Crash]

So, I'm making lots of bits and pieces for the exterior of the Space Fortress.:-> Yellow eye-shaped turrets with yellow beam weapons and "delta-lasers" - plus Emplacements-> Solar Electric Nets which close around and electrocute you - plus Launcher.-> Cruise Missiles and 5-tube Launcher-> Fighter Launch PortsI'm also thinking about what I suppose will be the final revision for X-Bomber and Dai-X's weapons: http://www.sfxb.co.uk/cgi-bin....;t=1138

[Crash]

Oh yes! I am the law!I managed to reduce the smoke systems on X-Bomber (of which there were many - grey for dust, blue-glowing for hyper-jumps, green for radiation, and white -> yellow -> orange -> red-glowing for napalm), which was a system comprising probably over a dozen objects and controlled from loads of different, random places in the game into a single, centralised system in the level engine using 2 objects; a generator and an actual cloud sprite.The beauty is that it can be programmed to handle lots of different effects in future if the need arises and it can be overridden by individual missions if you want a one-off effect not-included in the engine.It can also generate different sprites that way if the standard cloud sprite object doesn't meet the requirement (although it too can be programmed with more animations in future).I reworked the green radiation clouds from the Alliance Astrofighter bombs in Mission 06 to use this system and it performs great, despite the number of objects that effect uses.The only thing it struggled on was the Mission 10's Fire-Monster boss, which just needs too many effect objects for the intelligent detection routine to process.So I used the override method above to generate a special object that was simplified so that the MMF2 run-time engine didn't have to think so hard about managing loads of them.I finished rolling all the Alliance Astrofighter variants into a single, portable object too. There are four main types of basic Astrofighter:[ Standard | Fast/Atmospheric variant | Carter's "Attacker" variant | and the show's 'Plunger' variant ]That doesn't include different colour and weapon subtypes of the above (of which there are many), which are also rolled in.There are loads of other Astrofighters too but they involve multiple animations each or separate into 2 ships etc. Those are too complicated or just dissimilar to make integrating them into fewer objects worthwhile.So where are your pictures? Well, I didn't get any good screenshots but here's the new fire-monster just after it fired a load of its guided fire-trail missile things at me. So I decided to stick it with the last of my X-Impulse:http://www.xbomber.co.uk/iv/#/content/m10r-4.jpgand this is just testing the actual napalm part of the system in Mission 01. If you zoom in, you can see the MMF2 code window with X-Bomber in a window infront.http://www.xbomber.co.uk/iv/#/content/xb-dev6.jpg

[Crash]

OK, yesterday I fixed the problem with Missions 6 and 7 not progressing to the next level upon completion. In these levels the game only moves onto the next briefing after showing certain plot events (like X-Bomber falling into a black hole). The Mission Complete notification was fading out long before it was needed.I also fixed a stupid glitch where the levels would restart after 5 seconds if you'd died under certain circumstances. Some tiresome variable wasn't getting reset if you went back to the menu and tried a new level after you'd died, rather than letting the level start over.Thanks to Phil at www.emeraldcoast.co.uk for finding that for me.Finally did away with all the excess Alliance Fighter objects now that one object acts as all variants of the original Alliance Fighter.Made quite a lot of adjustments to the Enemy AI. I also got rid of the pre-rotated animations for Mission 10's Fighters and Carriers (that fly up the screen rather than down) by having MMF2 rotate the objects on the fly. Unfortunately that broke a few of their hard-coded weapons but they've all been re-done properly.There are a couple of new screens in the Gallery: http://www.xbomber.co.uk/iv/Next-up is to do the same consolidation on the AstroFighter carriers so that I can create carriers loaded with fighters at any point in a level to make the game more challenging without any further faffing about.A separate carrier object that can launch its fighters on-screen features in the game but only in Missions 02 and 07 and not having the Carriers rolled into a single, multifunctional object is messy and difficult.