Polyhedra of Disorder

[Public Hermit]

To all those wanting to have a go, the link in his signature takes you to the official site, just click on "Downloads".

I just installed it and it works fine. I don't know if this is the latest version, but it sure works!

[Jamesac]

That's the original, which sadly doesn't look right on my Win7 machine. This thread's all about the shiny new revision.

Anyone have any ideas on how to make the original play nice on a modern machine...?

James

[Public Hermit]

That's the original, which sadly doesn't look right on my Win7 machine. This thread's all about the shiny new revision.

Anyone have any ideas on how to make the original play nice on a modern machine...?

James

Ah right, sorry

I'm playing that on Windows 7 though!

[Barney]

That's the original, which sadly doesn't look right on my Win7 machine. This thread's all about the shiny new revision.

Anyone have any ideas on how to make the original play nice on a modern machine...?

James

Ah right, sorry

I'm playing that on Windows 7 though!

Me too - I'm on Win7, and the colour palette is pretty much random which detracts from the experience somewhat. hence my request for the source to the old version, so I can fix it up for Pandora.

Oh yes, you might like to run linux in a VM and play the linux version on that - should work fine, as all it uses is SDL.

[noodles]

Still as mental as ever, which is good.

The controls on the pad drove me a bit mad with the thrust on the X instead of the more intuitive (to me) B. Kept confusing warp with thrust, which made me lose a bit too often when things started heating up.
Suggestion : use the triggers (left for warp and right for thrust) on the 360 pad so you can simultaneously fire and thrust without getting a fit finding the right button.

One serious problem: the analog stick on the pad kills my thumb as you have to constantly press to it's extremity to get any precision for aiming. Maybe use the D-Pad as an alternative for aiming with less travel.

I stand by my first comment on the screens. Yes the explosions make my eyes bleed with joy but not as much as before with the crisp pixels. Backdrop effects look detached from the objects being blown up, which is not good. Love the objects themselves and their purity.
Mixing 3D explosions with backdrop explosions look weird, all in one style seems better to me.

Sound is perfect, don't change anything.

The higher rez version refused to start on my machine (Win7, 64 bit, nvidia 9400GT).
Error message : "cannot start D3D, not even software rendering."

[Iain]

Don't the shoulder buttons on the 360 pad do anything?

I went for fuzzy-blob particles because that's what graphics cards can do, and it looked very nice so I went with it. I thought writing single pixels would not be very modern-graphics-card friendly either.

What's the best/fastest way to do points?

1. Lock the backbuffer and draw points into it with the CPU?. I presume this is not so good because the GPU has to stop and wait.

2. Lock a different surface whilst the GPU gets on with something else, draw points into it by CPU, unlock, overlay that surface on the backbuffer (with alpha)?

3. Use a points list and have the GPU do the drawing?

I had taken out most of the dot-particle code. Bah!


I'm running it on a single core AMD 3GHz-and-something, with a nvidia geforce 7800 gs, and it runs fine on that.

The number of particles dynamicaly changes to keep it running in 1 frame, and it seems to be at the max of 32k all the time (I think).

It works on my eeepc, until the particles start and then it crawls. It's either the amount of rendering of all those alpha'd blobs, or the lack of hardware vertex processing on the eeepc. All the vertexes for the blobs are in world space, and they could fairly easily be in screen space.

I changed the menu system a bit so it sort-of works with pad and keyboard too. Not finished and not quite right yet.

The colours go wacky on w7 with the previous spritey version because it uses a 256 colour screen. It is rather old you know. The linux version isn't quite up to date as the windoze spritey version.

I'd like to put this on smartphones, but Giles says there's not much money in phone games at the going market rate of $1 a pop.
Anybody want to give me a hand?. I want to put my p2p radio thing on smartphones too. But I don't own a smartphone at all, I have a dumb phone that does phone calls and occasionally texts and alarm clock. I don't own a console either. And the game I play the most is Robotron, for which I hacked mame a bit to make it work better with joypads. I must be getting old.

[noodles]

The shoulder buttons brake and fire but I need thrust more than I need brake.
Also a trigger is more intuitive for thrust than a button as you can modulate the amount without
releasing the button completely.
I suppose this will be configurable in the final version.

Was amazed by the sales of Voxatron (PC) through the indie Humble Bundle offer, maybe something to look into as SoC is very much made for that market.

[sack]

What's the best/fastest way to do points?

1. Lock the backbuffer and draw points into it with the CPU?. I presume this is not so good because the GPU has to stop and wait.

2. Lock a different surface whilst the GPU gets on with something else, draw points into it by CPU, unlock, overlay that surface on the backbuffer (with alpha)?

3. Use a points list and have the GPU do the drawing?

3 is definitely the best way to go - especially if you want an iPhone/android port. It won't play nicely on standard renderers, but it'd play havoc with a deferred renderer like powerVR.

Basically powerVR will batch up all your draw geometry and will check the depths to try and 100% eliminate overdraw regardless of draworder, but it can only do that until you:

a) Present the display (obviously... but then again that's what you want)
b) Fill the queue (Not even sure if that is even possible practically speaking)
c) Draw translucent objects (so draw these last)
d) Lock the surface (because until it's finished drawing the surface state won't be what you expect).

So really you don't want to be locking the surface at all if you can avoid it. I suspect locking a second surface, drawing to it and then overlaying it would be slow too as it means large amounts of overdraw.

The way I'd do it is to use instancing - you'd have a buffer with just a single quad centered around 0,0 and a second buffer full of centrepoints of the particles, and in your shader you would combine the two to get the true position of the vertices by adding them. I forget how you'd do it in OGL/GL ES though because my head is currently stuffed full of DirectX.

Just be aware that using pointsprites is a bit of a grey area (even under directX I've found) and implementations seem to vary somewhat, so rendering your own small quads is probably the way to be sure of what you are going to get. Given that things are more controlled on the iPhone/iPad you'd probably get away with them there though.

I'd like to put this on smartphones, but Giles says there's not much money in phone games at the going market rate of $1 a pop.
Anybody want to give me a hand?. I want to put my p2p radio thing on smartphones too. But I don't own a smartphone at all, I have a dumb phone that does phone calls and occasionally texts and alarm clock. I don't own a console either. And the game I play the most is Robotron, for which I hacked mame a bit to make it work better with joypads. I must be getting old.

I've got an android handset kicking around, and should be picking up a 4S soon enough (later today hopefully - I thought I had to wait until April, but it turns out my upgrade date is today) so I could give it a try once I've got everything up and running.

[gilesgoat]

Hey wait a sec what I said mostly is that "at $1 a thing you have to sell quite lot to make a profit" , it does not mean you can't sell a lot, but it's more a matter of luck than anything else despite all the planning/care you may put in there are still factors you can't totally control.

Altough I never used POINTS I think as Sack said 3 is the way to go, anything else like 'directly poking into a surface' not sure how good it is, however it may be less worse than it seems, the only way to know is to try.

I'd say too "pointsprites are a grey area", never used them so far on OpenGL however they seems to reasonably do well on DX.

Now also 'don't mix 2 things', if you are going to develop for iOS there you'll find a certain type of market/thing, if you are going for Android that's all another story, forgetting about 'development costs' ( you need a mac and such ) I don't know really if you are talking here in terms of profit 'what is best/worse', again the only realistic thing I'd say is probably 'depends how lucky you are'.

Who knows .. SOC was a quite well known/received game, you may be one of those 'blessed by luck', your game goes viral and next week you are millionaire.

Or maybe it stays dormant for months and then all in a sudden that happens.

Or you make some quids and that's about it, your game still remains 'a classic' and the profit is what it is.

My only advice is really 'don't dream too much just do it and see how it goes'.

In your situation I think "you are quite free to try everything" so you really should not be worried at all about all this you can really try everything a bit at time and see how it goes.

As I said, I'll say it again you have a PC version nearly ready finish that and then maybe use it as a 'promotional tool' for your future Mobile market as well, you can say always '.. and btw a mobile version will be soon coming out', I would not worry at all right now if your mobile version is ever going to make big money or small money and/or if it's worth doing or not.

The point is only 'if you can do it, do it and see what happens' .. if you can't do it or there's something else you think you have to do first then check that out

[Jamesac]

One more note I forgot to add earlier- with the current control setup, brake becomes more a high-level technique than a necessity. I found in the earlier levels (when my score was lower than 500,000) that it was just as easy to point the stick in the opposite direction and apply a bit of thrust than to try to sort out a third button. Later on when things get really nuts, and you need a constant stream of fire ahead of you and can't take the half-second to counter-thrust, braking comes into its own, but until then it's actually easier to only have to deal with aim, thrust, and fire.

To clarify, that's more an observation than a criticism. I'm very happy indeed to have that level of momentum control later in the game.

James

[toxibunny]

Is that just braking, or is it retro-thrust? Because it seems like retro-thrust would add something too...

[Yak]

I must admit I've never used the brake in SoC. Ever.

[guythp]

There's a brake?

On the smartphone front, would it not be easier to get help to port the original version to android/ios? I suggest that merely as my 'droid phone is a budget one (ie: slow) and that could widen your market. I suggest it may be easier with absolutely no knowledge of programming, and I rarely know what I'm talking about so probably best ignore this.

[Jedburgh]

I discovered the brake in the update and in the right situation - later on when there's loads about and you've nabbed an Attract and you're getting catapulted all over the shop - it's brilliant. Slows you down enough that death when the Attract runs out isn't a certainty.