Living Life Afraid J'n'R

Here's the next test release.

This time there should be at least some gameplay value. There are things to collect (blood-red tears) and it's not too easy to get to the end of the area.

Among many small changes the scrolling is much improved but not quite perfect yet. Moving platforms work much better now as well.

There are some spikes but you can't get hurt yet.

Check it out and give me some feedback:

http://www.mediafire.com/?bywxwwvdm0w

DOH lol, this crappy computer can't run it... gotta wait until I can get out to the workshop and use the good computer to check it out.

"Direct X 9 is not installed blah blah blah..."

Me =

D:

>

> Obviously I'm not getting the same impression looking at her and actually those pixels are not supposed to be brows (but it may pretty well be you're right). All I can say is that it's NOT supposed to be the average cute little girl, fitting the overall mood of game (which isn't really there yet).

>

Just to clarify, this is the impression I get when looking at her face:

<img src="http://xs126.xs.to/xs126/08156/oldman601.jpg">

Again, I'm not meaning to offend. It's just the way I see it. It could very well be just me, you know, like one of those two faces/vase optical illusions or something.

When the pixels are zoomed way in like that though, the old-man illusion sort of loses it's effect on me, and it does look more like a girl. It's just the small version that makes me think "old man." Or maybe "old Russian woman."

...

....

HAHAHAHAHA LOLLOLOLOL!!!

But yeah, you're right. It looks like an old woman

Finally I understand what deadeye is seeing.

Where he put the eyes there's actually supposed to be the nose which is pointing up. The brows are the eyes... I didn't see it before, now I can. I never thought of the 2 pixels on each side of the nose as eyes.

Anyway, it's not unlikely I will change the sprite to something like this:

<img src="http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/9094/girlheadar2.png">

I guess it would look much less confusing... hehe.

Much better.

But, we need something like this :

<img src="http://img02.picoodle.com/img/img02/4/4/18/f_oldman601m_dbcf2c7.jpg">

Much better.

But, we need something like this :

<img src="http://img02.picoodle.com/img/img02/4/4/18/f_oldman601m_dbcf2c7.jpg">

OMG NO! It's return of Terro...

Long story short, I was admin of my very own boards with hundreds of IDIOTS posting crap by the minute... I threw the towel in because the morons decided to chew on the hand that fed them... one of the guys name was Terro, and he ALWAYS used to post that exact smiley face but in GIANT SIZE. It haunts me still...

/rant

:awesome: face is not amused by your post

<derail>

OMG NO! It's return of Terro...

Long story short, I was admin of my very own boards with hundreds of IDIOTS posting crap by the minute... I threw the towel in because the morons decided to chew on the hand that fed them... one of the guys name was Terro, and he ALWAYS used to post that exact smiley face but in GIANT SIZE. It haunts me still...

/rant

The History of Awesome Face:

Like many once-funny but now tired internet memes, the Awesome Face started at Something Awful. It was originally a simple, innocuous smiley with the tag :awesome:

As with most good things people ran it into the ground, though in this case faster than usual. SA was divided into two camps: those who used it in every post, and those who were absolutely sick to death of it.

It spawned many variants (example).

Eventually the moderators got so sick of seeing it that they changed the :awesome: tag to a smiley depicting a nerd regarding a large erection, and changed the Awesome Face smiley to the tag :iamafag:

Right around the time it died at SA the rest of the internet picked it up and has been flogging that dead horse ever since. While not as infamous as "i herd u liek mudkips," "IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAND," or "Do a barrel roll," it's still a horrible meme and anyone who uses it should be terribly ashamed, unless it's done in an ironic fashion as I'm sure SuperV meant it to be

</derail>

SoldjahBoy is right as stated in rule nr.5

Yet on this forum we have rules 7 and 8

Lets try not to bring 4chan memes or other internet "fun" stuff becouse it gets boring and stupid.

SuperV RULE 1!

I'm tempted to edit Doppel's avatar and put the awesome face on it.

I'm tempted to edit Doppel's avatar and put the awesome face on it.

Like this?

<img src="http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/9639/avatarawesomern7.png">

Win.

Anyway, stop derailing the thread.

I still think that gravity should be a little higher.

[quote:2l8r28bx]

I still think that gravity should be a little higher.

Good that you guys are coming back to topic. I was a little worried about that smiley nonsense...

Didn't really notice that it was this long since I last posted about my game...

Well it's still there although I had a really long break from working on it. But I'm back on track now.

<img src="http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/5851/llashot5bbcb0.png">

I added quite some stuff like slopes and different enemies, new tiles and sprites... and well, stuff .

One of the enemies chases the player and tries to jump him in order to suck his blood and you will have to have a good timing to get rid of it once it's stuck on you. It's the smallish thing in the lower left corner of the wip screen and its behavior is based on Deadeye's enemy AI example, thx for that btw!

Had a pretty hard time making those enemies work on slopes. Although I had a very simple solution at first which seemed to work perfectly in a standalone cap. It kind of broke in my game cap, resulting in the enemy getting stuck sometimes when moving from slopes to solid again. I still can't explain why this happened but I finally seem to have a workaround for this problem.

Just recently I ran into a much bigger problem: the framerate drops dramatically causing the whole game to feel very laggy. Sometimes it's even like the player is teleporting instead of proper moving through the level.

I compared it to the cap from the last beta build for my testers, which was still perfectly smooth. Major difference: 197 events as opposed to 348 in the most recent cap. Which means I added 151 events in the last two weeks. And something I added or changed was really bad for the performance.

But I can't quite think of the cause since I mainly added events regarding enemy behaviors while the custom engine remained the same for the most part. I compared the CPU usage too: It's about 20-30% for the older version and 40-50% for the newest one. Pretty damn big difference if you ask me.

Well I don't suspect that it's just too many events or loops. My believe is that Construct is capable of handling a lot. Still I'd like to know if somebody experienced something similar with event-heavy caps or certain events which tend to slow down games significantly. So if you have any experience with this or a similar issue I'd love to hear about that. Till then I'm continuing to investigate the big bad slowdown originator.

The main culprits could be:

• Lots of shaders (doesn't look like it from screenshot)
• Lots of nested loops with lots of objects (for each A, for each B with 200 instances of A and B = 40,000 iterations per tick = about 3 million a second)
• Unwise use of RTS pathfinding (if you're using it)

Send the cap over to me and I'll run it through the profiler and see whats the main problem.

Still, artwork looks great, can't wait