Yo!
Not bad. This is what everybody is supposed to be able to crank out with Java 3D but what we haven’t really seen all that much of. I suppose you already have had a look at http://www.flyingguns.com/ same genre and quite good.
I guess someone will say it so it might just as well be me. You should consider making it java web startable! You’ll get a lot more ppl at this forum testing it that way, plenty of tutorials out there.
A bit modest framerate at 15 - 30 fps on 1.8GHz P4 with ATI 9600, winXP and Java 1.5, especially considering that there are very few objects to look at. I think it is necesary though to have some more ground objects, because I had a hard time of “feeling” what altidude I was at, especially with most objects single colored or faint gradient. I would all of a sudden smash into the ground while thinking that I was way above ground level…
Better AI would also be really nice. Right now they just scatter away and crash or fly off the map, so no real dogfighting going on.
It also seems like there is no gravity in the game, is that right? I seem to be going just as fast straight up as straight down, or it might be that I miss the sence of speed because the few objects thing.
If you roll 90 degrees I expect the plane to start turn, even without pressing the down button.
After pessing an arrow button, the plane continnues to pitch/roll. It would be nice if “the stick” would auto center itself so that it would stop rolling/pitching.
Textures would be nice on planes and ground.
Maybe different colors on the radar indicating if enemy is above or below player. Difficult enough to get close to them as it is right now.
Didn’t try the networked option, so can’t say anything about that.
It’s probably up to your interest in flightsims if you should continnue or not. Right now it feels more like an OK tech demo than a game, but better “plane feeling” and better AI might make it more fun to play right away. At the same time, the framerate has to be improved a bit, and that is probably not a trivial thing to do.
Keep us posted on the progress!
I just want to find out if it’s worth me carrying on with, recoding it, or just scrapping it):