just changed my (unfinished) chopper game to fullscreen mode and thought it yould be nice to have a few opinions about it.
http://www.rastaduck.org/games/ProjectEscobar/ProjectEscobar.jnlp
the game tries to set its framrate to the refresh rate of the display. if your machine is too slow for that you can half the framerate by pressing the ‘h’ key (will try to automate that).
You’ve done a really good job! I like the gameplay a lot. Now add some objectives and purchaseable upgrades 
I never could get the hang of aiming the Vulcan gun though. The other two weapons worked for me just fine. Keep up the good work! 
thx. i know, there are still tons of features to add.
i posted this once again to find out how the framerate adjustment works on other machines.
on my box it runs pretty good, but i have slight stutters in the screen although i try to reach exactly the display refresh rate with sleeping for a certain amount of nanoseconds (or even better with timer ticks).
no idea why this happens. i saw other games with perfectly smooth fullscreen animation.
very. very nice! Win2k, ati radeon 9600, java 1.5
works very smooth here! WinXP // AMD Athlon 3200+ // 2.0GHz // 512MB RAM // Java 1.5
Just a slight suggestion, I wouldn’t display the ammo of all 3 weapons on the bottom at the same time. I would just display the ammo of the current weapon. That way if you had an arsenal of say… 5 weapons, you wouldn’t have to clutter up the bottom even more 
btw, I love the explosion animation 
I think it crashed, but I don’t know (and don’t really care). It just had a horrible “loading sprites” screen and the bar filled up and after 2 minutes I got bored and killed it.
You’re using webstart, so you already have a download-system. If you’re going to hack together you’re own you must make it at the VERY LEAST have the same features as the built-in one you’ve decided to spurn.
That includes byte counts and a progress bar that works.
I just don’t know why people bother with hacking together their own inferior ones :(.
BlahBlahBlah… dont take this the wrong way… but you seem to have a bitter net-presence. I am sure you are perfectly nice in person, however i have yet to see you give any positive feed back on any topic you reply to.
It doesnt serve any useful purpose to provide semi-scathing replys, to both the author of the thread or the readers.
Just something to keep in mind.
the loading bar is for displaying how long it takes to preload the images and sounds into memory not from the webserver to your machine. maybe this is not the best way to do it (suggestions welcome) but it is my way of doing it.
[quote]I think it crashed, but I don’t know (and don’t really care). It just had a horrible “loading sprites” screen and the bar filled up and after 2 minutes I got bored and killed it.
You’re using webstart, so you already have a download-system. If you’re going to hack together you’re own you must make it at the VERY LEAST have the same features as the built-in one you’ve decided to spurn.
That includes byte counts and a progress bar that works.
I just don’t know why people bother with hacking together their own inferior ones :(.
[/quote]
Works fine for me. Very cool. I’ll be watching for the next version.
[quote]BlahBlahBlah… dont take this the wrong way… but you seem to have a bitter net-presence. I am sure you are perfectly nice in person, however i have yet to see you give any positive feed back on any topic you reply to.
[/quote]
Off the top of my head…read the first thread on the chopper game
Thanks for the advice.
However, people keep doing things that they think are acceptable but make many people (often most) unwilling to play their games, and unless someone points this out to them sooner rather than later they’ll suffer for it (people simply ignoring the game, starting it, giving up, and going elsewhere). It happens a lot even on this board, where people are mostly devs. The situation is obviously a lot worse in less niche places.
2 years ago I was a lot more gentle in pointing out how bad it was to e.g. force people to download the entire 20Mb JVM in order to play your 5Mb game. But over time the bar gets higher, and at the same time I have less time to gently persuade people of things and expect people to have actually read the forums and played other games and picked up on some of the minimum standards they should be aiming at.
Maybe I’m being too harsh these days. Maybe I’m just frustrated by good games that make it so hard for people to actually play them, and so are wasted. Thanks for the thoughts…
EDIT: and it’s a character trait I have (a comon one amongst devs) to not repeat what’s already been said: if several people have said a game is good already there’s no need for me to repeat it. I also grew up in the age of AOL, where you would get threads with one post and 100 posts saying “me too!”. I have latent dislike for repeating what’s already been said, unless I have something new to add.
Me too!
Kev
reaches loading weapon sounds and just stays there, don’t know, waited a while before pressing escape which exits the game!
running linux here! :’( :’( :’(
[quote]… I don’t know (and don’t really care)… … horrible “loading sprites” screen …
… hack together … a progress bar that works … I just don’t know why people bother with hacking together their own inferior ones :(.
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you have really a nice way of telling others your opinions… thx a lot.
i just don’t understand what’s wrong with a preloading bar. how would you load 2 megs of data?
[quote]reaches loading weapon sounds and just stays there, don’t know, waited a while before pressing escape which exits the game!
running linux here! :’( :’( :’(
[/quote]
unfortunately i don’t have a linux system to test. i have no idea what could go wrong at this point. can you replicate the problem?
yes, it happens every time!
ok i’ve booted into windows on the same computer and it runs fine, very nice looks to be a linux specific issue, could also explain blahblahblahh’s problem, that is if he is running linux.
I summed it up quite clearly: the user has just 2 seconds earlier seen a loading bar that uses colours + is much clearer (a sensible-sized font) + has a byte-counter to tell you it’s doing something + to tell you how much you have to wait for. Then you dump them into an almost-full-screen window with a tiny loading bar and no way of telling if it’s crashed or not. And then it hangs for several minutes. It’s really off-putting :(.
The previous demo of this game, assuming it’s the same as I think it is, was really cool so I’m more frustrated that I have this barrier thrown in my way.
Thinking about it, I’m probably more extreme about this these days because a large part of my job at the moment is “the player experience”, putting myself in the mind of the casual player and working out what in our game needs to be fixed, stripped-out, or removed to make sure they don’t run away. We have >> 20,000 players already and expecting many many more very soon so this is a big job. I obssess in my day-job about what turns people away from a game :(.
i understand what you’re trying to say but i don’t understand why you say it this way. take a look at the other guys replying. they don’t say “your game has a horrible loading bar and your work is inferior”, they say “hey, there’s a problem with this and that. you may want to check this…”
btw. who said, that the game is finished yet? read the first post and you’ll see that this is not the case.
please excuse if my priority is having a smooth animation instead of a perfect loading bar as long the game is under construction.
to all others: thanks for your comments. i’ll try and find out what the reason for the “audio device unavailable” exception is…