Quix - Early build

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#21

[quote]I’ve updated the code so it should (hopefully) be a bit better at creating the display now, it’ll automatically fall back to a window if fullscreen fails, and it’ll try 0Hz modes as well if any are found.
[/quote]
Completes ****ed up this windows PC. First it changed to fullscreen (black then white) from 1024x768, then it switched down to 800x600 with the webstart window saying something about it trying a mode, then it just crashed, and I had a 800x600 area of screen at top left of screen that was black and overlayed the whole of windows including the cursor.

I had to kill the app with task manager to get rid of the black square overlay.

Prior to that, alt-tabbing to it just showed a completely blank white screen.

Trying to run windowed was similarly bad, it just made a 800x600 window which was all white. Nothing happened.

EDIT: 1800 Ghz (or something faster - effectively 2ghz I’m told) athlon with GF4MX and windows 1.4.2_04 (because of sun’s stupid crap piece of sh** java for windows updater won’t let me upgrade it to _05)

#22

(because of sun’s stupid crap piece of sh** java for
windows updater won’t let me upgrade it to _05)

???

Just uninstall it (old one) and install it again (new one). That’s what I always do.

#23

Fullscreen works now :slight_smile:

If you select 0hz the default refreshrate for that mode is selected, isn’t it?

#24

[quote]Completes ****ed up this windows PC.
[/quote]
Arse. Have you tried any other LWJGL apps on that machine? Looking at my code I don’t really see how I can fix that, if I don’t get some kind of LWJGL exception tripped then I’m kinda stuck. :-[

#25

[quote]>(because of sun’s stupid crap piece of sh** java for

windows updater won’t let me upgrade it to _05)

???

Just uninstall it (old one) and install it again (new one). That’s what I always do.
[/quote]
Not my PC, and the guy whose it is insists on just using the “standard” installers etc. Shrug. I can understand that, having seen the occasional screwed-up windows machine e.g. with two JVM’s both of which have ostensibly been removed but are still present (no idea how it ended up like that, but I have seen it!)

#26

Um, not recently. Although it was the machine I borrowed most often to play AF, and it never had problems with that, so…

(but note since it’s not mine it may have had hardware changes since then. I’ll let you know next time I or they play LWJGL…)

#27

Fun game, ran smooth. Nice transitions and effects :slight_smile:

p4 2.4ghz, gf4, 256mb ram, java 1.5 beta3

#28

Version has been updated with a better glow filter. I’ve been tinkering with the editor and Spaghetti all week, so theres not really any other visual changes.

The options should let you choose between the glow quality. Low will still have the bleeding problem (but should be somewhat better). High looks loverly but tends to bog the framerate down a bit on my machine.

#29

More updates:

  • Started adding some proper sprites instead of just coloured blocks.
  • Extra level added. Includes the scarecrow bonus item (see below).
  • Added and extra ‘scarecrow’ bonus item
  • Added an extra ‘gem’ bonus item.
  • Added burst particle effects when picking up bonus items.

The Scarecrow is still a little experimental, basically you pick them up like normal bonus items. When you’ve collected one (or more) you can use ‘x’ to place one. Press x again while touching one to pick it up to reuse it. Critters will try and avoid the scarecrows when they’re placed, so you can herd them with a bit more control than just randomly chasing them.

I think I overdosed on the particle effects on the new level though… :-[

#30

I assume the sliding graph thing is like an FPS meter, except higher is worse and lower is better :slight_smile: Any time you use any sort of effects, like the opening of the menu or transitions or loading a new game, the meter goes off the top of the screen and the stuff runs at like 2fps, maybe 3. The game itself runs at 2-3 fps constantly. It never speeds up even if I’m not doing anything.

I’m on a 2ghz Windows XP box. I had SP1 and got these results, and I installed SP2 yesterday and I’m still getting them. My JRE version is 1.4.2_05. I assume the poor speed is due to my graphics card. It says it’s an OpenGL based 64meg 3D card, but it’s a laptop card, so it’s not that great. I can run AlienFlux beautifully with no stutters anywhere, but unfortunately Quix is unplayable for me :frowning:

#31

Yeah, the graph is the fps like you said, with lines indicating the 30 and 60 fps marks. I wouldn’t worry too much about the low fps in the transitions, I havn’t had time to optimise them much.

But you should really be getting more than that in the game itself. Since they’re both doing pretty heavy render-to-texture stuff then that might be the problem. Try setting the glow quality to low in the options, that should help some.

#32

that did help some, but the FPS line was still right through the middle of my screen. It was still very slow.

#33

I was planning an update tonight, but my hosting is playing silly buggers. So the mix of old and new files means that Quix is broken until further notice. :frowning:

#34

Theres a new Quix build up :slight_smile: New additions:

Linux version! Using the new .92 LWJGL build. Should work fine, but untested. I’d appreciate if people told me how it runs on linux.
Glow options Better, faster, bigger. Options to turn the glow off completely for slow systems, or whack the quality up for those with big beefy graphics cards. Automatically makes use of more graphics card features so should be generally faster and better quality than before.
Improved critter behaviour Critters are now more timid and prone to scaring if you run straight at them. They’ll also become paralised with fear if their path takes them straight into a player or scarecrow. The up side of this being that scarecrows are much more useful. :slight_smile:
And lots of little changes that probably only I’ll notice.

[i]NOTE![/i] I’ve had to update the jnlp files for the new lwjgl files. While that shouldn’t be a problem, webstart has a tendancy to cling to old, cached, jnlp files when it shouldn’t. If you get missing file errors try flushing your webstart cache.

#35

Runs great after I removed the previous Quix installation. The glowing effect and all the particles are a great effect, but a bit much. Espially with glow on highest quality it all becomes very blurry and sometimes hard to make out where you are, but I guess this is probably on purpose in this stage right?
One thing I noticed though: on my machine in full-screen mode it runs slightly less smooth than in windowed mode (I can see regular spikes pointing down in the graph only in full-screen). But maybe that’s just nvidia with their ever degrading drivers… (Running on GF4 Ti4200).
But it seems it could become a fun game!

#36

'rangy - always post the JNLP url when you’ve got a new version, it’s a pain having to go back to page 1 to get it…

Cas :slight_smile: (becoming ever more lazy)

#37

mipmapped didn’t work for me at all - just a white screen.
Turned up quality - DAMN!
perhaps a bit too flashy! - and sound is really lacking :confused:

btw, I got stuck in the map a couple of times - could just jump out of it though. Has a nice feel to it - like the shephearding theme, though last map was tricky!

#38

Thanks for the feedback :slight_smile:

Odd to hear that fullscreen is slower - on my machine fullscreen ends up being the faster of the two. But then I’m running some fairly old nvidia drivers. The glow quality slider probably goes a bit too high at the moment, you probably don’t want it any further than halfway otherwise you’ll end up blinded. :wink:

Matzon: What graphics card are you using there? The mipmaped filter uses (and should check for) GL14 'cos it needs GL14.GL_GENERATE_MIPMAP_HINT. And I’ve spotted the bug with getting stuck in the ground a couple of times myself, but I thought I was imagining it. Guess I’ll take a better look at it.

#39

using Radeon 9700 - should be common enough I think…

This is what I get when mipmapping is turned on (no matter slider setting): http://matzon.dk/brian/quix.png

#40

Thats a bit worrying, the text should be much sharper than that. Has it always been that blurry?