I think the reason you didn’t see the slow down is because I reakon its fixed!!! Woo hoo! Taken me longer to find that one bug than anything else in the renderer 
Keep the good ideas coming, I assume we’ll still be going once the contest is dead and buried.
Kev
Ran fine, not a huge fan of the controls. How about a targeting reticule that stays on screen and signals what direction you are shooting in. Using the mouse you can rotate this aiming reticule to change fire direction. You then move was WASD or UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT. Similar to a game I played awhile back and really enjoyed (Crimson Sand or something like that).
OFF TOPIC: Kevin - Snow Patrol is iTunes free song of the week. Really enjoyed it. It was Run from Final Straw.
[quote]Ran fine, not a huge fan of the controls. How about a targeting reticule that stays on screen and signals what direction you are shooting in. Using the mouse you can rotate this aiming reticule to change fire direction. You then move was WASD or UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT.
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Yeah, this was my preferred system from the start (*). We just haven’t had time! And still much to do in the way of gameplay to add in the next 36 hours!
Maybe if enough people ask Kev nicely enough, he’ll somehow pull the time and energy out of the hat to be able to add some extra controls options.
(*): we decided not to implement it first since the current system was a more basic easy-to-get-running-and-test one (bearing in mind we do not use the mouse anywhere in the game at the moment, it was one less thing to worry about!)
One more thing I wanted to mention… the HUD does not stay with the camera when you zoom in and out. It would be nice to be able to zoom out and still read the HUD information.
Keep it up! Looking good.
Can I just clear up what you guys are talkng about here? Are we saying free form firing direction? Or just 8 directions but controllable via mouse?
It might or might not get in 
Kev
I was talking Free Form (360 directions). However, if it was even 8 to start with that would be preferrable to the current (IMHO).
Yes, I was thinking just 8 to start with - and see how it goes. 360 would of course be nice, but if 8 turns out “good enough” then we can move on to other stuff instead…
aha, now i feel much better: the controls are discussed to get changed !
dont know if you know the (former free) project ‘crimsonland’.
its a very fun game with the mentioned controls of mouse aiming and keyboard moving. this controlling is nearly perfect and i think eight ways would suit for the beginning
yepp, but i have to mention that the version i have is (of course) the old free one. after that i played only a demo. but the point is, that the game consisted only of a very little world, thousends of dozens of enemies and the good weapon control. never had so much fun for short time. but after a while i wished to get into real levels with indoor missions etc. perhaps your game is on the way to that
s’cool, but its too easy, I find just standing in a corner (say the bottom right) and all the enemies come from either the top or the left, so al I have to do is A/W! Cleared the whole tempest level this way. But good work blah^3. Its kinda cheating on my part! 
OK, the webstart was updated a couple of hours ago with:
The last item is in expectation that we will add weapon powerups.
We could really do with some feedback on this version - especially is it too hard to be fun? Is it about right? Note that in previous versions many rooms have been “too easy” although I’d already made a fewer extra hard to even this up BEFORE we doubled the hitpoints of all the monsters, so I might have to scale it down again.
It kind of depends on whether we get powerups in in time for the compo deadline - without powerups i guarantee that temple is currently impossible to complete (or else I’d love to hear how you did it! Send me or Kev a private message…).
PS Blah’s hot tip: When you shoot a monster, that reduces it’s hit points (obvious!); but, when they hit you, the amount of damage you suffer is reduced by how much damage you had already done to them.
[quote]s’cool, but its too easy, I find just standing in a corner (say the bottom right) and all the enemies come from either the top or the left, so al I have to do is A/W! Cleared the whole tempest level this way. But good work blah^3. Its kinda cheating on my part!
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Do you have the “monsters need two shots to kill” version yet?
Did you manage to clear Cloisters and Dome this way? Or just one of them? I think I made a mistake in the current version of Temple, and left Cloisters as the final room - this is an accident; it’s now intended as the penultimate room (Dome should be the final room but I think I forgot to select it in the level editor; Dome is about 1.5-2 times harder than Cloisters).
PS I am so frickin glad that we put in room names in the basic design, or it would have made testing and feedback really painful! FYI as it happens, they are actually a core part of the game - teleporters etc use the names of rooms to decide where to send you.
PS to anyone who’s not realised yet: please do not play pyramid for now - play temple instead. I haven’t even tested pyramid for the last 9 - 10 updates at all! (and it was only half-done when I added it)
I get a java runtime error and the program crashes. I see the menu screen for about half a second, the screen flickers and it dies. Does this happen to anyone else?
[quote]I get a java runtime error and the program crashes. I see the menu screen for about half a second, the screen flickers and it dies. Does this happen to anyone else?
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Please do the following:
Wait five minutes and try again (Sun’s Webstart implementation has some serious problems if you are unlucky enough to try playing just at the same time as the authors are uploading a new version - if you get any REALLY fatal crash, like the window disappearing, it’s probably because webstart only downloaded half of the update).
Find your Java Web Start (JWS) program. (in windows, go to Programs - > Java Web Start; in linux, run /usr/java/jdkXXX/jre/javaws/javaws where jdkXXX is whatever you installed to. You can type “which java” on the command line in linux which will give you a very strong hint what your directory is called).
In the JWS program, go “File -> Preferences” and find the option to save a logfile (you have to specify a file somewhere and give it a name). Click OK then run Survivor again (you can just double click on it from within JWS and it will run automatically).
After it crashes, open that file you created and copy/paste it into a message to me or Kev (just click on one of our names in one of our posts).
it was cloisters, replaying now!, well, recheating now if that sounds possible. As for your first question, the monsters with two kills, I dunno, as I choose the dude who fires fast. Brb, playing it again
replayed dome, nice level, still easy tho, soz blah^3, i dont mean to put you off, its a nice game and all, but unless you somehow manage to put respawning positions across everysingle part of the wall, then there’s no way you can stop me from doing so. Unless you get better AI, because its the AI thats letting me do it. Let me explain:
You find a sweet spot (not that hard to find really) where the alien dudes cant come at you from an angle, that forces them to “home” in on either the X/Y plane that is nearer to them. Let me explain more:
Say the alien dude si at position (5, 100), and your at position (0, 0). The Alien dude will go at you at a diagonal until his X plane matches the players. Thats say (0, 95). Then the alien’s y starts descreasing and thats when they come at you from the top, similar situation is from the sides.
The place where you dont want to be is somewhere like (0, 0) and the respawn is (25, 25) because they will come at you diagonally.
Hope thats helps blah^3 and kev and the rest.
Darkprophet: well done - we’re going to have to change the gameplay in honour of your tactic!
Even in dome - IF you use Charlie - your tactic is foolproof.
In our defence, I will add that the current AI is moronic: it was only added as a temporary measure cos our main AI was running too slow (a bug we haven’t fixed yet 
). This moronic AI always approaches you directly from a compass direction - our intended AI approaches from random directions which would have defeated your tactic :D.
Unfortunately, unless we fix the performance bug, we’ll have to go with a cheap hack for now (not enough time!). I think what we’ll do is make you take damage every 2 seconds you stay still or similar…Muahahahaha…that makes it considerably trickier.
Keep the feedback coming! ;D
[quote]replayed dome, nice level, still easy tho, soz blah^3, i dont mean to put you off, its a nice game and all, but
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Thanks - we had planned to have 4 weeks for game-testing, but various disasters reduced that to the 4 days we actually have so all help at this point is appreciated!.
And that, my MMOG-developing friends, is an excellent example of what I’ve said many times before: Whatever algorithms you use for every part of your game, if it’s popular they’ll ALL quickly be reverse-engineered by your players ;).
DP’s analysis is spot on. Formalise that into source code and you have our current AI routine. Now you see why I called it “moronic” :P.