Did a quick test on MacOsX 10.3.9, Java 1.4.2_05, G4 733Mhz, 1GB ram, had no problems at all. Looking very nice 
gameplay wise, what might be cool is if the enemies were slightly smarter, as in instead of just moving towards you, they could gang up and come from different directions just to get you! (i was thinking a bit like pacman, where they cut of your escape routes)
You won’t be thinking that on level 20…
I’m trying to broaden its appeal by making it much easier for the first few levels. The difficulty ramps fairly linearly and it’s tuned to how good you are as well (formula is maxbottype = level * 2 + gun fire rate + (shields > 5 ? shields - 5 : 0) + bonus multiplier - 1)
in other words if you’re good enough to start accumulating the bonus multiplier and / or shields it ramps up in difficulty much faster.
Cas
…more updates!
Beware the bosses now!
Cas
Patterns! ;D
Fixed pitch numbers in the highscore!
And you can also use the mouse in the menus. Great!
But it looks like I cannot submit highscores. It behaves like it’s working but the score doesn’t show up at the end. The console also doesn’t indicate any problems.
edit: mh works now… odd (meh meh meh)
edit: doesn’t work again (onyx)
Actually the hiscores have always worked that way, they’re just a bit confusing, so I need to put up some feedback about what’s happening.
Basically to stop the hiscore table looking like this:
- BAZ
- BAZ
- BAZ
- BAZ
- BAZ
- BAZ
- BAZ
- BAZ
… - BAZ
what it does is check to see if you have submitted a score under that name & unique installation ID before, and if you didn’t beat that score, it doesn’t go up on the hiscore table.
Cas
It currently seems much easier than the first, which is a good thing for me cos I died very quickly in that one and this one I last for a couple of levels…
That’s the idea. And it will probably get even easier. But fear not! It has a built in difficulty adjuster. If you’re good it rapidly gets hard as hell. And your scores soar.
Cas
@princec, just wanted to say I think thats a great idea what your doing with the high score list, I almost suggested something to you before cause I was annoyed with getting my name all over the list on puppytron.
edit: just realized you said thats how they always worked… didn’t seem like it when I was playing puppytron though(when you first released a playable demo).
[quote][…]
what it does is check to see if you have submitted a score under that name & unique installation ID before, and if you didn’t beat that score, it doesn’t go up on the hiscore table.
[/quote]
But it said I was on 12th place and it doesn’t added that one with the name “oNyx” and there wasn’t another “oNyx” somewhere else before that. I explictly looked for that, because I assumed that you used something like that 
Either way… you could add some kind of message, which tells the user what happened. Like “you didn’t beat your old score”.
I’m planning on doing that, yes.
It doesn’t do the check just on name, btw, it also checks your installation ID as well. Which means if you play it at work as well as home you’ll have two hiscores.
There’s a hidden feature I haven’t implemented fully yet which is “score groups” - you can effectively give yourself a private online hiscore table (say, for your chums in the office ;))
Cas
I just tried it on my Windows XP box.
Dual 1.7GHz Xeon
GeForce FX 5200
512 MB RAM
I like it but…
- Someone needs to take away your glow filter
- Backgrounds could be a bit more subdued
- It feels much slower than PuppyTron
Is there a way to display the FPS. It felt like it got slow a few times… but with the powerups adjusting fire rates and all, it was hard to keep track of. I sort of thought that I was playing at half speed for the whole game.
I’m going to try it on the Powerbook (1GHz G4, 768MB, ATI Radeon 9000 Mobile) in a moment… I suspect it may be slow there…
It’s half the speed of Puppytron but should still be 60fps… if not, we have a problem 
Or more particularly, you have a problem I’ll add an FPS counter in the next build.
Cas
Playing on linux…
first time through got the “You need a sound card…” warning box, and then no sound in the game
Subsequently got the warning box again, but sound worked.
Good points - Great game, and my default browser (konqueror) was opened to view Puppygames rather than firefox - nice
Bad points - please use dot files/directories for your config and logging, it’s mildly annoying to have your home directory cluttered up. oh, and you can’t close the game during the loading/progress bar bit.
Noted.
Cas
Tried it on the Mac… plays the same as the PC.
I don’t find it as “fun” as Puppytron though. Maybe it is just the speed. I’ll try a different balance of power-ups… I was probably being to greedy on the mega bonus
Final beta before gold is up!
All thats missing is the right music and a couple of sound effects.
Let me know what you think…
Cas
Looks good.
When you submit a highscore the stuff at the bottom is somewhat garbled… see here:
http://kaioa.com/k/ultratronsubmit.jpg
Right after submitting everything is ok again.
No slowdowns or whatsoever… except a jws zombie, which I had to kill manually… hmm…
win2k (sp 4), k7 500, 256mb, radeon 9100 (64mb catalyst 5.5), jre 1.5.0_03
Very addictive!
but every time (!) the game launches your site in the browser I get this message from my virus-scanner
C:\DOCUME~1\ADMIN\LOCALS~1\TEMP\C27D8FEF-D7AE-42C0-82E6-F30598265639.EXE
Is the Trojan horse TR/Cleaner.A
Edit: This is the URL that is opened:
Edit 2:
Loading that URL manually in the browser doesn’t give me that warning. Only if Ultratron launches it.
Apparently there’s some problem with some virus checker or something that mistakes some file for, er, something else. Or something. I don’t know.
Cas