61

Development Progress / So Alpha is delayed, but don't worry - not that much :)

« Last post by gumix on May 31, 2016, 01:50:07 pm »

Few things slowed me down, mostly providing hi-scores interface to all platforms.
Hi score data are accessible via http://ascii-patrol.com/rank.php?rank=1
It is updated and fetched by game using curl or browser by its own XHR requests.
Below is a screen shot.



Shot is made just after game over, so if player fits in hi-score table, it is centered and the new entry is highlighted.

Confirmed to work on all platforms.

62

Development Progress / Hi Scores with anti tampering validation

« Last post by gumix on May 26, 2016, 03:24:44 pm »

No graphics here, but topic I think is quite interesting.

Ascii Patrol records all player's key strokes during the game, later such recording is passed to the server with wget curl or in case of a browser it makes XHR request.

Then the server starts game application on its own and feeds it with key strokes recording from player. So it actualy repeats entire game-play, but of course without need to paint anything on screen or synchronize to the real time, so the process is pretty fast, about 0.5% 0.01% of real time game-play.

In that way it calculates player's score, which after positive validation, is inserted to hi-score data base.

My own experiments show that 1 hour of intensive game-play, relusts in about 100K bytes of recording data. It is almost nutting and allows to fully replay the game, so I'm going to use it also for making video gallery.

63

Development Progress / Re: New Performance Screen

« Last post by gumix on May 23, 2016, 07:55:04 pm »

And its final animated look,
with dissolving transition from game and a bit of 'motion blur'.

64

Development Progress / New Performance Screen

« Last post by gumix on May 19, 2016, 08:03:09 pm »

This one is going to replace scrolling list of killed enemies at the end of every level.
Grey values at right edge of progress bars are percents|seconds|lives to score multipliers.
Progress bars are animated (from blue to red) and score is counted up, currently 'T I M E' is progressing (yellow line).

'A R E A   C L E A R' (ratio killed/all):
From: 0%
To: 100%

'T I M E' (level game-play time):
From: theoretically shortest time possible, defined per level
To: mostly set to 2 minutes, defined per level

'S A V I N G S' (number of lives after level):
From: 0
To: lives before entering particular level

65

Development Progress / Re: Improvments & Research (audio!)

« Last post by gumix on May 19, 2016, 03:53:49 pm »

Can't be sure but probably it is. I'd also suspect some animated ads running on the other tab(s) too.
The fix simply detects a lag, in such case it doesn't let the game to advance game animation timer.
Currently threshold is set to 1/10 sec. (it is no fun to play with lower frame rates than 10Hz though).

66

General Discussion / Re: Interference fields

« Last post by gumix on May 19, 2016, 03:38:29 pm »

It's going to appear from time to time on levels 2.3 - 2.5 (story culmination for Alpha1)
More details on this is explained to player via dialogs between in game characters

67

Development Progress / Re: Improvments & Research (audio!)

« Last post by Kyzrati on May 19, 2016, 04:17:37 am »

PS, I made also a small fix for @Kyzrati suffering from GC lags in his browser

Yay . So it was the GC, after all?

68

General Discussion / Re: Interference fields

« Last post by Kyzrati on May 19, 2016, 04:16:23 am »

That looks great, a good idea. And as you have it now it certainly wouldn't be taken as a bug. This is something you'd encounter in a certain area?

69

General Discussion / Interference fields

« Last post by gumix on May 16, 2016, 09:38:57 am »

Recently, while adding story line to the game I've added some noise effects to simulate a bad connection.
The main problem with it was that player in no way would be able to deduce what's going on, it could be even received as a bug.
So I've came up with field strength hexagonal iso-lines visualsation. Looks interestnig ...
Iso-lines algorithm is adaptation of 3d marching cubes to 2d hexagonal grid, in this case should it be called a marching triangles?

70

Development Progress / Improvments & Research (audio!)

« Last post by gumix on May 12, 2016, 09:59:44 am »

During making a campaign story I just couldn't resist making some additional research.

First of all good news for Linux TTY console players. Ascii Patrol will try to use raw keyboard input so even without running X11 there is a big chance to properly detect key presses and releases. Of course it can't be used while playing over ssh or even if game is started from another app like Midnight Commander (mc).

I've been scratching my head for a long time thinking about audio support in game. After intensive experiments I've came up with an idea of implementing sound using MIDI. Can sound pretty weird by now but in this way there are big chances to have sounds even when playing game remotely via ssh over laggy internet! MIDI also makes great support on all target platforms. Only real DOS systems like FreeDOS will require a real MIDI synthesizer hardware to be present, or at least some TSR MIDI emulation process will need to be started. DOS emulators (ie: DOSBox) will simply forward MIDI commands from MPU-401 ports to the host system. Windows has its General MIDI with Roland patches, Linux can use any software synthesizer attached to ALSA (ie: timidity). Web browsers need to support Web Audio, usually they simply forward MIDI commands to the host system. And now, the bad news: audio won't be implemented in first alpha release yet as this is too big part to be implemented quickly across all platforms.

Another new feature is going to be implemented, global hi-scores. Only gameplays results starting at the very first level will take part in it. After figuring out that freedos comes by default with WGET, decided I'll use it instead of CURL to send score data to server and get current hi scores to game. Of course web platform will not make use of wget, instead it will make requests directly.

PS, I made also a small fix for @Kyzrati suffering from GC lags in his browser

Well, that's all for today, getting back to work.