Scrolling Game Development Kit Forum
SGDK Version 1 => Projects => Topic started by: Jam0864 on 2006-08-19, 05:09:13 AM
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Yeh well i'm making this game Platformania i called it Platformania because its a Platform game its set in the future and humans have evolved now they can jump really high perform magic and some other things i've finished 5 levels and so far it's pretty cool all your weaponry is magic like throwing fireballs iceballs and and wierd green things i havent given a name fireballs kill most things but some enemies like fire and it makes them stronger ice balls freeze enemies making them immobilized and the wierd green things i havent given a name turn enemies into frogs worms flies and other useless animals that dont kill you you can drive a car in certain parts use a jet pack and a spaceship id say im about halfway through making it
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I like it! I hope there are challenges/quests to keep the player engaged... like possibly having to acquire those powers one by one.
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Sounds cool, but what happened to the motorbike game? :P
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I wonder, have you ever heard of a grammatical punctuation mark called the period?
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I was waiting for someone to say that, presumably you durnurd ;).
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like possibly having to acquire those powers one by one.
yeh ive got it so you get a new power every couple levels i originally made this game to test out a lot of things that i didnt know and i had a lot of different types of games i wanted to make so i put them all in one game thats why theres cars and spaceships jet packs and by the way i just made it so you could use a motorbike today because i wanted to make the motorbike game but wanted to finish this also ;D and the head following thing didnt work but it was worth a try now its and 8 directional sprite
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I wonder, have you ever heard of a grammatical punctuation mark called the period?
Yeh but i never use them
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It makes reading the things you write three times easier (that's a lot!) when you do use some form of seperation.
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Yeh but i never use them
Oh really?*go back and reads your posts* huh, I never noticed.
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I suppose several people (myself included) have some part of grammar/punctuation they choose no to use for some time. I think capitalization was mine for at least a year...
Sounds like the game has lots of variety. Can't wait to see it in action. Good luck!
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My motorbike graphics sucked so i drew an quad bike it doesn't look like a quad bike but since its in the future ill just call it something else ;D ;D ;D
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I've just put engine sounds for the car and quad it's fairly easy surprisingly ;D
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At the moment it's 30mb. (uncompressed) Does anyone have some ideas to make the file sizes smaller. ???
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What file format are you using for audio? For your tilesets?
If possible, use compressed formats for these. Instead of using High-quality WAV or MP3 files, use WMA or OGG files. Instead of BMP files, use GIF or JPG files (as long as they work). The downside to using JPG files is that they don't tile well.
Don't have excess black space in your tilesets. If it's too tall, shorten it. If it's too wide, make it skinnier (using the Tile slicer from the tools menu). This is a huge space-waster.
If you have a lot of very similar large tiles, with only a small difference, you can simply create the large tile once, and create a smaller tileset and another layer over top of the layer with larges tiles to show the diferences. This will also allow you to create more varying tiles.
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30mb...wow, how long have you been working on this game?
um...when you create a new tileset, if you know there only going to be like 4 tiles in it, dont leave it at the default amount of tiles...
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with the black space i'm getting rid of it at the end. The music files are MP3. I thought WMA took about the same amount of space as MP3. (whats OGG) and i thought gamedev only takes BMP files so tilesets are all BMP. I've been working on the game for about 2 months.
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GameDev supports all of the image formats that VB6 supports by default, including BMP, GIF, and JPG.
WMA files, if compressed properly, can be much smaller than MP3 files and still sound better too, because it uses a smart compression algorithm to get rid of the stuff we don't hear, rather than getting rid of a little bit of data everywhere indiscrimately.
OGG Vorbis files are an alternative to MP3, except better. I don't really know what else to say about them... it's an entirely open-source, free audio codec that doesn't behave stupidly like MP3 does some times, and gets better compression too. It's much more ideal for video games, since they are quick to load and don't take up much memory to play. The only downside is that it's not a codec that's distributed with windows or with GameDev 1.x, so you'd have to distribute that along with your game. Many newer games use OGG files as audio, including Doom 3 (first on that came to mind), which comes with its own system for playing OGG files.
Here's a place to download the codec: http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/oggcodecs_0.71.0946.exe
Here's the official OGG Vorbis website: http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/
Xiph (makers of OGG Vorbis) also made an open-source video codec, Theora, which is freely distributed at http://www.theora.org/. This is another good codec, similar in quality to Vorbis, but for video instead of audio.
I'd personally recommend using BIK files for video (http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm) and Miles Audio for audio (http://www.radgametools.com/mssdown.htm), but those aren't supported by GameDev1.x at all, or any other game development kits that I know of. These are tools, formats, and APIs designed specifically for gaming multimedia that are used on professional games for Windows, Linux, Mac, XBox, XBox 360, GameCube, Nintendo DS, PSP, PS2, and PS3.
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Windows Media Audio is WMA right?
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Theres something wrong with the player sprite on my new map. :-[ Whenever facing right the screen shakes. :-[ But none of the others do. :) I have no sound on this map yet. Only one layer so there's no background yet. It only happens when facing right or anything less than 20* off right.
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Theres something wrong with the player sprite on my new map. :-[ Whenever facing right the screen shakes. :-[ But none of the others do. :) I have no sound on this map yet. Only one layer so there's no background yet. It only happens when facing right or anything less than 20* off right.
I just encountered a bug i have no idea how to reproduce it.My game had all the tilesets mixed up. Say your player was a person you would end up a ground tile or something. I fixed it by using a XML backup i made earlier and overwriting every file i had used in my game and it all went back to normal. Except the map where the screen shakes I just had to delete it because my backup didn't have that map in it.
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Theres something wrong with the player sprite on my new map. :-[ Whenever facing right the screen shakes. :-[ But none of the others do. :) I have no sound on this map yet. Only one layer so there's no background yet. It only happens when facing right or anything less than 20* off right.
That might happen if your facing right sprite is too large for the size of the map display area according to the scroll margins you've specified. Check:
1) The size of the sprite
2) The width of the map display area
3) The horizontal scroll margin
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Yep that was it but i dont know why it only happened when facing right you see its the same size as facing left
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Maybe it wasn't facing right that was the problem but moving to the right into the area where the map would have started scrolling.
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I don't think so because i was playing around with it and traveled left plenty of times testing stuff to see if i could fix it
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So far the new map is pretty good. You're in a plane and you can shoot down other planes with guided missiles or bombs that you drop out the bottom of your plane. The bombs can destroy multiple enemies in one hit but are much harder to aim. I'm going to make it so they shoot back but haven't got around to it. I'm also going to make enemies that travel by ground and water. ;D
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I'm not going to make the enemies shoot back. I decided it was too much work. :-[ I have made other sprites shoot back in other levels where the enemies were in the same spot every time. In this level there's only a small amount of enemies, when you kill one a new one appears about 5000 pixels ahead. They don't appear in the same spot everytime so i'd have to make a lot of sprites to get them to shoot back regularly.
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The planes are basicly obstacles if you hit them you will fall until you hit the ground and explode. The enemy ATV's go over ramps and hit you while their airborne. If you hit these you will fall until you hit the ground and explode. You can hit the boats but it's extremely unlikely. You can crash into the ground without hitting enemies and you can sink in the water
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30mb?!!! thats a lot... right click the files and see witch ones hogging the most space... btw... wuts this about this word "grammmer"? ;D does "thats" bug you? or "btw" ?
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It's the music files hogging all the space. I'm going to try OGG.
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And now it's 35MB
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I can't get OGG to work, i downloaded the codec and i couldn't play any OGG files. I tried putting it in the same folder as Windows Media Player. I clicked a button in that folder to check for updates in the Media Player folder and it still didn't work. I understand that it's probably more complicated than that. Anyone know how to get it working? ???
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Didn't the OGG codec come in the form of an installer that you run and it installs itself? What kind of file did you get? Where did you get it? I haven't tried OGG myself, but I might be able to at least ask the right questions to help you out.
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It's an NSIS installer and i got it from http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/oggcodecs_0.71.0946.exe
and when i installed it I thought OGG would play in Windows Media Player or Real Player but neither worked.
so that's when I tried other stuff such as, copying the codec into the folders that Media Player and Real Player were installed into. But nothing worked. :( >:( :-[ :'(
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What version of Media Player are you using?
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I am using version 10.0.0.3931
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How about MIDI? Can you get a free program that converts to MIDI?
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OGG is an audio format. MIDI is a Musical Instrument Digital Interface format. Which means they are completely incompatible. There are programs out there that will "listen" to your music and attempt to find the notes in it and convert it to MIDI, but that only works it it's simple music playing one or a few notes at a time using one instrument. No talking or sound effects, obviously, and no percussion. Pretty much, if you can't get OGG to work on your computer, you probably won't find it easy to get it to work on others' computers either, so you should just stick with .MP3 or MP3-encoded .WAVs.
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OGG is an audio format. MIDI is a Musical Instrument Digital Interface format. Which means they are completely incompatible. There are programs out there that will "listen" to your music and attempt to find the notes in it and convert it to MIDI, but that only works it it's simple music playing one or a few notes at a time using one instrument. No talking or sound effects, obviously, and no percussion. Pretty much, if you can't get OGG to work on your computer, you probably won't find it easy to get it to work on others' computers either, so you should just stick with .MP3 or MP3-encoded .WAVs.
I couldn't get OGG to work that's why I was going to try MIDI. I wasn't going to try and convert to OGG using a MIDI program. I was just going to try using MIDI and forget about OGG.
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Then I guess I wonder why you asked about a program that converts to MIDI?
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I've just started making a website. :) It's a geocities free website. I wanted to call it jamproductions but that and about 25 other names I tried were already used, that annoyed the hell out of me >:( >:( >:( so eventually I tried a name that I knew no-one would choose. ;)
http://www.geocities.com/jamesgardnerrulz/index.html?1158297157421
I just started it today and there's not much there yet.
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Then I guess I wonder why you asked about a program that converts to MIDI?
Ok, let me rephrase that. Does anyone know of a program that can change the format of an audio file to MIDI?
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why dont you try looking...ie. google...
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MIDI is a pretty unique format. I'm not sure what you'd want to convert from. The only other practical format I can think of is MOD, but I doubt you have MOD files you want to convert. If you want a MIDI file, you pretty much have to create or download a MIDI file to start with. If I were to compare it to GameDev, it would be like asking if there's a program to convert a game into GDP format. You can't really do that from any arbitrary game. You kind of have to start with the game in GameDev/GDP format... or re-create the game manually as a GameDev project.
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Alright I see your point.
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(crude way)
you can always rename the file *.mid ;D though, it's not very compatible most of the time...
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(crude way)
you can always rename the file *.mid ;D though, it's not very compatible most of the time...
I tried that and nothing changed. It stayed exactly the same, apart from the fact it had a different name.
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OK, I've just started to make file sizes smaller. :D I changed pictures from BMP to JPEG and now my game doesn't work. :'( It's looking for tilesets with .BMP extension. I could always just change them back to BMP but that adds about 9MB to the total file size. I'm sure people would prefer a quick download to a slow one. ;) Does anyone have an idea that could make SGDK look for JPEG instead of BMP? ???
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Open the GDP file innotepad and change the ".BMP"s to ".JPG"s.
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That works perfectly! Thanks!
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Platformania is finished!!! ;D Bluemonkmn I don't have a place to host, I've got a website but I only know how to upload images not games. :-[ Is it OK to E-mail it to you? ???
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WAHOO!!! ;D ;D ;D 100th post!
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Platformania is finished!!! ;D Bluemonkmn I don't have a place to host, I've got a website but I only know how to upload images not games. :-[ Is it OK to E-mail it to you? ???
Don't attach it to an email, but just send me an email requesting a place to upload your project. I will reply with instructions on uploading the project to an FTP server. How familiar are you with FTP?
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Also, if you don't get an email reply from me within a couple days, post a follow-up here to check that I got it. Some people email me at the wrong address or their email doesn't get through for whatever reason, but I ususally check my email twice a day and should be able to reply pretty quickly (except on some weekends when I'm out of town).
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How familiar are you with FTP?
I have no idea what FTP is.
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Platformania is now posted in the project listing at http://gamedevprj.sf.net/ (http://gamedevprj.sf.net/).
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Has anyone found the secret level? I don't think anyone will ever find it, there's a hint in the README file.
Comments and questions are welcome, just send to my E-mail address by clicking on the picture of an envelope. Or there's a link on my site for E-mails. The web address is at the bottom of this message.
http://www.geocities.com/jamesgardnerrulz
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This game is cool. Especaially when using the cheat ;D. And how far are you on finishing the full game.
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This game is cool. Especaially when using the cheat ;D. And how far are you on finishing the full game.
Thanks for the feedback. The full version is finished, it just doesn't have a very good ending and seems unfinished. I got so sick of making it and I knew if I didn't stop on level 7 I would never finish.
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Surprisingly, Platformania has had 108 downloads. :o 93 from here, 15 from my website.
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I sent Platformania in to download.com about a month ago. I got an E-mail 3 days ago saying it is active on download.com. In those 3 days, My sites hits doubled and there has been 168 downloads from download.com so now the total downloads is 237. Have a look for yourself.
(http://www.pivothost.org/upload/v2/Jam0864/Platformaniaetm5.gif)
I was amazed when I saw this. 168 downloads in 3 days. This is crazy!
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Hey, that's pretty cool. And if people get interested enough to want to try creating their own games, all the better for SGDK too ;D.
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I just checked how many downloads it had today to see if it had 1000 yet......It has 1124! ;D That's if you add up tha amount of downloads from this site, download.com and my site.