Mirage Source

So, I've been making (in my opinion) leaps and strides in coding new things for my game, and I've been trying to keep everyone here updated and interested. But no one seems that interested in the things I am coding for. Things like different player stats, item stats, new combat systems, algorithms that affect combat and stats, loot tables... Things I think are pretty cool and make the game unique.

But am I wrong? does anyone else have these things in the games, and adding them in just isn't a big enough deal to warrant posting? Or are you guys just focusing on features and optimizations different from my own? I admit, most of my tinkering has basically been involved in overhauling the underlying structure of the game, a part that largely goes unnoticed by the average player, but it makes for a more dynamic and fun game play experience in my opinion.

Any thoughts?

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Err.. I think everyone is just taking a back seat. Those of us that are developing games are doing so slowly in our spare time, the rest will just be randoms that check your posts for free copy and paste code, are promptly disappointed, then never come back again xD

Yeah, nobody really cared much about my Dynamic AI and shit either.
So I jsut stopped posting.

These sort of things are more for discussion in Game Development forums and such, not really programming support forums.

I'd like to think that this forum is a bit of both. We are a community of people with similar interests in programming and we all have unique ideas. I use you guys as a sounding board for my own ideas.

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Don't worry dude I'm sure pretty much everyone here will read your posts, don't be discouraged by none-responses, its a very casual forum here :]

I'm just new but at least your trying to improve the forum by posting your coding, you never know when they actually need it.

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I guess I am just used to the old times when this place and PW were a flurry of activity. I thrive on engaging in discussion and getting people interested in things and using each other for new ideas. Well, I suppose if I want that I'll just have to start using MSN more. anyone can add me if they want just for some chat while programming, PM me.

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For PW, Kael fucked up, and here, a lot of people lost interest...

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P2B Feed: Custom AI

I stopped posting and taking interest after my 3-page essay updates concerning optimised string buffers and time-saving loop bypasses went un-noticed or un-cared for.

I've found that the internet as a whole generally likes pretty graphics more than coding specifics.

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really, those Optimizing tuts seemed to be the most posted on topics in the section. I personally haven't used them yet because I want to get all of the features out of the way and working bug free before I start optimizing. But I planned on looking more in depth at those at some point.

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Yes, the forum is obsessed with saving a few ms per loop, but if you post a good looking game with some nice effects people are generally more impressed.

Personally I hate working with formulae and block chances and crap. I leave that up to my developers to sort out. I love make big new features which no one has done before

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Don't worry man, I post screenshots and such all the time and I don't get much feedback. But it's not the point to get into discussion about everything you post about the game. The real thing is when it's done and released, that's when you will get the most feedback. I just like sharing what I got sometimes or it doesn't feel that real until I release a new version so people can test it.

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Eh, I'm a math minor and physics major, so algorithms are statistics are fun for me. to me, it IS new features I'm adding, just a lot of behind the scene ones. ^_^

And I can see your point william, when I actually have a client to release I hope I get alot of attention. I plan on letting everyone know. I want people to break my game as much as possible to fix any bugs I haven't.

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Also another thing is that people on this forum don't actually play MS games, they more test them or make them.

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It is for development though...

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P2B Feed: Custom AI

oh and another thing. I could *almost* care less about how optimized the client is, because most people have a computer built this decade and it should be enough to run anything a 2D VB6 game can throw at it. (though there were a few fixes, like the CPU usage fix, that I included) I do care a lot about server optimization though, since it does a lot of heaving lifting. for example, I have the client calculate item level when editing items as opposed to the server, saves on CPU cycles for other clients.

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I'm sorry to say that you're wrong there.

Mirage uses some very heavy controls, and if you take it to the extreme (For example, the Visual Inventory tutorial) you can easily make your game unplayable on fairly mid-market computers.

Also, if you're loading 100mb worth of graphics and you don't fix the bug which makes the client load the graphics twice, you're loading 200mb+ worth of graphics, and on a computer with 128mb of RAM (Yes, they do still make them like that) then that computer is going to be raped.

Besides, look at what Mirage games are. Primitive ORPGs using 16-bit graphics. You shouldn't need over 128mb of RAM and a half-decent processor to run them.

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Oh I completely agree with you on that one. trying load huge .bmp files across several different surfaces of picboxes can easily get out of control. There are optimizations, and then there is just common sense. I'm not looking at trying to shave off milliseconds in the client game loop, but making sure that graphics are efficiently handled is just good programming practice. For instance, my algorithm for determining item level is fairly long code, and I have many If Then's and Case statements for figuring out item specials that probably increase CPU usage, but not to the point of needing anything more then an old P3 or P4 equivalent.

I guess you could just say I'm not worried too much about the details in the client, as the bottleneck like you said is in bloated graphics and VB controls that take up system memory and video card, rather then CPU cycles.

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We need a code profiler to see where the bottlenecks -really- are.

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Why not try my app, ColorEye, on your Android devlce?
Do you like social gaming? Fight it out in Battle Juice!

I am a professional software developer in Salt Lake City, UT.

No. No we don't.

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