WIP: CroAsteroids – Contest Entry

archive beta-1-game-contest
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Asteroids with a kick!



Find your way home to earth by opening wormholes using math equations while avoiding asteroids!



Destroy asteroids to get random numbers that can be collected. In order to travel to the next galaxy and eventually find your way home you need to solve the equations at the bottom of the screen and collect the correct number.



DPsuA.jpg816×638
http://i.imgur.com/DPsuA.jpg



Here is the video of the latest progress (the video quality is not that great and the sound lags a bit). I am using the free open source screen capture tool CamStudioRecorder (http://camstudio.org/) recording a window and i’ve entered my FPS (60) as the capture frequency, but still it’s not what it is locally. Got a 4 MB video that i uploaded to Youtube. In any case you’ll get a better feeling for what the game is going to be.



http://youtu.be/vOBfk2-Y24Q



Plans for the the rest of the development:

- Add particle effects to: bullets, explosion of asteroids, engine exhaust
- Make the ship constantly glide forward while being able to accelerate/de-accelerate
- Find nicer sounds and more space images
- Remodel numbers to use a better clearer looking material
- Create a level mechanism (number of equations, loading of levels, etc)
- Add a "wormhole" upon level completion
- Integrate the story line
- Add main menu
- Add intro animation
- Add background music
- Use text-to-speech software to mimic 2001: A Space Odyssey on board computer
- Add different things to pick up besides numbers (health, stronger guns, etc.)
- Add alien ships
- Upload a playable version somewhere

If you catch some time let me know what you guys think!
2 Likes
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Good Luck :slight_smile: If you need any help with the rules, just ask!



The game looks nice, but I didn’t quite get the description.

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@memonick said:
Good Luck :) If you need any help with the rules, just ask!

The game looks nice, but I didn't quite get the description.


thanks :) i'm gonna reword that.
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Sounds good :slight_smile: However, only now did I notice the floating numbers. I would recommend using a different color for them.

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for real - i’ve been trying to see how i should make them visible on all of the different backgrounds. I enabled spinning so that they flash once in a while when the light hits them, but that’s not good enough. I’ll just play with the models in Blender. thanks! :slight_smile:

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Try #FAD1FF…

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I’ll give it a try - btw my j3o files end up being larger than the .blend. Is this normal or should i do something to the .blend files to make it much smaller? Some of them get to be really bad:



.blend = 400kb → .j3o :3.5 MB



Getting too late, i’ll see if i can do some more work tomorrow! But i have a feeling my heavy lifting is done. I need to focus on the particle effects and the game level logic.



Peace, and thanks for the input!

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It’s nothing :wink: I don’t know about the sizes. Guess you should wait for normen or sbook for that. If you need anything else, just ask.

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I guess your images are packed in that blend file.

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Hi normen!



I’ll try and see how to remove them from the blender - i’m not that versed with it yet - such a powerful tool…if you know how to use it!! I almost threw my laptop out of the window while i was learning the maximize/minimize/expand windows :slight_smile:

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J3O can be very nicely compressed via zip or gzip compression.

And yes, storing the images in the native format like PNG or JPG is more efficient than storing them uncompressed in J3O.



For the numbers, you can generate a font in the AngelCode font generator, that will have an outline. A white font with a black outline can be seen on nearly any background.



I like the concept of the game btw :stuck_out_tongue: Solve equations by collecting numbers in space … I guess that’s the job of an astronomer?

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@Momoko_Fan said:
J3O can be very nicely compressed via zip or gzip compression.
And yes, storing the images in the native format like PNG or JPG is more efficient than storing them uncompressed in J3O.

For the numbers, you can generate a font in the AngelCode font generator, that will have an outline. A white font with a black outline can be seen on nearly any background.

I like the concept of the game btw :P Solve equations by collecting numbers in space .. I guess that's the job of an astronomer?


nice info - thanks momoko fan. :) I myself am just a simple programmer :) that's my job and it's been like this for a while now...sounds lame when I put it like that, but i like it and knowing that you have the power of millions of circuits under your fingertips and that you can create something is keeping me happy. But i am a tech and science enthusiast so whenever i get a chance at night to look up and wonder - i do it ;)

my dear brother however thinks this game is something that no one will end up playing and that i am wasting my time - but ever since i was 6 years old i dreamed of making a video game - so it's something that i gotta do - even though no one will probably ever play it...haha...the things we dooo, i tell you... :)
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@nardev said:
(...) but ever since i was 6 years old i dreamed of making a video game - so it's something that i gotta do - even though no one will probably ever play it...haha...the things we dooo, i tell you... :)

Some always play it. And if you're anything like the rest of us, you'll enjoy making it so much that you're gonna be thinking about making a new one even before you finish the last. And if you finish that one, it's probably gonna be played by a few more people. Rinse, repeat & keep having fun ;)
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word :wink:

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so i removed the texture reference from the blender model material and the “number model” sizes were drastically lowered. It’s now around 50kb for a j3o of a number. Is there a way to save the blender’s material definition into it’s own file and then load it programatically for each number model instead. Cause i have a feeling that if i removed the material reference from the model files they would get even smaller?

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Just going for “smaller” doesn’t necessarily mean “faster”. Some of the data should be decoded so theres not so much work when loading the model in-game. When you convert a .blend model that doesn’t pack its textures but has them referenced from e.g. a “textures” folder next to the blend file they should be referenced properly instead of being packed into the j3o file.

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i see so materials are “ok” with being in the model itself, but textures should definitely be outside since the jMonkey will do the heavy lifting and lower the footprint of the models at the same time. I just need to figure out how to have the blender file know about the texture name - but not hold the texture itself. Currently i have the texture assigned to the material as image file. But i have not explicitly packed it - i need to learn Blender better - such a powerful tool.

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I have not used blender 2.5/6 too much yet but in blender 2.49 you had a small “package” icon next to each texture that would let you specify if that file is packed or not.

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@nardev: This is not your fault! Imo you do everything right! It is a bug!

At the moment it doesn’t make a difference if you packed the images in the blend file or leave it extern. if you create a j3o the textures are packed uncompressed in the file. I made a bug report about this yesterday: http://code.google.com/p/jmonkeyengine/issues/detail?id=419#c0



The only workaround for the moment would be to use two materials! One for working in blender and one for saving it to your asset-folder. The first one with textures referenced and the second one a plain one. Then you would have to switch the material everytime before converting :D! Then you have to set the material manually!

1 Like
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@ttrocha said:
At the moment it doesn't make a difference if you packed the images in the blend file or leave it extern.

Thats not really true, in blender 2.49 at least referencing textures work. Just make sure the textures are either in the assets folder when converting the model file in the assets folder. When using the Model Import Tool the textures have to be in the same folder (or a sub-folder of it) where the model is. If the texture cannot be loaded via the assetManager it is packed in the file instead, since the assetManager for the model import tool has the current folder as root and the projects asset manager has the assets folder as root the texture has to be in the respective location.