[DustFalcon85]

Will it include WangBang?

[termit]

DustFalcon85, on 08 December 2012 - 08:10 AM, said:

Will it include WangBang?

No

[Micky C]

So any word on a release date? The year is starting to come to a close.

[ReaperMan]

Micky C, on 12 December 2012 - 04:08 PM, said:

The year is starting to come to a close.

You mean.... our existence.

[Lunick]

Be patient Micky, it should be out this month if the details in the first page are correct and I doubt it would be delayed.

[termit]

We submitted the game to the App Store last Friday, still waiting for approve. So I hope it will be approved by next Tuesday.

[termit]

The game will be available in the App Store this Wednesday (December 19)

[TerminX]

You mean December?

When are you releasing the source code?

[termit]

TerminX, on 17 December 2012 - 06:19 PM, said:

You mean December?

Yes, sorry, December

TerminX, on 17 December 2012 - 06:19 PM, said:

When are you releasing the source code?

I can release it on Wednesday, I think I will put it on github.

[Micky C]

GeneralArcade, on 17 December 2012 - 06:14 PM, said:

The game will be available in the App Store this Wednesday (December 19)

Technically wednesday starts in 10 hours and 10 minutes for me. Could you be a bit more specific? And any word on the price?

[Lunick]

That could be Thursday for us Micky or a could be a WW Wednesday date.

[termit]

We will put it to the AppStore Wednesday at 10:00AM Pacific US

[termit]

It's available now! https://itunes.apple...d583929865?mt=8

[TerminX]

Nice. Could you tell me a bit about the renderer? Did you just port Polymost to OpenGL ES, or is it something else?

[Micky C]

I've only played through half of the first level (on both iPhone 4 and iPad), but I believe it's enough for me to comment on and perhaps offer some improvements.

First off, I LOVE the way the HUD is set out, it's fairly simple and elegant, and the controls are among the better of FPS games on iOS.

However, they could use some tweaks. The ninjas love walking around then randomly cutting you down with their uzis. On iPhone it's very difficult to keep up with them as they often walk completely off-screen and you're spending 95% of the time aiming and not very much time shooting, which is very bad IMO. It's a bit better on the iPad due to the bigger screen size and more area to drag the view around. I know this isn't your fault, but there are ways to help a bit. It's hard to feel like a badass ninja when you're losing 80% of your health while fumbling around getting a good aim.
So why not put in AUTOAIM as an option? If it's already there, I didn't notice it, and it could be made stronger (with the option to switch it off of course).

Btw, why only allow one save slot? For a game as complex as this, the player might want to have multiple locations to load from if something goes wrong. And I think autosaving when something important happens like picking up a keycard would be helpful.
Where's the oxygen bar under water?
And on the iPad, there NEEDS to be an option to make the buttons on the right bigger. In a life or death situation, you don't want to die because you hit the fire button and missed by a few millimetres. There ought to be an option to adjust the size of those buttons. This is also a bit of a problem on the iPhone.
There also ought to be a "tap anywhere on the screen" option. It does make it a bit easier to accidentally shoot your weapon, but it also makes fighting while aiming easier.
And when a player dies and has to restart the level, why not let him restart with all the weapons he had when he entered the level?

And judging by how hard it was to jump to get the secret riot gun, and jump into that room with the grenade launcher, I'm really not looking forward to some of the platforming sections later on in the game if I do buy the full version. I don't know what you can do about that, but you have to do something. For a complex PC game such as this, if you want a portable device touchscreen port that's fun rather than accurate, you need to adjust the gameplay as well as the control scheme, not just the controls.

I hope this helps.

Edit: Just in case you haven't seen it, I think the best controls for iOS (especially iPad) for an FPS are the ones in Marathon (and Marathon 2). They are also ports of old PC games with 5 star ratings. They're free so it's work checking out and see if you can get any ideas. It's a bit simpler because there's no crouch or jump button, but still: https://itunes.apple...d419805412?mt=8
Just playing a bit of marathon on the iPhone, one of the innovations about it is that the use button only appears when there's something to use (e.g opening a door), and when it appears it's nice and big so it's easy to press. This helps simplify the controls in a good way. I know this might make secrets more obvious if the use button magically appears in front of walls, but I think it's worth it.
And this is more game-related since it was also in the original (not sure if it would fit in SW), but there was also a motion sensor in the HUD which basically showed enemies as dots on a circle within a small radius near you, so you know where you have to turn, which helped a lot in bigger battles.
But if you care about improving the controls, please download it on both iPhone and iPad and play a level or so.

[termit]

TerminX, on 19 December 2012 - 11:11 AM, said:

Nice. Could you tell me a bit about the renderer? Did you just port Polymost to OpenGL ES, or is it something else?

Yes, it's Polymost. My partner can tell more about challenges he faced during porting it to OpenGL ES, but his duke4.net account still on moderation.

[termit]

Micky C, on 19 December 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

So why not put in AUTOAIM as an option? If it's already there, I didn't notice it, and it could be made stronger (with the option to switch it off of course).

Good suggestion.

Micky C, on 19 December 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

Btw, why only allow one save slot? For a game as complex as this, the player might want to have multiple locations to load from if something goes wrong. And I think autosaving when something important happens like picking up a keycard would be helpful.

Yep, maybe we should add more slots.

Micky C, on 19 December 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

Where's the oxygen bar under water?

Oxygen bar is line around the health/armor indicator. Pay attention to upper left corner: http://www.youtube.c...y8OGXxHQ#t=103s

Micky C, on 19 December 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

And on the iPad, there NEEDS to be an option to make the buttons on the right bigger. In a life or death situation, you don't want to die because you hit the fire button and missed by a few millimetres. There ought to be an option to adjust the size of those buttons. This is also a bit of a problem on the iPhone.

This change is approved and will be next update

Micky C, on 19 December 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

There also ought to be a "tap anywhere on the screen" option. It does make it a bit easier to accidentally shoot your weapon, but it also makes fighting while aiming easier.

I think we can add this as an option.

Micky C, on 19 December 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

I hope this helps.

Thank you very much for the review!

Micky C, on 19 December 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

Edit: Just in case you haven't seen it, I think the best controls for iOS (especially iPad) for an FPS are the ones in Marathon (and Marathon 2). They are also ports of old PC games with 5 star ratings. They're free so it's work checking out and see if you can get any ideas. It's a bit simpler because there's no crouch or jump button, but still: https://itunes.apple...d419805412?mt=8
Just playing a bit of marathon on the iPhone, one of the innovations about it is that the use button only appears when there's something to use (e.g opening a door), and when it appears it's nice and big so it's easy to press. This helps simplify the controls in a good way. I know this might make secrets more obvious if the use button magically appears in front of walls, but I think it's worth it.
And this is more game-related since it was also in the original (not sure if it would fit in SW), but there was also a motion sensor in the HUD which basically showed enemies as dots on a circle within a small radius near you, so you know where you have to turn, which helped a lot in bigger battles.
But if you care about improving the controls, please download it on both iPhone and iPad and play a level or so.

I have looked at Marathon and I think we can take some ideas to improve controls. Thanks

[Micky C]

Thankyou for listening! Good luck with future sales

[TerminX]

GeneralArcade, on 20 December 2012 - 06:52 PM, said:

Yes, it's Polymost. My partner can tell more about challenges he faced during porting it to OpenGL ES, but his duke4.net account still on moderation.

What's the account name? I'm pretty interested in the GL ES version of Polymost... I've been wanting to do an Android port of EDuke32 for a while, and GL ES Polymost would be a pretty good stopgap solution before Plagman has time to do GL ES Polymer.

[ricochet]

TerminX, on 20 December 2012 - 07:26 PM, said:

What's the account name? I'm pretty interested in the GL ES version of Polymost... I've been wanting to do an Android port of EDuke32 for a while, and GL ES Polymost would be a pretty good stopgap solution before Plagman has time to do GL ES Polymer.

hi, finally I've got my account approved.

Regarding to your original question: yes, I just modified polymost code to run on top of GLES. There are not so many modifications. There are two major changes: glBegin/glEnd emulation using glDrawArrays and modifications of texture uploading code.
For glBegin/glEnd I just took the code written by John Carmack for Doom Classic and it worked pretty well. JFBuild uses either compressed textures or uncompressed GL_RGBA/GL_RGB format. Actually, Open GL (not GL ES) can automatically convert RGBA data to fill up GL_RGB texture, but GL ES can't. JFBuild keeps the textures in RGBA format, and it uses GL_RGBA for sprites which have transparency and GL_RGB for sprites which havent. So before I realized this, I could see only sprites with alpha-transparency. I added simple RGBA->RGB conversion function and it worked well. Later, I added 16-bit texture format support, it works faster on old devices like iPhone4. For fan-made port I would advise to convert all of the textures to PVR format and put them beside the original GRP file. It would speed-up resource loading and rendering as well. In our case, we've limit of 50Mb for the whole application, so we couldnt do that.
One more thing was that the game lagged like hell on the first level when you hang around the screen allowing you to remotely control the car with key. The reason was that the game still uses software renderer to produce this texture with remote view. It provides live-view, so it updates the texture every frame, it invokes software renderer on every frame. Since it's software renderer, it's CPU-consuming, so no wonder it lags. I decided that there is no point in live-view and now it switches on only if the player actually controls the car, otherwise it does not update that texture. Visually there are no differences at all, but FPS became twice higher at that location.
There are one more thing with voxels. The voxel data is bit-packed and there are a lot of bit magic code to unpack it. Bit operations could work differently on different CPU types and they do. Voxels were working well on iphone Simulator (it runs i386 code) but not working on iphone (the ARM CPU). I've fixed few lines of this code and finally got it working, but it took hours to figure out.

For better FPS and overall smoothness we run the game code in separate thread.

I think our modified renderer should work well on android platform, so you can freely use it. In order to implement our new fancy UI we made some hooks withing the game code, and now there is some kind of abstraction layer to pass game events from the game itself to UI code and pass command events from UI into the game, it might be useful for android port.

We're going to release the source code soon, we just need some time to cleanup the code and remove the game data from source tree.

[Lunick]

Some general things that I didn't see until after the Beta:

You can move sideways in vehicles. You can't do this in the vanilla version and it is also very unrealistic.

Also, would you be able to add in the function for aiming by touching anywhere on the screen, rather than just restricted to the right hand side in classic mode?

And in map mode, is it possible to zoom in and out?

[termit]

Lunick, on 20 December 2012 - 08:48 PM, said:

You can move sideways in vehicles. You can't do this in the vanilla version and it is also very unrealistic.

Strafing vehicles - it's so cool. I like it I need to look to the original one more time.

Lunick, on 20 December 2012 - 08:48 PM, said:

Also, would you be able to add in the function for aiming by touching anywhere on the screen, rather than just restricted to the right hand side in classic mode?

We will see if more people requested this feature , we will do it.

Lunick, on 20 December 2012 - 08:48 PM, said:

And in map mode, is it possible to zoom in and out?

Not implemented.

[Lunick]

What about the Zilla flag not moving in Map 2?

[Micky C]

GeneralArcade, on 20 December 2012 - 09:01 PM, said:

We will see if more people requested this feature , we will do it.

I prefer to use the screen tap method rather than classic (because the virtual stick was too small for movement), however if you can aim with the rest of the screen in classic mode, then that opens up a situation where you can aim with both hands, allowing you to aim with your left and shoot with your right when standing still if needed. The good thing about the shoot button as opposed with "tap to shoot" is that you can drag the aim while shooting which is great for Uzis. So it's great to have many options for different situations in the same scheme.

And +1 on the map zoom feature. Sometimes you want a bigger view of the level and you just can't get it.

Oh and before I forget: Autotilt on sloped surfaces! It's an annoying carryover from the original 1997 game. Do we really need it?

[termit]

Lunick, on 20 December 2012 - 09:04 PM, said:

What about the Zilla flag not moving in Map 2?

I need to check it too.

Micky C, on 20 December 2012 - 09:10 PM, said:

Oh and before I forget: Autotilt on sloped surfaces! It's an annoying carryover from the original 1997 game. Do we really need it?

Good idea. I think we should disable it and enable only if "Vertical aim" is off

[termit]

Source code: https://github.com/T...Warrior-iOS.git

[Micky C]

The update come out a day or two ago, it's got minor bug fixes, support for the addon packs ($1 each) and better controls; the fire button is bigger (it could still be a bit bigger on the iPad), and you can finally move the buttons around.

Although I'd still like:

• A tap to fire button option.
• Disabled auto-tilt.
• A soft-lock option for aiming to appeal to the more casual players, similar to Max Payne on iOS; if the crosshair's near an enemy, it will slightly move towards the enemy.

If it gets these things then IMO it will be the perfect FPS port.

[termit]

Micky C, on 24 January 2013 - 03:56 AM, said:

And you can finally move the buttons around.

Actually this option was there from first release. I just mention it, because some people can't find it

Micky C, on 24 January 2013 - 03:56 AM, said:

Although I'd still like:

• A tap to fire button option.
• Disabled auto-tilt.
• A soft-lock option for aiming to appeal to the more casual players, similar to Max Payne on iOS; if the crosshair's near an enemy, it will slightly move towards the enemy.

If it gets these things then IMO it will be the perfect FPS port.

I think we will do some of it for next release. Thanks

[fgsfds]

Any news about version for android?

[termit]

fgsfds, on 03 July 2013 - 01:56 AM, said:

Any news about version for android?

No plans for it right now.