Happy New Year
Just a quick post to wish everyone a happy new year.
- may 2008 bring you good luck, good health…and lots of good remakes.
…oh, and I just started on a new remake a couple of weeks ago and it’s already beginning to looks good. More about that later.
Rip Off updated to v1.1
I discovered a “serious” bug in Rip Off, and a few minor
ones too, so I fixed those and made a few tweaks as well.
Version 1.1 is now uploaded.
Changes:
* Difficulty didn’t work as it should, so it didn’t get harder each round as it should have. Fixed.
* Score fixed. Game only showed 4 digits ingame but has been changed to 5 now.
* The places the enemies entered the screen wasn’t random enough.
* Now you get double score if you shoot an enemy with a fuelcell on tow.
* Now it’ll also say, on the score screen, what round you reached in the last game.
What a complete Rip Off :)
Done! – Go get it.
Please leave your feedback.
Smooth sailing!
Well, mission complete…mostly.
Amazing what a bit of optimization can do. No more framerate drops for Rip Off.
The framerate is limited to 60fps, but unthrottled, the earlier version would usually run at up to 200fps if the screen wasn’t too busy.
But the screen did get busy sometimes, which caused the framerate drop I’ve been working to eliminate.Well, now it’ll run at up to 1000fps and most of the time at about 500fps even if the screen is busy.
There are more bits that can be optimised, but I think this’ll do for now.
I’ve noticed a few bugs though (small ones), so I’ll need to take a look at that before releasing the game, but this extra week of optimization was more than worth it.
Here’s a screenshot of how it looks right now.
Fun fun fun…a small update
Good news…and bad too – as always
The good news is that I got some feedback on Rip Off from Oddbob and it was good – the only thing he mentioned as bad was a slight framerate dip for no apparant reason occasionally- which also happens to me. I don’t think it’s so bad in singleplayer mode – on my pc anyway…but it’s there and it’s annoying.
If my PC can play Bioshock it should, sure as hell, also be able to play Rip Off
(ok, I don’t get the best framerate in Bioshock either, but still…) 
I also had a friend over on monday night and we played the two-player mode for two solid hours and it was really fun – just like 25 years ago in the arcades…only we didn’t have to spend a lot of money on it. So it was great fun, and seemed bugfree, but unfortunately the slowdown Oddbob mentioned is worse in two-player mode because there’s more things on the screen.
So the bad news is that I can’t release the game this week, as I’d planned, but have to put on my thinkingcap instead and try to find out what part of the program causes the slowdown. Is it the 1000+ cos/sin calculations each second or is there particular function somewhere that is the cause of it?…that’s what I need to find out before I release the game.So it’ll be a little while longer before it’s completely done.
UPDATE:
I felt like experimenting last night, but since I had no athletic 25 year old blonde girl handy I decided to poke and prod Rip Off instead. I’m now pretty sure I know what’s causing the slowdown and I even have a crazy idea how to fix it, but it’s going to be a quite extensive rewrite – but it should eliminate the problem completely (if I can make it work that is).
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Come back soon…