Omnimaga

Calculator Community => Other Calc-Related Projects and Ideas => TI 68K => Topic started by: ATG on February 01, 2008, 05:48:00 pm

Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: ATG on February 01, 2008, 05:48:00 pm
I decided I should start a thread about my newest calc project DOA, for the 68k series. It is another FAT engine based game, this would be my third... Anywho here's the open to the story:

You are part of the I.G.I.A, the InterGalactic Intelligence Agency. You have been sent to Titan, one of saturn's moons to investigate the disappearance of weapons, plutonium and some soldiers. The IGSA, the InterGalactic Security Agency runs and funds this base, so uncovering the reasons for the disappearing weapons and soldiers is of the highest importance.

After being briefed, fed and dismissed, you spend some time reading in your quarters. Some time in the early hours of the day, you hear a crash. You grab your weapon and dash towards the direction the sound came in. The T1000 has gone berserk. It appears that this prototype defense robot has killed a soldier. You draw your weapon, find a weak spot and fire. After the thing has been disabled and the body of the soldier is taken care of, the T1000 is taken in for diagnostics to find out why this happened.

In the morning you hear a commotion coming from the administrative quarters. "What now?", you think as you rub the last remnants of sleep from your eyes. You make your way to the commander's office and find out that during the night, the diagnostics lab technician has been murdered.
 
And here's a neefty little kleep I decided to create as a kind of showcase of the game.

DOA Showcase (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHnDx5sB6Gk)
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 01, 2008, 06:07:00 pm
wow awesome, this seems even better than Doom :)

I like how the enemies look 3D and all, nice job on the graphics. Nice intro as well :)

Only suggestion would be to make the gameplay area a bit wider, preferably the same width than the heigh :)

Keep up the good work on this!
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: Netham45 on February 01, 2008, 07:21:00 pm
wow, this looks amazing. But, I noticed that in certain places, there were words such as "like" that were split over 2 lines, "li
ke"
You might want to try to fix this, as it makes it much harder to read.
Also, would it be possible to move the radar below the status? Then you could use more of the screen for the game view, which would be awesome!
Other than this, this game looks amazing. Bravo!
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: Liazon on February 01, 2008, 09:49:00 pm
o.o nice!  I love the cutscenes a lot!
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: ATG on February 02, 2008, 02:40:00 pm
Thanks for the complements! :)

The viewing area is set to 96 pixels by 96 pixels, and I can't do anything about that. That's because this is a FAT powered game and the viewing area is standard. The movie maker thing made the screenshots look squished width wise, so it appears to be a vertical rectangle, instead of the square viewing area as in real life.

As for the text being split by the screen, I am going to work on this, but it's not on the top of my list currently. There are a lot of things that aren't even close to being done, and I need to work on those first. Then comes the touch ups and minor things like the word wrapping.

It is being worked on however :)
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: Liazon on February 02, 2008, 07:06:00 pm
96x96 is already more than the number of pixels available on z80s, not to mention it's gs, so it's all good!
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 02, 2008, 07:09:00 pm
oh thats why it looked so small, i thought it was like 48x64. I guess it's Youtube compresion that is to blame, i was sure the vid was taken from a TI-89
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: ATG on February 03, 2008, 12:32:00 am
Actually the screens are taken from a Voyage 200, because it's my favorite calc. :) The Ti-89 version has all the stats and radar on one side, and the HUD is a little less intricate because of the screen size of the 89.

So, generally I take screenshots of the 92+/Voyage 200 version. But the game play and all that is the same.
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 03, 2008, 01:04:00 am
cool, I wish they would do a full screen FAT engine, but i guess that would be much slower.


Btw question: Why is there so few non-grayscale ASM/C  games on 68k calcs? On the 83+ almost all games are monochrome and people love them
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: Liazon on February 03, 2008, 10:19:00 am
the libs, whether it be TIGCC's stuff or extgraph or FAT, make it way too easy to do gs.  The available functions are exactly the same as their b/w counterparts, except about twice as many arguments for the extra layer.

and even if the game was starting to slow down, I don't think people would back down from gs.  They'd start optimizing in ASM just to squeeze out more cycles.  I guess gs has become a norm/expectation for the 68ks.  Though Phoenix for 89 has never been converted though.  The version I have is still b/w and it's still fun ^^
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 03, 2008, 03:53:00 pm
thanks for clarifying things up :)

I was just wondering, i was afraid that most 68k ppl hated b/w graphics with passion, no matter how good they were x.x
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: ATG on February 03, 2008, 10:20:00 pm
No, most 68k guys don't hate b/w, we just prefer gs. :) Or at least that applies to me.

I think that if SM68k had been black and white, it wouldn't have turned as many heads. Some things you just can't do in b/w. Plus I've noticed that the b/w raycasters, with the exception of the maze 3d and Gemini, tend to be difficult to see.

The full screen FAT engine would be impossible to get any real speed out of, even in your best case scenario, the 160*100 pixels of the 89 would still mean you would have to check on/update 1600 pixels.

Plus, the textures would have to be scaled a lot more, adding more clock cycles. And throw in gs, and you've got an unplayable game/engine.

I imagine it would be around 2 fps. So that would kind of suck. :p
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 05, 2008, 03:17:00 am
yeah quite a big pb i see -.- I guess it's better to let things as they are now ^^
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: Liazon on February 05, 2008, 07:00:00 pm
would 160x100 b/w be playable?
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 05, 2008, 07:18:00 pm
I'm sure it would, but maybe people wouldn't like the graphics since it's hard to see, even in Gemini it was. I think it would be very nice in a RPG style game with few texture details though
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: ATG on February 15, 2008, 01:48:00 am
It might be, but like DJ said, it would be difficult to see, unless you had very uncomplicated textures for walls and such, like a simple checkerboard pattern or something.

DOA is being worked on though, I just got through editing and converting 63 images that are going into the game for use with a character which I finally am able to finish, and an item and several little props and things to make the game more detailed.

I should probably post my screen shots on here as well, but tonight I am too tired to mess with it. I'll post all the recent shots when I get a chance or possibly tomorrow.  

Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 15, 2008, 06:27:00 pm
glad to see this still progressing ^^
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: kalan_vod on February 16, 2008, 12:28:00 am
Can not wait to see the new SS! ;)
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: ATG on February 18, 2008, 12:58:00 am
While I am not done working on the new stuff, I made a screen shot of some of the new additions, but these are only a couple of them.

I made the scientist characters behave like the soldier characters, so that you could observe their motion and what the sprites look like and such.

Plus I killed a couple so you could see their death sequences. When I am shooting at one, near the end of the screen shot, I am actually shooting at two of them, but one is standing in front of the other, that's why it looks like he dies twice or something.

This won't happen in real life, once i get things finished up.


(http://www.tifreakware.net/atg/doa_screens/SCREEN0017.gif)

This also shows the two new props I added for detail, the little camera on the ceiling, complete with blinking recording indicator, and the file cabinet, which does nothing. :lol:

Oh and this screen shot, on my computer, looks very close to actual speed. I played around with calc capture's settings.
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 18, 2008, 01:53:00 am
still no nukes :(

j/k awesome so far :) Keep it up!

I think that person you kill at some point in the screenie should be made so it defend himself when shot tho so it looks more realistic ^^
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: Liazon on February 18, 2008, 08:49:00 am
o.o wow those are pretty good death sequences.  I liked the exploding robot thing a lot!
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: kalan_vod on February 18, 2008, 02:39:00 pm
Nice, I love the robots graphics :P
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: ATG on February 24, 2008, 02:01:00 am
Thanks everyone, progress has been slow with a capital s lately. It's not dead though, just excruciatingly slow.

I have a ridiculous amount of school work lately. I have to complete 220 code labs on turingcraft.com for my java programming class, each one is a short word problem, and I have to complete them by the end of the semester.

Each one requires around 6 lines of code, give or take a few lines, so it's a lot of work.

Plus my math homework, history homework (I have to read a 200 page book in a few days), and my French work, which is also lengthy and time consuming.

Who would have guessed that I'd spend so much time studying when I went to college. :p
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: Speler on February 24, 2008, 11:11:00 am
That looks great!  The ceiling looks kind of strange though...
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 24, 2008, 01:03:00 pm
wow thats a lot of work, sorry to hear ATG, I hopes things get better and more smooth for you soon
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: bfr on February 24, 2008, 02:50:00 pm
Looks great!  I hope you're able to handle all of your work.
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: Liazon on February 24, 2008, 02:58:00 pm
o.o that's a lot of school work!
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: ATG on February 24, 2008, 05:59:00 pm
Thanks, I've been handling it so far, I just hope nothing else gets thrown on top you know.

Super Speler: if you look at it for a moment you'll see it's a clear ceiling, and what you are seeing is the stars out in the distance. The idea is that it's a space station with a plexiglass ceiling so that the inhabitants can see outer space if they so desire. I think I'm going to have to put something in the story that hints to that somewhere.

Can anyone else tell that the ceiling is supposed to be stars?
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: kalan_vod on February 24, 2008, 09:44:00 pm
I knew it was stars, looks nice too :P
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on February 24, 2008, 11:59:00 pm
same here, I like it :)
Title: DOA - Dead on Arrival
Post by: ATG on February 25, 2008, 12:42:00 am
Okay, just making sure that I didn't need to mess with it to make it easier to see. :)