Anyone up for a Team Project?

By Spooner Date 2013-11-02 10:59

Yep, for Ashton to not work, you really need an old netbook or a 10 year old PC, unless you've accidentally used new GLSL features (which you don't appear to have). Even if that were not the case, Ashton would install and fail when run. Hmm, I really should have uploaded binaries of Ashton anyway...*cough*

Finally got around to playing the game and found I liked the special effects a great deal, especially screen-shaking! Would have liked to see some animation of the player sprites though (a walking animation when moving and a staff-waggling animation when hitting the ball).

Unless you are a member of the project on Github, you need to use this command rather than the https link:
git clone git@github.com:MattLemmon/StickBall.git (public read only access rather than full access).

By ml Date 2013-11-04 00:32 Edited 2013-11-04 07:03

The main caveat I can see about ashton, in terms of how it affected this game, is that on PC it requires Ruby Dev-tools. As far as uploading binaries is concerned I have no idea! lol

The big issue I'm running into right now is that a weird error has appeared when trying to install Gosu and Chingu on some PCs. I will post about this separately later.

EDIT: fyi, I posted about the weird error in the Gosu Exchange forum.

I appreciate the tip on the proper syntax for git cloning. I did not know about this at all.

Thanks for the compliment about the visuals. It was definitely a team effort. A lot of it is Arrow's work, and a lot of it is mine, and the background crowd on level 3 is Fritzherald's work.

The screen shake was really easy, but it never would have occurred to me to try it if it weren't for the "Juicy" video.

You are totally right about the need for player animations, and especially about the need for the sticks to wiggle when they hit the ball. The ending also still needs some work...

If you want to see something pretty cool which Fritzherald made, just swap out this part of main.rb:

def setup
# push_game_state(Beginning)
push_game_state(CrowdScene2)
end

...and also this part of crowd.rb:

class CrowdScene2 < Chingu::GameState
def setup
@bg = Gang.create
# make it Gang instead of Crowd

and then try out the arrows as well as I K U J Y H T G R F E and D. The lighting dimmer is the thing that really amazed me. The logic is crammed into in crowd.rb and backgrounds.rb. A lot of it looks like hieroglyphics to me. Fritz has significantly more experience with programming than I do.

By Spooner Date 2013-11-04 18:13

If I got off my arse and uploaded Ashton binaries for windows and OSX, then users wouldn't actually need dev-tools installed (same as they don't need them for Gosu because Julian builds it for you :$).

Don't worry, most code that looks like heiroglyphics is a less, rather than a more, skilled implementation. Well, except for regular expressions which don't work unless they look like nonsense :D

By arrow Date 2013-11-05 11:41

This is great! I was a bit in doubt about using Ashton before because I was unsure about packaging. I'll definitely play some more with it then.

By ml Date 2013-11-05 21:18 Edited 2013-11-05 21:32

Ya I just didn't have time to learn ashton, and fritzherald ended up being more interested in crowd generation. I left it in there up until the final hours of the competition, and then I finally #'d ashton out, which I think might have been the thing which caused the sudden increase in framerate although it's hard to be certain. Good to know about it not being in the .app. It sounds like ashton should not create any significant long-term issues for future deployment, although it seems like it would probably be a good idea to try to optimize it as much as possible. We can definitely include ashton effects in StickBall2.0.....

Now as we look toward the future, I wonder what it would take to package this game for iPhone/iPad?..... EDIT: I just read up on this a little bit, and it sounds like it would need to be in C++ to make it work on an iPhone. It sounds like compiling from Ruby to iOS would be pretty difficult...