Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Web page, team profiles, weapons & voxels

[Kasper Hviid]

2011/9/29 Christian Mauduit <address@hidden>:
>
>> Hello again,
>>
>> I just checked out changelog.txt ... what is this "Viewport set by hud."?ch
> Err, well, I acknowledge some changelog entries can be cryptic (sometimes
> one-liners to remind what's in the release...). "Viewport set by hud" means
> the "hud engine" (actually only one, "floating") decides where the maps will
> be drawn. Currently map takes all space/screen available, at least all the
> screen is declared "drawable" if needed. This contrasts with a tactical hud
> (yet to be implemented) where say 75% of surface is reserved for map, the rest
> for various indicators, which would in that case not be drawn in overlay mode,
> the way it's done now. The point is how much space you have depends on how the
> hud is handled, so viewport (my entity to define "where to draw") must be set
> by hud engine, which was not the case before.

Okay, got it!

> FYI, I have 2 main things to correct before 0.0.11beta is released.
>
> 1) fix the zoom/scroll issues, basically I want to implement some scroll "a la
> "Google Maps", you click in the map then maintain button pressed and drag it
> where you want then when you unpress the button map continues to scroll with
> some inertia until it stops. I don't own a smartphone but from what I've seen
> it's pretty much the standard way of things now. It contrasts with the old way
> of doing things which is to put your mouse near the border of the screen and
> wait until it scrolls. Not that hard to implement, but needs to be done, and
> it's not yet.

Photoshop has also had flick panning after they got OpenGL. I think it
do require a bit of fine-tuning. Also, I think the inertia should be
calculated from the very last 1/10000000 second of the corsor
movement, so if the coursor has practually stopped, there will be no
inertia.

>
> 2) finish the "level chaining" system. Currently, LW does handle all a system
> of "experience" (exp) you gain by winning levels, unlocking other levels along
> the way. Get ready for some heavy level tuning Kasper, the idea will be to
> have a sort of long chain of say 30 levels (I thought 15 was enough but since
> they are mostly masked at startup it won't confuse newcomers), played one
> after the other. Things to implement are: when a level is done, warp the
> player to next level, currently player is just *allowed* to play but not
> redirected to it.
>
> 3) include your map/rules settings as the defaults.
>
> Once those are done, release 0.0.11beta. There are still many bugs, I couldn't
> manage to fix the problem of blank/white textures on MS-Windows properly, I
> seriously studied the problem and will come with a solution which will
> probably come along with massive graphical optimization, but well, not for
> 0.0.11beta.

It sounds like a *very* promising release!

>
> As a side note, I had a look recently at the Androïd SDK, and more precisely
> the NDK (native devel kit), it happens it does have GL-ES support, GL-ES is
> slightly different from OpenGL, and "as is" LW6 won't compile, it does uses
> OpenGL constructs. However the rewrite ain't that hard. I can't really figure
> out how long it would take me to build an Androïd devel chain, then I could
> check all my GL constructs are both OpenGL and GL-ES compatible. This is just
> to say the Androïd port might be even easier than I thought.

Amazing! ... (my own HTC Android had a fatal encounter with a car
door, but I *almost* have a new one)

>
>> I got an idea for the music area: Let the game play some water-related
>> environment sound in the menu, and reserve the music for the actual
>> game. I tried it with some personal recording of a rain storm. The
>> constant raindrops were a bit irritating, but I really liked the
>> contrast it gave. I think I could find some useable content on
>> freesound.org, maybe some hydrophone recordings.
> Yeah, maybe. What I did in LW5 was to have different volumes for in-game and
> in-menus context, what did you think of that?

That would also be an option. Frankly, I'm not sure what is best. My
work as a "designer" may cause me to have a more simplistic (and
boring) preference, maybe a "player" will prefer some music track in
the menu.

But about the idea i mentioned - I have just pulled together an
enviremental track using those sources:
http://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/33827/
http://www.freesound.org/people/MsPogge/sounds/83030/

Try downloading it from either of these sources:
http://www.verzend.be/t9v3rl1c7jzc/lw-environment.ogg.html
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1II8FZ8C
http://www.easy-share.com/4C1E79B2EB8711E09676002481FAD55A/lw-environment.ogg
http://depositfiles.com/files/rzizdr2kl

Place the file in the folder 'Liquid War 6\music'
And change a line in config.xml:
<string key="ambiance-file" value="lw-environment.ogg"/>

See what you think. Again, I'm not sure myself. The negative thing is
that the menu feels a bit ... gothic for a game like Liquid War. The
positive thing is that it gives some contrast between doing
adjustments in the menu and the actual game.

Anyway, maybe we should disable the menu mouse-over sound? I find it
kind of anoying ...

>
> Another thing we could do is to have one music per map, the game does support
> it, I didn't do it for now since it's a hell of a job to find an accurate
> music for each map and it does make a very big download, but who knows, might
> be nice anyway.

I don't think most people care much about download size. Personly I
just feel that I get more free content if the download is bigger. But
of course, it requires time to find more free music which fits the
levels.

>
> Anyway the current "water" sounds have a serious drawback, there are not
> "fluid" enough and do contain some thunder and other things. This is IMHO bad
> because it could confuse the player when we'll have real storm sounds for say,
> a weapon or the death of a player.

I could look at it ... the content need to fit GNU GPL, right?

 - Kasper