VBGamer
Star Cars - Second Alpha Demo 
Peachysoft (11 replies, 18 views) (2004-Jun-14)
Peachysoft (11 replies, 18 views) (2004-Jun-14) Peachysoft has just released the second demo of their up and coming shareware game StarCars. The game is modeled on an old time favoriate called SkyRoads by BlueMoon interactive. Peachysofts version however, is not just a remake but a moddifed new game.
Added to this version:
• Moving Platforms
• Stars to collect
• Ramps
• SFX
• Bounce Pads
• Turbo Pads If anyone is willing to test out this alpha version. Please send me an email telling me what you think about the game and you will recieve a free version of the full game when it comes out. (Please include system specs) But you have to send me an email, so I can put you on my list. There isn't too much to do before the game goes into Beta. A pregame GUI and a fastest times table is about all there is - as well as creating many many more levels of course. Note: The SFX are a bit grimey - They will be replaced in the beta, they are just fillers for the moment. So please download and enjoy. Oh - one final note: It is important (because of the way I have programed the game) that you get a constant 25fps - if you get under this amount please, I will need to know what your system specs are. Programmed in Visual Basic 6.0 with DirectX 8.0
• Moving Platforms
• Stars to collect
• Ramps
• SFX
• Bounce Pads
• Turbo Pads If anyone is willing to test out this alpha version. Please send me an email telling me what you think about the game and you will recieve a free version of the full game when it comes out. (Please include system specs) But you have to send me an email, so I can put you on my list. There isn't too much to do before the game goes into Beta. A pregame GUI and a fastest times table is about all there is - as well as creating many many more levels of course. Note: The SFX are a bit grimey - They will be replaced in the beta, they are just fillers for the moment. So please download and enjoy. Oh - one final note: It is important (because of the way I have programed the game) that you get a constant 25fps - if you get under this amount please, I will need to know what your system specs are. Programmed in Visual Basic 6.0 with DirectX 8.0
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 | The game looks very good. Just some details...
- I got nowhere above 22 FPS;
- I often got small FPS like 12, 15 or even below 10 if there is many thing being drawn.
I think the blocks rendering proccess needs some tweaking o it becomes faster (i.e., not rendering triangles that are INSIDE the terrain, I don't know if this is implemented yet)
My system specs:
- AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1800 MHz) proccessor
- 256 MB RAM DDR 266
- Video Card: GeForce2 MX 64 MB
- OS: Windows Xp Professional
About the exit-window problem: in the Form_QueryUnload event, you could add something like:
If Not Terminated Then
Run=False
Cancel=1
End If
Run is a public variable indicating whether the main loop shoud run or not (I guess you have one of that). Terminated is a variable that you should set to True after terminating DirectX and everything. I guess this should solve the problem.  Oh yeah, I get no sound at all. Altough sound is working right everywhere else. I got about 22 FPS fairly constantly, but it occasionally would get a bit lower for a second or two.
3GHz Pentium 4 with HT
1024MB RAM
128MB ATI Radeon 9800 PRO
I didn't get any sound either.
Gameplay is good tho! Keep it up! Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, I am using Windows XP Pro. the game looks great mate - good work!
My frame rate never dropped below 22 (pretty much stayed constantly there) ocaasionally it would drop to 12 or so (mostly when loading the new level which is where I guess you're creating the level :) ).
My system specs are:
P4 2.4 with HT
512 meg ramm (PC3200)
Radeon Pro 9600 with 128 meg ram
Onbaord sound card
Win XP Pro
I didn't get any sound either.
Thats for the help guys
1. That automation bug is fixed now, thanks VBBR
2. Silly me, I had the initalize sound function commented out. Sound should work now.
3. Looks like I need to spend some time optimizing the rendering routines :) At the moment its too slow for the level of complexity. I pretty much don't do any optimization at all. So I've gotta go read up on this kinda stuff. - I'm gonna go buy a couple of new video cards to test and optimize for. Probably get an old TNT2 and somekind of mid level Radeon.
The updated version should be online in a few minutes :)
Thanks again If you want VB optimization, check out Almar's site persistentrealities.com, It has some great stuff for speeding up your VB code. Before going all crazy about "optimizing" you should consider finding the bottleneck in your gameloop. The earlier mentioned performance tests and tips on persistent realities are nice, but i don't think they will really help you. profile your existing code first. Cheers, the bottle neck is in the renderer. tried it out: Looks like a great game :) I got a constant 2t5 FPS. It was alot of fun, though, kudos. 400 mhz intel celeron
128 mb ram
nvidia geforce xfx 5200
Got a constant 23 fps, and the control was pretty nice, although a little to controlled, I would put in more inertia related physics on the car... but all in all pretty nice..
DaBooda out... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
