Anime Tennis Babes 2 - Controls Demo

It's nothing much yet, but I really need feedback on the controls because they're going to change now or never.

Feedback on controls very much wanted please, and some idea of how it performs. ( if it runs badly in 1600x1200x32 with shadows and crowds on, at least turn it down to 640x480x0 with shadows and crowds off and tell me if it's ok like that. ) It's currently unoptimized, so it could be slow. There's no onscreen FPS counter, and no game-timing so just tell me if it's smooth enough to play.





Download (5MB)

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PLEASE READ BEFORE PLAYING
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.. And definitely read before complaining ;o)

This is just about the controls and performance. I probably know about all the other missing features, little bugs, unexpected behaviour. It's stable though, you can alt-tab out of it if it should lock up ( never has in days of testing here ) and won't do anything nasty.

Most menu options are not implemented. The only options you need concern yourself with are Options\Graphics Options and New Game\Special\Practice

Clicking options which have not been implemented can cause the menu to ignore legitimate commands, so you've been warned.

Controls are mouse only. Move the mouse to move the player. Hitting the ball is semi-automatic. If you're in a viable position, the player will attempt to play a shot ( or dive if the ball is a little out of reach ) but the shot will just be a standard return to the middle of the court.

The full range of shots ( at least so far ) are as follows :

Left Click - Standard shot to left of screen. ( Not left of player )

Right Click - Standard shot to right of screen. ( not right of player )

Double Left Click - Lob to left of screen.

Double Right Click - Lob to right of screen.

Hold Left Click - Drop shot to left of screen.

Hold Right Click - Drop shot to right of screen.


At the moment, the shots are pretty focussed, but that's not a fault as there's much more to be added. There will be much more variety in the final game, this is just a quick test to see if the controls feel reasonably intuitive.

Yes, there is no game timing yet. It's locked to refresh rate so you may need turn it on in drivers if you've disabled it.

Yes, there are a lot of things missing, and a number of things don't work as they should, but I can't add anything more without cementing in the controls, so I need to know if the controls need changing sooner rather than later.

Thanks for testing.

Oh, and assuming I can ever find the time to get it finished, yes, it will be free to everyone who bought the original.

Controls feel fine to me. And it runs smoothly on my Athlon 1800xp + Radeon 9600pro using 1024x768 with Crowds and Shadows on.

Ohhh ... I'm so glad you're redoing the controls man ... gotta go test this out! Be back after ...

That's sweet ... I like it so far. Have to see what it's like in a match. The only niggle is that I wish the player character was a little further up from the bottom of the screen and that the mouse was hidden as it kinda messed me up sometimes. Great improvement over the last one though you'll probably do really well with this.

At first i didnt read the instructions here so she hit the ball automatically. Then i figured clicking helped. There are two small problems that i found. By moving the mouse, i cant really say for sure where she will move or in other words how much my mouse movement will exaclty move the girl. I can see the cursor and thats extra confusing, so i guess youll remove the cursor in the final game and i suggest that you add some kind of indication on the court where the girl will be moving when you move the mouse. Secondly, i wasnt sure if i'm in position to hit the ball, somehow i wasnt sure the ball was near me when it passed. I wasnt too focused when i tried it, but maybe you can make the "3D feeling" more 3D somehow, of where the ball is. The animation changes are pretty sudden, and perhaps that doesnt exactly help to imagine where i'll be hitting the ball. But in general, theyre ok.

Can do on both counts. I found it harder to judge the player movement without it, but I could use a player target icon instead as Lenn requested.



Yes, perhaps a target cursor on the court itself would be more helpful.




Well the ball doesn't have a shadow yet ( I only just noticed ) so hopefully that will make a big difference to judging "depth".




They are pretty sudden, yeah. I was concerned it would be unresponsive if the animations were any smoother. I'll fiddle with the tweening though.


Thanks for the feedback so far guys. It seems like I'm on the right track if I can make improvements.

Oh ... yeah thinking back ... it'd be better to have some sort of cursor ... but put it on the girl and have it transform to where she's going ... make it accelerate faster than her ... like Tennis Critters did. Just so long as the mouse cursor isn't in a different place than the girl like it is now.

It seems to work pretty well once you get used to it.

Things I noticed:

1. The player should face the front of the court most of the time, and use bouncing sidesteps to move left and right, particularly with small movements.

2. As others have pointed out, the animations aren't fluid, but this is really a visual thing that can be tweaked. The animations that are there look good, as do the models.

3. It would be nice to see a solid 'smash' shot playable at the net, but I'm not sure how you could incorporate this into the present control scheme.

4. I'd prefer the controls to be short click for drop shot, long click for long shot, although you could easily make this optional.

5. If you could make the character's head point at the ball all the time it would look very cool :)

Other than that, it looks good, and would be fun to test against an AI opponent to see how well a rally plays out.

I'm not really buying into the mouse control idea, tbh. Just doesn't seem 'right'.

The mouse pointer is distracting, also.

cant play it m8.

No frame limiting in it so it runs so fast i cant keep up with the ball.

looks nice though.

Hi,

nice game so far. My daughter enjoys it a lot! :O)


Greetings,

taumel

I'd like to do this, and initially I did, but it didn't look very good. I hope to get it looking good and back in before the final product though.



I guess I'll need to work on adding fluidity without messing up controls response.



At the moment, overhead "smash" shots are automatic if the ball is above head height and reachable.



Not sure if I like that, but I'll look into it as an option.



Oooh I hadn't thought of that, but I really like it. Just one of those pointless little touches that looks really cool. I'm definitely gonna do that.



Well technically you're probably right, it isn't "right". I'm just not convinced that casual gamers are happy with keyboard controls, and they sure won't own a joypad ( which would be my preference. ) Most shareware tennis games are mouse only or mouse preferred too, so it seems I'm not the only one to have this concern.



Yep, I did warn about that in my first post. If you have VSync disabled in drivers, it probably won't be playable unless you temporarily enable it again.




hehe, thanks.

Performance was fine (all the graphics settings were low by default it seemed) on my machine AMD 500 MHz, Geforce 2 MX 32 MB Video Ram, 256 MB System RAM, Win 98.

Controls were easy enough to use I felt. I prefer using the mouse only as it is a much more relaxed way of playing. I have been working on a game from time to time which only uses the mouse for input as I am the kind of gamer who can't be bothered learning all the keys and playing a game that requires too much concentration - I do that at work enough.

Thanks Matty, I'm particularly pleased to hear that it runs ok on a 500mhz and gf2.