Rockfall DX - WIP test

Hello all,

I've been working on this for the past few months. A few of you may know that I previously released a game called Rockfall - The Return for the PC that was written in Blitz3D. Since the release of BlitzMax it was always my intention to release a version for the Apple Mac as well. Since BlitzMax is cross-platform, I decided to give the whole game a bit of a face-lift and remove some of the more annoying features of the game, so re-releasing it for the PC as well. Not really sure what to do about the Linux market (if there is one), but since it's not much effort, there's a Linux version as well.

Anyway, the game is now at a playable state and I would like the community to give it a bit of a test run and let me know how it performs and what you think of the game. For those that don't know, it's my take on the Repton series of games that were released for the 8 bit computers of the 1980s (although they have now been remade for the PC).

SCREENSHOT:



DOWNLOADS:

Windows installer version (5.45MB) - (Vista users must install from an admin account)
Winodws ZIP version (4.90MB)

Mac (Universal binary, 6.51MB)

Linux (4.78MB)

If you're a Windows Vista user, please try the installer version, as I want to make sure that everything works as it should on other people's systems. Cheers.

NOTES:

Display settings: The game should detect your desktop aspect ratio and hertz settings and find the closest matching resolution. It is limited to a screen of between 480 and 600 pixels high. You can change display settings in the game as well, should you want to.

Audio: Vista should default to OpenAL, or DirectSound if that fails. XP will use FreeAudio. The Windows version will let you change it should you want to from within the game. Mac uses FreeAudio and does not give you the option of using another driver (no need).

Profiles: The game will create a profile based on your user name upon first starting the game. You can edit or create additional profiles from the Start Game menu (you should be able to access all profiles from all user accounts regardless of OS - please report if this proves not to be the case).

Levels: The levels included have been ported from a set that was meant for release for Rockfall 3, an Atari ST game, not a PC one. The default set for the final game is being worked on, so I decided to include these as you'll see most of the game elements far more quickly. As such, thinigs may seem to get difficult a lot quicker than they will in the final game, although you may have more time than you're supposed to at this stage as well.

Music: Will not be included in the final game. The final music has not been written yet, and the included track is for testing purposes only. It's also been sampled from the title track I used in Rockfall 2 (from the ST again), which is why it sounds more than a little retro. The final game should have around 8 tunes.

VERY BRIEF INSTRUCTIONS

The aim of the game should be obvious to any Repton or Boulderdash fan, but anyway...

To complete a level you must collect all of the gems, kill/trap any creatures, and use all transporters, all before your time runs out. Some levels also require you to flip a switch to open the exit, which only becomes active once all other tasks have been completed.

Bonus points and time are awarded for the successful completion of a level. Any time bonus will be lost if you die on a level, so be careful.

Also, when you die, the game has an auto-play feature. It basically takes control after you die so that you don't have to remember how you got as far in the level as you did. You simply take over from wherever you like by hitting a direction key. While auto-play is active, press the 1,2 and 3 keys to control how fast it runs (it will drop to 1 again should it get near the point where you died). You can disable this feature on a per profile basis in the Preferences menu under Controls.

CONTROLS:

Selectable and reconfigurable from within the game.

Keys: Arrows to move, Space for map, Q for suicide and Esc to quit.

Mouse: Move direction pointer with mouse and press LMB to move in that direction.

Joypad (must be plugged in before starting the game): Directions to move, button 0 to show map.



And that's basically it. Please let me know what you think of the game, how well it peforms (giving OS and specs), and whether there were any problems (and any way to reproduce them if possible).

One final note is that not all of the menu options will do anything for the simple reason I haven't coded them yet. Also, as I have not implemeted the Pause menu yet, the game will continue to run should you switch windows or Alt-Tab.

Pressing F11 will reveal various bits of debug info, including FPS, which should stay around the refresh rate of your monitor (although you can turn VSync off if you really want to).

Have fun.

Nice game, very fun! I remember your old Rockfall game. This one is just as fun, and the graphics are great.

Thanks. Glad you liked it. Could you let me know what your system specs are, as I'm trying to get a feel for what the minunum should be.

Anyone else? Just a tad worried I've only had one reply in 13 hours! :o(

Played it on my MacBook P:ro. Very nicely done! One of the better boulderdash clones around for sure. Like the way it was in widescreen on my laptop too! Possibly you should be able to press the mouse button at the start of a level as well as space.

Hey how do I get the green key on level 1, I get squashed when I moved down?

What timing method did you use, delta?

Hi Grey. Glad you liked it. Did you manage to test it on a Vista system as well as your MacBook, as I know you were part of that whole other thread?

As for the mouse button, yep, I can add that as I find myself hitting the mouse button even when I am playing with keys. The mouse button does actually work, but you have to be using the mouse control method. I'll change it so that it works when you're using keys and joypad as well.

As for the green key, there's two of them on the first level. The first one is a trap, so cannot be collected. The second is just a little bit later on. Only one key of each colour is needed to open all the safes of that colour.

I used fixed rate logic timing for the timing, no delta. Game runs at 200 logic cycles per second.

No I haven't tested on Vista as I don't have it! :-) I'll get it soon though...

mouse button thing seems a good idea.

Aha gren key a trap! grrr.. ;)

Fixed Rate logic @200fps is what I use too, cool.

'input not supported' on my TFT, had to manually change the ini file to something standard, I suggest to start with standard resolutions.. :P

Is it to be a game for sale?

@Grey - Ok, No worries, I'm sure that Gfk will bo along soon enough to test it on a Vista machine. Yeah, sorry about the little trap so early on. Things will be a lot easier in the proper default set - not even any boulders! I found that anything lower than 200fps for the logic didn't yield smooth results, so I use 200 as a minimum. Sometimes go higher if the game doesn't have a lot of logic going on.

@CS_TBL - Can you remember what settings the game was trying to use, including the refresh rate? Do you know if it was the resolution your monitor had trouble with, or the hertz setting. Would it fail if I used 60hz for example? Do you have the correct drivers installed for your monitor (no excuse, I know). Yes, the intention is to sell this game when finished.

I don't have Vista either! I hijacked somebody else's PC to test my own stuff on.

I put it to 800x600, initially it was 720 x something, prolly the matching 4:3 value. That's all I know :P It ran and currently still runs 16bit. System was the left one in my sig.

Hmm, if your monitor is 4:3 it should have picked up 640x480, unless you use a desktop resolution that doesn't match the ratio of your monitor. What res do you use for your desktop? Is it 1280x1024 per chance?

it is.. but 800x600 worked.. (didn't try 5:4 yet)

Do you know if you have a resolution of 640x512 available, as this would fit a 5:4 aspect ratio? Maybe I should treat 5:4 resolutions as 4:3, and allow the user to change it later in preferences if they want to.

What the game does at start up is determine the aspect ratio of your monitor by using the user's desktop resolution. So even if a user has their desktop as 1280x1024 on a 4:3 monitor, the program will think the monitor is 5:4 and not try to set 640x480, but the closest match. In your case, the monitor didn't like it, but this may have had something to do with the hertz setting, as this is also taken from the desktop. I might try using a default of 60hz and see if this makes a difference. I decided to use the desktop hertz setting as default, as any lower resolution should support it.

The program does check the availability of the final selection before switching. If it fails it tries the same res, but at 60hz. If that fails it goes to 640x480 @ 60hz. For some reason your drivers appear to be reporting back combinations that are not actually available.

I'll sort something out, as all I want to do is have the game start in a widescreen format on widescreen monitors, and 4:3 on CRTs, etc.

This game is driving me nuts, because I suck at it. :-)

anyway, some info:

1) It ran pretty smooth.
580 FPS when disabling the VSync (Core 2 Duo E6600, Radeon X1650XT)

2) Sound defaulted to FreeAudio, and played without hiccups, delays, etc. (Windows XP). The default background music isn't my taste though, it starts getting old real quick

3) the uninstall feature ran into some problems, saying it could not remove all files/folders.
The "log" button in the uninstaller returned this:



but when I checked out the 'SOS Software' folder manually, I found the following:



So... It appears that your uninstaller didn't take all files into consideration that are created later on by the game itself. That's a fairly major issue, since people (rightfully) expect a program to clean up after itself when uninstalling.

4) The reoslution selector gave like 30+ options, but many of the 'major' ones that one might expect (like 1024x768) were missing. Not that big of a deal, except you may want to consider breakup up the resolution, color & refreshrate options into three seperate selectors so you don't spend forever cycling through the list to find out that the one you're looking for doesn't exist.

You could even make the 16 bit / 32 bit color a radio button. (e.g. 'thousands of colors' <-> 'millions of colors')

Or you could use a pull-down menu rather than the current way of iterating through the list of resolutions, that way it's a lot faster to see if the resolution you're looking for is even an option without manually having to flip through the entire list.

I did see some options that I had no idea that my system even supported. :-?

Thanks for testing. Your points, one by one...

1) Great. Nice to know it was nice and smooth.

2) Worked as expected, FreeAudio should be the default under XP. As stated in the original thread the current music will not even be present in the final game - it's test music. The final score is being written by a good friend of mine, which is not ready at this point in time.

3) I'll look into this and see if there's an option to force the removal of all folders. I don't think it's as major an issue as you make it out to be though. If a user decides to re-install, their saved games, profiles, etc are still there.

4) Any screen resolution that has a height of more than 600 pixels has been hidden on purpose for the simple reason that I cannot allow anyone to see too much of the level at once, as this would introduce an unfair advantage. It's only there so that people can select a suitable resolution for their monitor, from a 4:3 or widescreen point of view. Much of this is automated from the initial start, so a user should not have to worry about this. Plus, it's not that easy to split up the res from the refresh rate, as not all refresh rates are available for all resolutions. If this option is used at all, it will only be used once.

What options are you not aware of that you system supported?

Some of the other games I've run across ask you whether or not to keep savegames/profiles etc. during the uninstall. Either way, erroring out the uninstaller looks unpolished.

also, I realize that this is still a work-in-progress, but I also couldn't help noticing that the .exe itself doesn't appear to have an icon embedded in it, it just shows the plain vanilla 'application' logo in the start menu.




Many of the resolutions are ones I'd never seen before. (Although I did get a new video adapter last week, so they will probably pop up in other games too)

Anyway, I had never seen any of these:
- 720x576 (Was selected as the default resolution)
- 720x480
- 800x480
- 848x480

And I don't see it now, but I thought it also had 1280x512 as an option earlier today.

Under 848x480 everything works just fine, but the graphics are too tall and narrow, and look squashed together... Although I guess that if one had a widescreen monitor, that resolution would be great.

Agreed. I will look into this and see what I can do to tidy it up.


I have no icon yet because I haven't designed one yet. There will be one in the final version, as well as later test versions should I have one designed by then.


Yeah, I noticed this on my system as well. I may filter the list further by just looking for the more common 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 ratios. I'll also include 5:4, but treat it as 4:3 on the initial start-up, aa the user can always change it later.

720x576 is actually a 5:4 ratio that matches the 1280x1024 you use for your desktop, which is why the game singled out that resolution. Can you get that resolution to work at all, by setting it from your desktop? If so, what bitdepth and hz setting did you use?

Thanks for your help.

If you use innosetup there is an option to totally kill of a folder no matter what the contents so I used that to kill off a folder where content gets created by the game like high scores, profiles, settings etc.

Tried InnoSetup a while ago and couldn't really got on with it! So I now use QSetup instead, which is a paid for installer, but I like it. I can't find an option to kill off any remaining files/folders, but I did find an option to hide the error message at the end of the uninstallation process. I've just emailed their support desk to see if there is a way of doing this. I'm sure there must be, as it's a pretty obvious feature to not have.

EDIT ---

After some playing with what they call an Execute Engine, I've discovered options to manually delete files, so I've added instructions to the uninstall process to manually delete all profiles and the config file. So that issue has now been sorted.

Unfortunately, I've discovered a problem with Vista. For some reason my Vista detection doesn't work if they program is launched straight after installation from the installer. If I don't choose to launch it straight away, but do so later from the Start menu then it's fine! I've got a feeling that will having me banging my head against a few walls :o(

I'll let you know once I have uploaded any changes.

That is a weird problem indeed. How are you detecting Vista anyway, some OS call which returns the windows version right? And what are you doing different if you fine it's Vista?

I'm using the method here to detect which OS is running, so you're right with your assumption.

I use this to deterime which sound driver to use on first run. Vista uses OpenAL or DirectSound, everything else uses FreeAudio. For some reason Vista is defaulting to FreeAudio when launched from the installer. Works fine if the first run is from the Start menu!

I'm about to start some testing to see if I can find out what's happening.

Phew, right I've now uploaded the latest version with the following fixes (same links as above, but you can click below as well).

Windows version (5.45MB) - (Vista users must install from an admin account)

Mac (Universal binary, 6.51MB)

The changes...

The game now has an icon that replaces the default Windows or BlitzMax one. May not be final, but it's nicer.

The Windows installer now asks you whether you want to remove the configuration file and profiles when you uninstall the game.

Screen modes are now filtered for 4:3, 5:4, 16:9 and 16:10 resolutions only. Upon initial start-up, 5:4 is treated as 4:3, which should solve the problem that CS_TBL was having. You can still select a 5:4 resolution from the Preferences menu later if you do actually have a 5:4 monitor.

I've also hacked a fix for Vista not being detected if the game is launched from the installer. A bit messy, but I've emailed the creators of my installer about this to find a more suitable fix.


Please do continue testing and let me know of any issues, as well as what you think of the game generally.

Thanks all.

Ah I see, to detect the sound driver in Vista. Good one. I'm gonna do that too.

Yeah, I saw no reason not to use the established and reliable audio driver in FreeAudio on systems and OSs that have not had any problems. So I have the PC version check which OS it is on and use FreeAudio for anything up to and including XP. If Vista is found it first tries OpenAL, and if that isn't available (although it should be given that Vista's audio is OpenAL), it tries DirectSound.

good plan. You didn't encounter any channel limit problems with OpenAL then like GfK?

No, I didn't experience any problems with channel limits, as Gfk did. However, I don't set aside a fixed number of channels. I create a new one for each new sound and kill off any that are no longer used. Just the way I've always done it and it seems to work fine. I don't have to play a lot of sounds at the same time, which is probably why I've been OK.

I've now uploaded a Linux version as well.

Linix version (4.78MB)

All feedback welcome for any of the three versions.

Hiya - nice game! I'm a big fan of Boulderdash clones, especially ones that have a lot more features than the original! :)

A couple of points though:

- On the majority of games of this genre, if you cause a rock to fall, you can 'keep ahead' of it and step left or right to avoid it when a gap becomes present. I notice here that if you set a rock free and move downwards (even if there's free space below you) you get bumped on the head instantly. Fair enough if this is the intended idea, I guess it'll just take a little getting used to, and means that puzzles need approaching in a different way. ;)

- May be something to do with the last sentence of my first point, but I found the first level a little difficult.

Apart from that, it's shaping up to be a brilliant game, and the graphics and sound can't be questioned.

I'm on a Centrino 1.73ghz / 512mb Dell Laptop (1920x1200) ATI Mobility Radeon X300, running XP (sp2) and I experience no graphical or sound problems at all settings.

Hope these comments help, and best of luck with the game! ;)

Hi Matt, thanks for testing.

With regards to the boulders, that's how they are intended to fall. The game is actually based on Repton, so is a lot more puzzle based. I never really liked how you could outrun boulders in Boulderdash - felt a bit like cheating.

These won't be the final levels. The set I'm using here are a part-developed set that was oringally for the Atari ST version of Rockfall 3. The actual default set starts out a lot easier, with the first couple of levels not even having any boulders. The different elements are introduced over something like 20-odd levels, so the learning curve is a lot gentler than those here. I simply chose these levels because the different elements come into play a lot sooner, for the sake of testing and feedback.

Glad you like the graphics and the sound.

Nice to know that you didn't have any problems with graphics or sound. Out of interst, did the game default to 800x500 to match your 16:10 monitor?

Keep the comments coming, they are all useful.

Hi JazzyB,

No worries! That's cool, and I must admit to the fact that however much a Boulderdash fan I was, I never did play Repton <blush>.

Looking forward to purchasing and playing the finished version!

On the resolution side, yes, it did default to 800x500x32, which looked just perfect on the screen.

Cheers!
M.

Yeah limiting the sound channels in an array is sensible.

I gotta say that I was at first also confused by not outrunning the boulders then I realised it was part of the game. I *did* play Repton on the Acorn Electron, and I loved it!

@Matt,

Cheers, thanks for confirming the resolution detection worked (only got 4:3 monitos on my Windows set-up here). Looks like you might be my first customer then :)

@Grey,

I don't actually limit the number of channels for my sounds. I create a new channel for each new sound that is played. These are then checked every game cycle and killed if no longer needed. I never have many more than half a dozen possible sounds playing at once, so I didn't think limiting them is necessary.

Repton was the first full priced game I bought for my Acorn Electron all those years ago. Pretty much bought them all, with the exception of Repton Infinity (I'd moved up to an Atari ST by then, or about to). Even got the first three for the PC (also available via my site).


Thanks both for your feedback.

Are you affiliated with Superior Interactive in any way? Also on this page:

http://www.sos-software.co.uk/dwnlds/pc_dls.htm

The "more info" buttons don't work on their games.

Oops! Didn't know I forgot to get those working!

Yes, I am affiliated with them. Try the following link for all their games on my site.

http://www.sos-software.co.uk/games/pc_games_2.htm

I'll get those links working later on today.

OK, I've just uploaded a Windows ZIP version, as it occurred to me that there might be a lot of poeple refusing to download an installer. This is a fair point, but I would like Windows Vista users to try the installer if possible.

Those links in full...

Windows installer version (5.45MB) - (Vista users must install from an admin account)
Winodws ZIP version (4.90MB)

Mac DMG (Universal binary, 6.51MB)

Linux TAR.GZ (4.78MB)

Thanks all.