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A jam submission

CtesiphonView game page

Retrowave/Mecha-themed Boomer Shooter
Submitted by stomygame (@StomyGame) — 21 hours, 33 minutes before the deadline
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Ctesiphon's itch.io page

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Comments

Congratulations on the C++ move, and hope it pays off in the long run. The game runs out of the box on my Manjaro desktop. As for the game, all I can say is that what's currently there seems to match the experience in the LibGDX version. I assume the reason why rockets don't damage the player is that combat isn't ported yet?

Developer

It already feels like C++ has paid off, just the amount of power you get access to is incredibly liberating. That'd be correct, there's no damage calculated for any projectiles yet, you can only get hurt by fall damage in this demo. As long as I don't waste too much time playing 4X games before next demo day I'll finally be back to adding new features instead of reimplementing old ones.

Submitted

I'm glad you're keeping at it with this game!

Issues I've encountered: The music has a lot of static in it. At first I wasn't sure if it was intentional or not but it seems like other people have this problem too. The mouse stays on top of after alt-tabbing. It seems like you can break the move speed by alt-tabbing too.

You game sounds like a lot of work. Good luck!

Developer

I'm in too deep, there's no turning back on this game now!

With the sound, is it in the main menu music as well or just the in-game? Does turning off the Ambient track in Sound Options clear it up? Because after getting some newer speakers I can now tell the ambient track sounds really terrible and is definitely in line for replacement.

I'll have to play around with alt-tabbing to make sure it captures the mouse properly, I must've missed a case in the capture check somewhere. Break the move speed how? Like it accelerates you a bunch if you tab out and then back in?

Submitted (1 edit)

I just redownloaded the game to test. Turning off the ambient track doesn't do anything, the static seems to be coming from all audio sources including sound effects. The menu music has static as well.

You move at approximately 1/3 of the speed after alt-tabbing.

Additionally the icon seems to be broken or non existent?

I'm wondering why you can't see those problems, are you developing on linux? I hope this helps!

Developer

Yeah I mostly develop on Gentoo, though I reboot into Windows 7 when working on Windows-specific things. Audio was a little tricky to put together on both platforms so I'm not overly surprised there are issues.

Could you make a video+audio recording of the game running with the static and post it (or a link to it) here?. I can't recreate the problem so I'd like to hear what you're hearing. Also does your setup have more than two speakers/channels?

I think I know what the alt-tabbing problems are so I should be able to fix those. I can't remember if I was manually setting the icon or not, I was saving that for later. I don't even remember if I've made an icon to use yet.

Submitted
Deleted 6 years ago
Submitted(+1)

There you go! My setup only has headphones. I hope this helps.

Developer(+1)

Thanks a lot, this actually does give me a couple of possibilities and I may even be able to recreate it manually. My guesses are either the audio thread is sleeping too often or I'm not judging latency properly for all sound cards. I thought it might be just the vorbis streaming not working correctly from the longer loops but I hear distortion on the plasmagun's shots as well so it would have to be a problem with the overall audio. Either way this gives me a good idea of what might be wrong as its similar to problems I've already had.

I'd have replied much sooner but itch appears to have swallowed up the notification from this reply so I didn't see it until now!

This seems really good and sounds great but when i launched i hear sound cracking, i don't know if this could being only my problem. The retro aesthetic feels really good, my only advice is to having more punch back when shooting, for example the shotgun should have a more powerful knock back animation like having a full knock back and slowly return to the position, ill wait for more.

Developer

Was the cracking when the whole game first launched or specifically after you hit New Game?

(+1)

This is a game I really have been looking for in quite some time. It's getting really better in terms of visuals and movement. Controlling her was a very smooth experience.

Too bad we don't have an actual gameplay yet, but that is something I can understand.
Good luck on this!

Submitted (2 edits)

I was about to write a big review about this game, and about how confused i was that you have gifs and images showing substantial gameplay with enemies and challenge.

However, before that I thought it might be smart to read the description to see if there's something I had missed. Upon doing that I have decided to not review this game until the screenshots at least match up with what the game currently is like. I think it's pretty dishonest of you to have screenshots showing a lot of content that just isn't in the current version of the game.

Developer(+1)

That is fair, the current build does not resemble what's shown in the gifs just yet. If you would like to try the game seen there, download the "Old" versions of the game. If it would ease your frustration I can replace the screenshots with just static images of what is actually in the current build.

Getting invisible menus on Linux / Radeon RX480 / Mesa 18.1.3 because of shader compilation error:

Error compiling fragment shader: src/shaders/text_frag.glsl
0:15(33): error: sampler arrays indexed with non-constant expressions are forbidden in GLSL 1.30 and later

Developer (1 edit)

Well this one of the more bizarre errors I've seen. I thought it might be a driver issue but the version of GLSL I'm using is archaic even by open-source standards. I have an idea on how to get around it but for now try just changing the first line in src/shaders/text_frag.glsl and src/shaders/text_vert.glsl to #version 400 and see if it clears up, let me know if it does as that will be a lot neater than what I have in mind on my end.

Yes, this seems to fix it. The rest of the game also seems to work fine without issues, though I'm seeing some minor glitches in the menu button borders.


Also, I tried testing the game on some other (older) systems, but the game refuses to launch, producing the error: Illegal hardware instruction (core dumped).

Developer (2 edits)

I've seen this happening on another computer, I'm pretty sure it's actually a related problem. Apparently the way I've been doing quick 2D rendering isn't actually possible on newer hardware without artifacting so I'm going to have to refactor my system for that slightly. For now I'm uploading some different shaders that should work better (albeit at 1/8th the speed), should be done in about half an hour.

As for illegal hardware instruction errors, that would be from the instruction set I've compiled with, CPUs made before 2011 are pretty much guaranteed to not work. Frankly this is something I'm open to spending time on as I would like older hardware to be able to run the game, it's just hard to find a good set of compiler flags to build with.

EDIT: Also the game is 64-bit only, I could build for 32 bit as well but I haven't tried up to this point. I might make a point of that for next Demo Day.

(1 edit) (+1)

I ran into this exact GLSL issue a few months back. Excuse the plug, but I wrote up my solution here, if you want something that's backwards compatible: https://coaldev.tumblr.com/post/170129777035/preprocessing-glsl-shaders

Since you're using C++, you may have an easier time implementing this.

Developer

I haven't done the replacement trick for now, though I was doing something similar in the LibGDX build and will eventually here again to consolidate constants between shaders and game code. Your write-up did help me get to a solution with macros for hardcoding array-access and branching to stick to a single sampler call each pass. I'm happy with that for now, I just need to check that it resolves the corruption issue in korpiroot's screenshot. It doesn't happen on any of my machines but I did see it on my roommate's computer so I can check on that.