World War Whatever - First demo!

[DilloDude]

Hello everyone! Check out my latest project - World War Whatever. So far there are only three types of enemies, but I only started a couple of days ago!
Download the executable here.
Please let me know what you think.

[DilloDude]

Well, on to my making my next enemy now - a trebuchet that hurls rocks at you. Sounds unusual? Wait till you see what else i've got planned...

[DilloDude]

Ok, done that, and I've got a helicopter as well. What should I make next...
maybe I'll do the Balloon with a machine-gunner in it.

[DilloDude]

Now i've got that, too! I think next thing to do is make better scenery, with tiles for water and land and montain and shores and things - man it seems such a pain! Oh well, it'll be worth it - I hope...

[DilloDude]

Well now I've got a basic set, but they don't wrap very well, and I probably want some larger ones as well. Any Suggestions

[DilloDude]

Well now I'm thinking it might be better to make an animation for the whole level, like in the abuse2 demo, rather than tiling it. I'll have to do that soon and try it out. I'm also thinking of most of the levels having some sort of mission, like shoot down the enemies' spy balloon that is surrounded by AAGuns, or drop a bomb and blow up some building. To make it more interesting, I might make animations for take-off and landing. I am thinking about making a player profile to save with your game, so you type in your name, age, interests and anything else, and it stores them in an array, but the only point I could see might be saving highscores on a website or something, any other oppinions?

[duracel92]

My opinion is:

Turn the max framerate up to 100+, you never know and it will also make you be able to make more complex animations that are faster.

I think tilling is better its: quick, simple and easy to use.

About missions, great idea.

*oh, an how do you get extra ammo, i ran out straight away LMAO!

[duracel92]

oh and can I ask, how did you make the FPS counter? If thats what it is...

[WauloK]

I had a plane flying and shot down another plane, collected whatever it left behind (ammo?) and flew around for a while but saw nothing else in the short test I did.
No trebuchets or anything else.

[DilloDude]

There is already a global variable real_fps, whish stores the framerate.
In the demo so-far, there is not much, just AAGuns, Wildcats and KWildcats (Wildcats without ammo). I am planning to upload another version soon.
While turning the framerate up could work, I would have to adjust things like velocity, and other values that are updated each frame, but I might do an experiment with a later version. I think Youre right about tiling, I made a simple background, but it is pretty large and takes a while to load. The hard part about tiles is making them fit together well, and having the right tile to fit the scenery. So far, I just mant to work with land, shore, and sea tiles (and possibly mountains) and have tiles that blend them together well. But I also would want larger ones (tiles made up of lots of smaller tiles) to fill large areas. I might want to make land and sea separate actors, so that ships can't sail into the land. Then I would want other scenery like trees and buildings but they won't be too difficult. I already have it set up so a tall building will damage you if you run into it. If anyone could provide a good source of tiles, or maybe a good program for making/editing them, please let me know.

[DilloDude]

I now have made a runway and a takeoff animation, and I considered either

1. Having two skill levels to chose from.
2. Having cheats to change maximum ammo, damage rate.
3. All of the above.

So you can make it so you only take half the damage, and/or carry twice the ammo.
Also, I might have it so at the end of some levels, you have to land. All you will have to do will be to line up with the runway, though, but it might make it more interesting.
I am open to suggestions, if anyone has any ideas for extra stuff, such as missions, enemies etc. Pretty much any sort of enemy is ok, considering you're in a biplane, and there are enemies, with crossbows, fighter jets, UFOs and a binch of other weird stuff. But that's one of the reasons why it doesn't fit a particular time-frame, or a particular war. It (hopefully) will make it more interesting, too.

[DilloDude]

I've now made it so you can pause. I have another idea, for some of those enemies that fly out of the screen and you can't see them, I want to make a radar. I know of a way to show dots on it, but can anyone find a solution for finding all enemies (preferably by checking variables, but possibly using names), and find the five closest ones of them that are closer than a certain distance, and returning their clonenames in an array? I know a way of cycling through actors with a given name, but is there a simple way of finding five closest ones, and is there a simple way of cycling through all actors with the variable Type == Player and Side == Bad? What would be better is if I could have all enemies that are closest, but I would then need to find the number of dots and assign a clonename to each one.

Also, for all those who want to know how I did some things, I plan to post the .ged file of one level when I'm done, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

[DilloDude]

My next idea of an enemy is a battleship type of thing. I have some ideas about it's weapons etc. but I want peoples' oppinions on how it should move. I want to know in what cases it should be moving, and which direction it should move to. As it's guns can rotate around, it doesn't have to face toward you, so it can move any direction. Also, how should it change to avoid sailing on land. I want something that would look better than just a physical response, though. Also, I probably want something similar to stop you flying out of the level.

While turning the framerate up could work, I would have to adjust things like velocity, and other values that are updated each frame, but I might do an experiment with a later version.

I could replace draw actor events with a timer for 33 ms, about the same time as a frame, anyway. This might even fix some of the lag when the view is moving. But I still would need to adjust directional_velocities (or write some other script that does it automatically). However, if I can keep the framerate up while the view is moving, I could have a better move where it moves the same speed as you when you're a certain distance away. I tried this earlier, but the result was much lag, so I changed it to its current method, which isn't quite as good.

[duracel92]

For the battleship, i'd say whatever floats your boat... meh, and for making tiles, heres what i do:

I make a simple tileset like the first part of the image below.



Then expand it, into a more better looking tileset, something like the second set, and keep on building up more and more. and then i copy and paste them 3 times so and keep rotating them 90 degrees untill i make a full tileset...

Hope this helps, and also don't complain about how bad the tileset is, it was a 2 minute drawing on paint lol...

[DilloDude]

Thanks for that! Based on that example you posted, I have made a basic set of tiles. I made them larger, though, to cover large sections of area. I hope to be able to post the next update soon, maybe after I've finished making my battleship. I already made the animations for it, so the rest is just scripting.