Endless Cathedral First Demo Download!

[DST]

See the bottom of the page for the new exe file (speed test).

This time around, the game doesn't crash, and the code is much more workable.

It was a tough decision to do this, but a resolution change was needed, as 800x600 is so very slow, especially when you want many moving layers. With 1000's of actors, recovering that version of the game was not feasable. Be careful of cloning, it can get you into a heap of trouble. Always have the game generate as much at the start of the game as you can, to make editing easier. Especially with platform games, where level planning is needed, be sure to use wireframe spawning actors where all the enemies will appear; you can then easily send them a timer to recreate the enemies when the level is restarted, and make them only spawn enemies when you get near them, this saves a lot of memory.

One thing that helped with my decision was when my game BossDestroy seemed unfixable, after a week of debugging, yet I made Hyperion in 4 days, and it was a much much better game.

I guess the point is, the real treasure you have is your own knowledge of how to do it; and that gets better and better. Don't hold on to projects that don't inspire you; They probably won't inspire anyone else either.

As I say to fellow artists "Your best work is yet to come".

Hopefully a new demo will be available in a few weeks!

[stevenp]

cool

did you use .wav for the music by any chance?

[DST]

Oggs for all the music, wavs for the sound effects. Why do you ask?

[stevenp]

43 MB seems like a prettty big size for a game on GE, did you atleast convert all of your sounds to a lower quality ?

like 8 bit mono 22hrtz
or
16 bit mono 22hrtz

you should be able to get like 65 sounds or more with .wav if you convert your sounds to this ( its what mine are all converteed to and they still sound fine) and 65 sounds only takes up 2 MB ( 1-3 seconds per sound)

also, your pictures, what format are they in, .BPM?

[DST]

like 8 bit mono 22hrtz

those numbers sound painful!

well, the majority of the game is made of png's and oggs. I could compress the wavs and take off another mb or two.

I'm not compressing the music any further, it already sounds like crap cause I had to set the game properties to 22khz to avoid skipping.....it really does take something away from the music.

Its the same thing with the sounds....reverb...helps set the mood, just like any other aspect of a game.

It doesn't take long to download really, not with the server I use. Did it?

I'm sure it will be more of an issue once it tops 100 mb.

I watched video games creep up out of the 2k gutter to the dvdrom, I remember when the SegaCD first came out, and I (had subscriptions to all the major magazines) was excited about the idea of sooo much storage space. Its hard to think in terms of compressing a game back down (to numbers like 8-bit), when I have half a terabyte of disk space today....but you're right, it is important. Personally, though, I'm always going to choose quality first.

I would like to note that Rondo of Blood on the pc is 40mb and that's without the cd tracks and is more shallow in color depth and has far less resolution than my game....

I don't mean to sound like a jerk. Its just how I come off.

[Bee-Ant]

Can you decrease the file size???

[DST]

well...Maybe.

here is a breakdown of the filesizes as they are in windows:
wav 15 files, 4.2mb
ogg 6 files, 15.8mb
png 446 files, 35.2mb

According to mojo i can get the wavs down to 2 mb,
the pngs i don't think I can change,
and I don't know that much about oggs. The variable bitrate oggs I tried to make always came out very large for the quality.
So I compressed them to a flat 128kbps with MediaMonkey.
It does seem that 6 tracks at 15 mb is pretty good compression, if it were in my mp3 collection....
I am a stickler for music quality.

Suggestions?

[supa-tails]

THAT WAS AMAZING!!! omg, that was almost as professional as DSD's Incursion! The gameplay was fun, and the whole floating castle thing was spectacular! The only suggestion I could make is probably a double jump feature. I love the effect how you see the ghosts in the background. Another suggestion is maby a larger variety of enemies, like zombies, spiders, fast zombies (hl2), maby shadows or something that reach from the ceiling and grab you, stuff like that. Also maby some details like stars, massivly huge castles in the background, flying things, just some ideas. Also maby some more detail in the bricks, instead of the red and black color, maby a more realistic type of thing, with the glow of fire or lava below or something. Once again, just some suggestions,

[DST]

Thanks for the help everyone!

[stevenp]

for some reason GE hates games that are made in 60 FPS it tends to slow down every few seconds ( for 1 second)

this is with all games in 60 FPS , even a game with 1 actor and no code ( try it )

at 30 FPS there is no slowdown,

[feral]

intel celeron 800mhz BUT running windows 98 so probably runs faster then it would on NT/2000/xp...and for crying out loud vista..

currently runs quite acceptably, with no noticeable lags in the game...

But, the music breaks up constantly and "jitters" , I assume music has lower priorities then graphics..

sorry , can't say what cpu usages is ? does 98 even have a resource meter ?

hope that helps
feral

PS: has a bug tho, do you want to know those now? or later..?

[Spidy]

there is a little bug in the game too the life menu is going behind the pillars

[DST]

Oh I'm sure you'll find lots of bugs if you look, mostly because there are a lot of things I haven't added yet. This is one reason i wanted to see how it runs on other computers.....to know if i'm heading in the right direction. Not gonna put a whole lot of work into it until i'm sure it will be playable.

I'm very surprised to hear your results, feral, since it uses 65-85% of a 3.6, i assumed it would choke an 800celeron....

[feral]

I'm very surprised to hear your results, feral, since it uses 65-85% of a 3.6, i assumed it would choke an 800celeron....

well, 1. it does not seem to lag, ( stutter/stop go) but whether it is running at full speed I don't know..

maybe if you give me a scrolling level where the guy just starts running (press space to go) , and set a realtime timer/ and a frame timer (timer+= type thing) then at the end of the 'run".... I can send you the results ... without lag the guys frame count vs realtime timer results should match those you get on a better PC ?

also 2/ as I said windows 98... it amazing what i can run on a celeron with 98, but can't using a higher end OS, that would be your real test I suppose running on a higher OS... sorry can't help you there ..

otherwise .. a thought.. there seems to be issues with some graphics scrolling on GE and not others.. not sure if it is just my old PC
but, larger items scroll slowly/lag. Which is perfectly logical and should happen, but some graphics still seems to scroll better then others regardless of size... anyone else see this or is it just my old PC??? I assume it may have something to do with the blitting routine and number of colors or number of variations of colors ?

feral
BTW, game is looking very nice..

[segwego12]

At the end, there is eternal falling.