visitation feedback

claxo on 2009/02/09 21:31 of Cenutry of the Fruitbat

It is a reduced version from the initial version, right? I dont see the hud elements , like Oxigen, that shows in the pyweek version ( and the current piggy screenshot)

with pygame 1.7 text has black bg, not transparent (looks ok with pygame 1.8.1).

soft scroll.
sun sprite looks good.

Getting cheap gains from openGL:

Would be better if your game logic decoupled from screen resolution. After all, the render is done with openGL. I mean writing the logic in world units, and the render scale acording to resolution. That way, you allow to select the screen size that better feels. Think the variety of display devices: netbook screen, 17'' crts, 22'' wide screen, OLPC.

floats for world coords: If at some time you want to guide objects along soft curves using delta physics, int coords will introduce inacceptable rounding errors. Even moving a sprite in the h axis at slow speed looks much better using floats coords + openGL.

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Comments

saluk on 2009/02/09 23:01:

Hi thanks for the comments.

It's more reformed than reduced. The oxygen feature has fallen away to be replaced with, well, no goals at this point. We took too long figuring out what we were going to do and finding our motivation, so in some ways it is less than the original, while it far surpasses in others. The people are livelier and smarter, which is closer to the idea for the original game, and the player has much more control over the simulation. The "hud" elements are displayed on individual buildings, as the economy is more localized, although some buildings are either missing the information or it's not very clear what it means.

with pygame 1.7 text has black bg, not transparent (looks ok with pygame 1.8.1).
Dealing with alpha channels is a bit arcane, especially between python versions. The text is based on the same sprite system as everything else, so the TTF has to be rendered as a texture surface with all of the letters laid out. For some reason the alpha isn't being picked up the same way on 1.7. Looking at the code it's probably the pygame.Surface([512,512] pygame.SRCALPHA) line.

Would be better if your game logic decoupled from screen resolution. After all, the render is done with openGL. I mean writing the logic in world units, and the render scale acording to resolution. That way, you allow to select the screen size that better feels. Think the variety of display devices: netbook screen, 17'' crts, 22'' wide screen, OLPC.
It's easiest when development to work with one resolution. Making it able to change is not hard. Left out of the interface, but a capability of the engine, is the possibility to switch from opengl to software display. So using pixel as a base is partly. As far as I know thought, things should work more or less the same if things were changed to floats. But yeah, this kind of polish is sorely missing.

Multiple resolutions, a camera independent of the player, being able to zoom in and out, and other tweaks are certainly under consideration, but the gameplay is still most important at this point.

Thanks again for the comments, it's very useful to think about these details, and you've pointed out some areas that I didn't really think about.