Aranara - post judging comments

paulpaterson on 2013/09/22 17:41 of Aranara

Congratulations to the winners and to all who competed. I was blown away by the quality and diversity of the entries.

A big thanks to everyone for the feedback on my game. Everyone was very generous, particularly since it seemed that so many people had issues getting the game to work as intended. It looks like there were some significant physics issues.

I'm interested in hearing from anyone that had physics issues which platform they were on so I can look into it. I'm thinking it may be a framerate issue but it may also be platform related. I didn't see this kind of thing (Helium rocks getting stuck in other objects) at all on my Mac mini so I'd like to investigate further because I'd like to use pymunk in the future.

It is very kind of everyone who still rated the game high despite these issues really making it unplayable.

Some people mentioned the mouse scroll wheel not being a good control scheme - it was slow for some and for those on laptops it was unusable. Yes! I should have tested this better. I'm using a magic mouse which seems to be very unrepresentative in terms of how it generates scroll events. 

Music too large? Yep - I noticed this to my embarrassment when downloading other people's games! Mine was huge but it didn't need to be.

Gerty obscuring the action - aargh. Yes, I thought this too when I was playing through after the submission. This is one of those things where you have a design idea and find it hard to get away from it. I really wanted Gerty to be a big part of the game but I needed to find a better way for him to pop-up without being annoying or hiding the screen.

I'll do a bit more of a detailed post-mortem later but I just wanted to thank everyone again for the great comments. This really helps me a lot.

Paul

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Comments

f7f5 on 2013/09/25 21:37:

I was one of the players who reported physics issues. I have a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E6550  @ 2.33GHz running Fedora 16 64bits.

paulpaterson on 2013/09/27 17:10:

Thanks for the info. This helps a lot.

Do you happen to remember if you were seeing low framerates? (if you have it still installed and don't mind running a test you could run it with "python rungame.py -c" and it will show the FPS counter displayed) 

f7f5 on 2013/09/27 20:33:

I tried with the level "Push and Block". Just placing the block below the falling Helium rocks get the fps to fall inside the 38-43 range. Once I had both the blower and the block placed framerates were around 29/30 fps.

From pip freeze, it seems I have pyglet dev and pymunk 4.0.0:
-e hg+https://pyglet.googlecode.com/hg/@f8da1dcafc85846fffde69212e3c62dc782b242d#egg=pyglet-dev
pymunk==4.0.0

This is the output when I start the game:

[aranara-0.2.3]$ python run_game.py -c
Loading chipmunk for Linux (64bit) [/home/nuno/Jogos/pyweek/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pymunk/libchipmunk64.so]
Initializing cpSpace - Chipmunk v6.2.0 (Debug Enabled)
Compile with -DNDEBUG defined to disable debug mode and runtime assertion checks

After a while I start seing these messages over and over on the console:

Chipmunk warning: High EPA iterations: 30
        Failed condition: i<WARN_EPA_ITERATIONS
        Source:chipmunk_src/cpCollision.c:286

paulpaterson on 2013/09/28 11:13:

Very interesting. Thanks for running this test!

I did see frame rates around 30 during development before I optimized the blower but I wasn't looking too much at the physics then so I'll go back and look at that.

I'll also take a look at that warning. It doesn't sound like a good thing!