Top-down rotational test

[mikael]

Here's a test I've been doing for a top-down shooter game.
It isn't much of a game, just a large area with a couple of the same monsters running around. And the graphics also suck at the moment since I have absolutely no artistic skills. But they worked for testing out the visual profiles.
The title is currently Hecatomb because I wanted to make a Hexen themed game and apparently hecatomb was the unfinished sequel.

The controls are:
WASD for up, down. left, right.
Use the mouse for aiming and left/right mouse buttons for primary and secondary fire.

The game also crashes allot on my computer and unfortunately I don't really know why. I use Ubuntu 7.10 and there's nothing in the log.txt that says if there's something wrong with the scripts, but if I start the game from a terminal i get a "Segmentation fault" error which is the same as memory access violation.
So you'd want to run it in window mode or else the resolution might not change back when it crashes.

I also have one question about the map editor:
When you click "Save Active Map Now" is there any way to make it change the files in the Worlds folder directly and not just in Profiles?
It's a bit annoying when you restart the game and accidentally click "New" just to have all your changes deleted.

A big thanks to Seth for releasing the engine for free. It's getting pretty easy to use now that I've gotten over the initial difficulty of how everything fits together. So hopefully I'll be able to do something a bit more coherent soon.

[Seth]

Nice work, the controls work very well.

Ok, I found that if I did the right mouse shot (the spread shot) directly into a wall piece I would sometimes get a crash.

The reason is the engine would allow a Schedule(100, ..) even after SetDeleteFlag() was called on the entity, which it shouldn't allow as the entity won't exist.

The way it would happen is first a bone particle would detect collision against another bone particle and would mark itself for deletion in OnCollision(). But, the OnCollisionStatic() would be run as well (because it was touching a wall) and this would cause it to run Explode(), which is where the Schedule() happens to delete it (again, but 100 ms later after it won't exist).

A fix for now would be to keep track of when you kill the entity in script var and don't run the Explode() after this has happened.

I've fixed it in the engine, now it will give a quiet warning (I think it would be useful to know when a Schedule() you do will never take place) instead of crash.

I will have a new novashell release with this and other linux improvements ready for download soon.

Thanks for the example, was very useful to fix this issue!


When you click "Save Active Map Now" is there any way to make it change the files in the Worlds folder directly and not just in Profiles?
It's a bit annoying when you restart the game and accidentally click "New" just to have all your changes deleted.

Hmm, I see what you mean. I'll give this some thought.

I haven't really experimented with this, but you should be able to work on your profile world and just copy the maps directory over your base Hetatomb world dir at the end. (manually, after quitting novashell)

Might be a useful trick to not lose work if you've spent time working on a map in the wrong mode.

[harrio]

hey mik,

interesting control scheme. sorta reminds me of robotron, but then i'm old.

you brought up a good point about the saving procedures. the first time i went through the eggs tutorial i wiped out my progress several times by not truly understanding where i was in the editor.

keep working on that game, could be cool.