Wasted Brilliance - Latest Comments

Re: Aeternum Arrives on PC

Brooks Bishop — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 19:24:47 -0000

Yeah, Taking a panic shot is still meant to fail the bonus. I think my meddling with the bomb system accidentally affected the panic interaction with the bonus flag. Annoying that I missed that one.

Annoying score reset bug too. At least it's purely cosmetic.

Once things settle down I'll see about putting out a patched version that addresses all the little things at once, and changes the Arcade balance like you suggested.

And thanks for all your feedback, I think it's really helping make the game better. :)

If you would like to claim a prize, go ahead and email me at brooks@wastedbrilliance.com so I can get some info.

Re: Aeternum Arrives on PC

Jaimers — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 19:14:46 -0000

Okay I have to say that the increased movement speed makes this game about ten times more playable and more fun now!

A suggestion I would like to make is for the game to save your latest inputted name on the scoreboard as typing out your name every time gets tedious fast.
Also it might be better to make panics fail the spellcardbonus as I feel kind of cheap capturing them like this haha.

Anyway I promised a video so here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

By the way you can see a score bug right at the beginning of the video and I encountered a different bug where I had most likely reset right after death and my character stayed purple until I had reset the run.

Re: Season’s Greetings: Winter is Come

Brooks Bishop — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 07:53:28 -0000

For the Extra mode cutscene stuff, I think the fact I've had a few people bring it up means it's very much a failure on my part. Going to see about how I can make it more obvious in a future revision.

I see what you mean on the Arcade mode power loss. In fact, I came to the same conclusion in order to implement an Easy difficulty on Normal mode, and for the new Arrange mode in the imminent PC release. Marking this down to do some testing with a lower power loss in Arcade mode too. Right now, it's a 75% loss, whereas the new Easy difficulty and Arrange mode are only a 50% loss.

Pacifist was kind of a quickie drop-in when I put out the first release. I figured since people usually like to try it anyway, I might as well build in an enforced version so it could have its own scoreboard. Unfortunately, I didn't end up spending too much time on balancing it. Although if you think the orbs are bad now, you should have seen them before I fixed their despawn timing, lol. In order to do bombs, I'll have to find some means of awarding them, since you can't stock back up on power. Just about the only interaction you have is grazing, so maybe I can make grazing also recharge the power meter at a relatively low rate to reward bombs, yet keep them from being utterly spamable. This also goes hand in hand with another change I made, in that in the PC version bombs don't count against you for the boss spell bonuses.

I'd love to have online leaderboards, but it would mean hosting them somewhere and developing a whole secure means of submitting scores. It's a whole lot of hassle to do and maintain and support on my own that I can't really afford both timewise and financially at the moment. We'll have to see how successful the PC release is. Unfortunately, getting on Steam is basically impossible for a niche little game like Aeternum, or that would have been the perfect platform for doing leaderboards.

And yes, I was kicking myself when KennyMan brought up a Restart menu option. It's already a part of the new PC release.

Thanks again for your support and suggestions!

Re: Season’s Greetings: Winter is Come

Jaimers — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 07:26:24 -0000

Ah my bad in that case. I guess while I'm here I might as well give you my two cents on the other modes.

For arcade mode I think to make it feel more like an arcade game experience it would be better to make the player not lose so much power upon death, seeing as you're usually pretty screwed if you die once, especially in certain areas. I feel that this is balanced in the main game through how you accumulate panics, which essentially become your "lives" in that so so speak. Arcade mode in that regard just becomes a "don't die ever" mode, I think not losing so much power balances out with the limited amount of lives you get.

Pacifist mode seemed like a neat mode until I found out you can't use the shield haha. I think that might be going a bit overboard in my opinion as it might make things almost impossible especially on the higher difficulty levels. The last wave of orbs on stage 2 seem to be a guaranteed hit on everything above normal for example.
I don't think adding bombs would break things too much and I think I speak for many if I say that a beatable challenge is always more fun than a "see how far you can get" one.

As for other implements, an in-game online leaderboard is always a good thing to add to your game and it will increase the replay value for many players as they can oversee their progress on the board.
And I think a quick restart option was already mentioned. You can restart pretty quick by suiciding but a restart button is always appreciated.

Re: Season’s Greetings: Winter is Come

Brooks Bishop — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 19:18:57 -0000

If you turn the dialogue option off in the menu before starting, it actually cuts out nearly all of the animation.
But I think since it seems to be a fairly non-obvious thing that it does that, then I should probably do something about that.
Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Season’s Greetings: Winter is Come

Jaimers — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 17:13:50 -0000

Seeing as it looks like you're remaking things for the PC port, might I suggest a way to skip the intro of the Extra Stage?
You can go through the dialogue fast but with everything together it's still long enough to be considered annoying when you just want to spam credits.

Re: The OverShield review plus podcast

Jesse Bishop — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 22:57:13 -0000

TEN OUT OF TEN!!!!

Re: New years resolution, ADVENTURE!

NateGraves — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 02:23:02 -0000

I've said it before, but that is so friggin' rad.

Re: Aeternum Released!

Jesse Bishop — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 01:21:06 -0000

I will personally send a gift package to the first person who beats the game on Demonic mode and uploads the full thing, via "let's play", to YouTube.

Re: Aeternum Now in Peer Review

Jesse Bishop — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 12:47:25 -0000

Oh snap! Now we play the waiting game.

Re: Aeternum OST Now Available

d34d1t3 — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 07:49:44 -0000

siiick

Re: Interview: Jesse Bishop

Nate Graves — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 02:54:23 -0000

Takes nothin' to realize you're Ken. Don't back away from the love you deserve again!

Also, art and hamburger throwing are one and the same.

We've talked about this before, but R.I.P. VGMix...manly tears. Great reading this interview. I didn't see it beforehand because I am airheaded, but better late than never, right?

Re: Memory Usage in Aeternum

Brooks Bishop — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 02:56:33 -0000

Excellent question. Maybe I should write another article to go in depth on pools themselves.

When it comes to something like this, "creating new" instances during run time is about the last thing you want to do. Instantation costs processor time and memory that you might not be able to spare. And often it means you're leaving garbage out to be collected which can lead to even worse problems.

So, by "pooling" I mean, at the very beginning of the game, during loading, I pre-allocate a large number of bullet instances, powerup instances, and particle instances. Enough to be never have to make a new one while the game itself is running.

From that point, every time I need a bullet/particle/powerup, I pull in one of the unused, already allocated instances, fill it up with data as necessary, and use it til it's no longer needed. Then it goes back into a list, still an allocated instance, just unused again.

The upshot is that the costly allocation is all done up front, and you never have any garbage collection because you never actually remove all references to the object. You keep them all in a "pool" for usage.

Re: Memory Usage in Aeternum

LanceJZ — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 02:49:31 -0000

By pools, do you mean something like an object factory? That is it say creates some shots, then if more are needed, it makes more, and they are all reused during the game? Or something like that?

Re: Lessons in XNA from the Trenches

Brooks Bishop — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 11:48:50 -0000

I'm honestly not entirely sure why the up scaling was killing my framerates. It could stem from any number of things that I'm doing that are specific to my engine environment and/or particle system. It ran pretty fast on any PC I tried it on, although that could just be a case of desktop graphics being so much more powerful.

I think once again, the answer could be found buried in Shawn Hargreaves wisdom:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sha...
Or better yet:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sha...

So my best guess is I was simply doing something that was stalling the pipeline, whether it was in the increased texture lookups per pixel, or the increased necessity of on the fly sample interpolation filtering, or thrashing around in the texture cache from drawing a rotated texture. When you multiply this by a large number of particles all simultaneously doing the same thing, the problem compounds pretty quickly into a frame rate problem.

It would take some pretty specific testing to locate the exact cause of the problem, and to truly understand what was going on here, I'd probably have to know a great deal more about what's going on under the hood on the Xbox itself than I do. But at least thanks to the testing I could do I managed to find the variable part of the system that was doing the most damage and reworked things around that. So I think in that regard, this works as a pretty good example story in console platform development..

Re: Lessons in XNA from the Trenches

Daniel Dobson — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 06:48:03 -0000

Definitely in full agreement that mip-maps improving performance when drawing 'smaller than texture' areas - but the when drawing larger areas has me puzzled since it should use the largest mip map level, when upscaling the texture like this I think? I appreciate you've seen a performance win, curious as to why. You mention 'much less resampling of the source texture' - are you manually caching it perhaps? You also say 'scripted to start at 0.25 and go to 1.0, is this a lerp across frames, or is their some caching going on? Or perhaps your manually specifying a lower mip-map level? as mentioned at the end? This would make better use of the texture cache, and I can certainly see it being faster.

Gratefully

Re: Lessons in XNA from the Trenches

Brooks Bishop — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 05:52:20 -0000

The interpolators I was referring to are just the scale values my particle engine uses to change the scale of each particle in an emitter over time. I mentioned having to modify them here because they're stored as a multiple value of the source texture size. So a 128x128 pixel texture scaled to 2f would draw at 256x256 on screen.

I believe what was killing me here and the solution is a two part problem. Shawn Hargreaves wrote quite a bit about texture filtering on his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sha.... And you'll notice that the fastest drawing involves, among other things, no scaling and no (or 90 degree only rotation). In my case I was doing both, and with linear sampling, which is comparatively inefficient.

My solution of instead using a larger texture meant that by utilizing mip-maps, it became easier for the GPU to cope with drawing better by doing much less resampling of the source texture. To return to the interpolation example. Instead of scripting a particle with a 128x128 texture to start at 1x and scale up to 4x with a max draw size of 512x512, thereby requiring resampling and filtering every frame for every particle, I turned around and started with a 512x512 texture, which scripted to start at 0.25x and to go 1x. The visual result is largely the same, but the larger texture lets you specify mip-maps which means the GPU has the original texture plus pre-computed 256x256, 128x128, 64x64, etc. textures to pick from, whichever is closest to the desired output, meaning less sampling required.

Re: Lessons in XNA from the Trenches

Daniel Dobson — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 05:19:07 -0000

Good article once again. I'm curious about why a larger texture made things faster for the GPU. You mention scale interpolators - perhaps these are the key to understanding this - tell me more :)

Re: Why Am I Writing This?

Daniel Dobson — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 05:13:16 -0000

Well said.

Re: Aeternum Progress Report 3

Daniel Dobson — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 01:44:45 -0000

I'm liking the progress. It is an interesting point you make about definite control over the length of the game. I'd thought about this in the context of racing games before, and their sound tracks, but not in relation to shmups, and the 'actual length' once your good at it.

I don't think XBLIGs need to be overly long, as evidenced by the success of "I made a game with Zombies in it", but I believe that like Aeternum, they should be intense :)

Re: On Motivations and Expectations

Roger Parks — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:55:39 -0000

I really enjoyed reading this. You were right, it wasn't what I thought.

Re: Memory Usage in Aeternum

Daniel Dobson — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:54:11 -0000

I'm guessing you needed to do some kindof Reset() to make it feel like it has just been constructed. And then remember to add all new member data to the Reset() if the class grows :) Those are the main gotchas with pools that I'm aware of.

Re: Memory Usage in Aeternum

Brooks Bishop — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:01:34 -0000

Thanks. The hard part was actually building the bullet class itself to be poolable to begin with. But I'll save the implementation details of my bullet engine for a later post, as I think it's the most interesting part of the whole code base.

Re: Memory Usage in Aeternum

Daniel Dobson — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:57:53 -0000

Great Read :) Using Pools is great for being contiguous as you say, and actually leads towards a cleaner design I find, because you know how many active bullets/entities/vfx you can have at any one time, and so re-use is promoted.

Re: First Aeternum Press on theXBLIG

Tim Hurley — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 20:15:24 -0000

Glad to spread the word! And while it may not be much, you're right, the recognition is enough reward. And you've got a guaranteed review to come from me once it's released.