[Contest #8] My First Quantum Translocator

[leafiness0]

A port of the critically acclaimed Flash game.

Since JustCause handed the project over to me, I've been working on porting this for the Cemetech Contest #8. Things are going pretty well, and I've got about half of the engine done with. I'm currently working on platform collisions, and will have updates once I have them ^^

[leafiness0]

Double post!

A few quick visual tweaks.

_________________

[KermMartian]

I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, as I don't really play flash games; would you care to explain? It looks like you specify a trajectory with a starting vector and magnitude, then launch a portal in that direction parabolically. It certainly looks fun, not to mention very professional with that grayscale background, so I wish you the best of luck in the contest!
_________________

[leafiness0]

You control that white scientist dude, and when you hit 2nd you put down a shadow. At any point you can hit Mode to teleport to where your shadow is, and momentum is conserved. That way, you can jump, teleport, and end up flying out of your shadow. It makes for some really nice puzzles ^^
_________________

[KermMartian]

Ahh, thank you for the clarification, Leafiness. That sounds very fun indeed, and from the way that you've implemented it thus far, it looks to be very fluid, even with the limited input of our dear TI graphing calculators. I'll be happily anticipating more updates.
_________________

[leafiness0]

Okay, I've ironed out some kinks, but this platform detection is far from complete. Still, have a screenie:

[KermMartian]

Looking good! I'm having a little bit of trouble telling what is happening in the screenie, but it seems as if you die if you pass through the dark gray part of the platform line?
_________________

[leafiness0]

Yeah. I know a lot of this game is difficult to tell what's going on - I'm cleaning up the background and seeing if I can make it much more obvious what's going on.

The grey lines do kill you ^^ That screenie demonstrates conservation of momentum, where you use the platform to help fling yourself over to the exit.

EDIT: Added death animation:

[KermMartian]

Excellent, looking great! I agree with the cleaned-up background, although it's too bad, because the previous one was quite impressively detailed, despite detracting from the clarity of the game.
_________________

[leafiness0]

Solved all my collision problems, so here's a screenie up to the first checkpoint ^^

[Sarah]

Assuming this is for TI, sucks that it is. This game looks really fun ;;
_________________
I have a [Prizm].

[Aes_Sedia5]

Looking very good Leafy!
_________________

[KermMartian]

[leafiness0]

The best solution I've found so far, given the nature of the platforms, is to have three collision checks for each platform per frame. It's painful, but it works. I'll most likely try to find a more optimal solution, but I've already gone through a lot of ideas D:
_________________

[Kaslai]

If you can handle the fatter memory requirement, you could map each block to a grid of say, 32x32 or 16x16 cells, and only check for collisions in the sections that the player overlaps (edit: for clarification, each cell would contain a stack of references to all environment collisions that overlap it). For the moving platforms, you'll need to detect when it needs to be remapped, or just use your current collision scheme, as there are far fewer dynamic platforms than static ones. That should give much faster results, but it will be harder to program and more memory consuming.

[leafiness0]

It is much faster but I want to finish all the levels (I'm almost done) before I work on optimizing. This is something I tried in some of my other games, but I've never been fully successful yet D: Part of the reason is because you have to loop through all the objects to find out which ones are in the right quadrant, and when you do that you end up with just as many checks as just looping through all of them once.
_________________

[JustCause]

Oh, wow. I had to resist my urge to keyboardmash. XD This is really excellent! I'd love to know how you did this someday. ^^

[leafiness0]

Don't worry, I'll post the entire source when I release it ^^

Also, I've used a variety of hackish methods to fix my platform-to-player velocity transfer. Check it out!

[leafiness0]

All right sparky! I've finished mapping all the levels and am currently working on optimizing and adding dialogue routines.
_________________

[KermMartian]

Wow, great job! You finished all the levels already? On an administrative note, would you please scale your giant avatar down to the 80x80 requirement?
_________________