Re: [pygame] Frantic (again)

["David Mikesell" <dave_mikesell@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 19:27:22 -0500, "Luke Paireepinart"
<rabidpoobear@xxxxxxxxx> said:
> It seems like even if you pre-loaded all your animations and sounds and 
> music
> it wouldn't use up more than ~150 mb.

Yes, I'm doing that but I am going to refactor that to load/unload only
what I need for a level.  I just never changed the way it worked when it
started out as a small, one level game with one type of enemy.  I did
fix a couple other horrible resource allocation bugs, and it seems to be
running much better on my laptop now.

> The only thing I could see taking up that much memory were if you 
> calculated the rotations
> of all of your sprites through 360 degrees and stored them in a huge
> array.
> Are you doing that?
> This would also make sense for the long load time at startup.
> It would be better memory-usage wise to just rotate the sprites at
> runtime.

Not 360 frames for each.  The starship has 72, the enemies have 18 in
most (if not all) cases.  I can't rotate the enemies in real time as the
sprites are modeled and prerendered in 3D.  This is pygame sprite
rendered, not OpenGL rendered.  Am I missing something basic here?

Anyway, I think I fixed the loading bug with the very latest release.

> Anyway,
> The game looked nice.  Sprites were good looking, explosions too.
> The issues I had with gameplay were
> 1. The enemies wrap around the screen(i assume) but the bullets don't.
> I love that about the asteroids, being able to shoot the enemies from 
> through the screen.  Perhaps you don't want this,
> but I liked it in asteroids.

Yeah, I didn't want the bullets to wrap.  Felt it would be too easy.

> 2. The bullets die out after about 3/5 of the screen.  I have to fly 
> over to the enemies to kill them.

Yes - all but the laser gun, whose range is the screen extents.  Again,
too easy if your shots can traverse the screen.

> 3.The maximum acceleration was a little too slow.  Turning was too slow.
> The deceleration was too high.  It was too easy to position yourself 
> somewhere or avoid the enemies.
> 
> I only played the first level, however, so I don't know if these persist 
> throughout the game or not.
> Perhaps different weapons can shoot further, etc.
> It was pretty fun, interesting premise (the backstory.) I'll try it 
> again when the memory issues are dealt with
> and I'll play it more thoroughly & give more gameplay-oriented feedback.
> No chance you'll release the source since you're thinking of going 
> Shareware I guess?

If it completely flops, I'll release the source :)

Thanks for the feedback, Luke.

Dave