Nordenfelt 0.1 is Out Now!
The very first playable version of Nordenfelt is out now!
There is nothing to install. Just unzip the file and start Nordenfelt.exe. You can delete the game any time without any hassle.
Please tell me what you think. Send me an email to feedback@nordenfelt-thegame.com. I'm looking forward to your feedback.
Many thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Thomas
Comments
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
You'll need the Visual C++ 2005 redistributable files, either the original version or the SP1 version. You can download them here:
Original: microsoft.com/.../...
SP1: microsoft.com/.../...
There's no harm in installing both, applications will automatically use the correct version.
That should be the right one: microsoft.com/.../...
One tip: you could try passing float coordinates to the renderer.
In this version, the water moves slowly from left to right. That slow motion causes a "jump" by one pixel about 5 times per second, which is a little distracting.
On the other hand, the downside of passing float coordinates to the renderer is that things will get a little blurry. More or less, depending on how big the fractional part of their pixel position is. That could possibly lead to some kind of "pumping" effect. (The "jump" 5 times per second would be replaced by a sharp-blurry-sharp transition 5 times per second)
I can suggest a possible remedy for that, however I haven't tried it yet, so I'm not 100% sure that it will work as good as I expect it to work.
The idea is to create textures that are 1.5 to 2x bigger then the sprites/tiles on screen, so they will always be down-scaled (standard bilinear interpolation should be fine for rendering). And apply a low-pass filter (blur) to the textures, to prevent them twinkling/shimmering aliasing artifacts. That should be rather easy for things like enemy sprites.
The tricky part would be to get this right for tiles. Whenever you apply some kind of filter and/or scaling to textures, you can get artifacts where they touch each other. I might be wrong here, and I'm sure there are ways to get rid of those artifacts, so maybe it's worth giving it a shot.
p.S.: I'm very demanding with visual artifacts, and you have plenty of more important stuff to do, so it might be best to just ignore this comment :)
Technical problems:
_When you hold left arrow, the ship won't change its direction if you press up arrow. Same if you hold up arrow and try pushing left.
Game design problems
_The player's ship felt a bit slow, but maybe it was just me.
_There is no way to estimate the size of the collision mask of the ship.
_At the beginning, maybe the ship should be above the clouds instead of being under them.
Graphical problems:
_The water's movement makes you feel like the sand parts are flying above the water.
I did not beat the boss yet :( (I like the way it deploys itself, it's one of the few things that look professional yet :) )
The problem with the missing VC++ redistributable files should be solved now. I've added the according DLLs in the download archive.
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