Loading window (about window) causes graphics to not refresh on right and bottom side. Might be something about my graphics driver.
Is that for both the about and the splash screen? (Is it something you can get a screenshot of if you're willing- that would give me an idea what might be causing it).
Make the images the same size as in the game, so they don't have to be scaled so much. It seems like that much scaling causes them to loose their antialiasization and look pixelated.
They are being scaled down from 256x128. There is no "size in the game"; I just use 33x16 as the normal size, but blocks can be any size, so I made the images much larger than needed.
I found that that slowed things down considerably, of course- having to constantly downscale 256x128 bitmaps to the smaller size, so I added logic that scales all images that meet certain criteria by a scaling factor specified in the INI file. I believe it doesn't do any interpolation of the image, which is likely why they experience some aliasing. (I had a reason for making the sizing linear but I've forgotten what it was, I'll probably be reminded when I change it though..)
The combo text that slides up the screen seems very pixelated.
Yeah, I keep forgetting about that. A lot of the blitting stuff was set for maximum speed which in the case of text seems to make it come out a bit aliased. I changed the class used for the scores, combo text, and so forth just now and it looks much better.
The music gets annoying after a while. Have it change to a different song sooner (if it ever does).
I've only made two songs and they both suck. There are some other songs that it never plays. The Default level music is the same and none of the level-builders change it from the default, with the exception of the one that builds it from a saved file.
You can change the music manually though, I actually do that a lot; Control-Alt-C, and PlayMusic <filename> can play a lot of different file types.
The music is way too repetitive though and it never seems to change.
Not on it's own. that "Playmusic" thing above can also play a few of the other tracks, (commando, galway, smwbonus, poing2music (very annoying), wart, and zaark. (for example the code 'playmusic commando' (without quotes) would play that tune. The Sound Manager already supported "queued" sounds, so it should be possible to make it so that a level can have multiple tracks or something to that effect.
I use FLStudio too and it takes a surprising amount of work for me to create a good melody. I have a few goodish ones though if you're interested. They would probably only be suitable for the ending scene though.
It's a huge pain to make music. Actually, I put the game in indiegogo so with any luck I might be able to get some actual music done properly. In the meantime I was going to use my remixes of NES music.
Wow. I thought my internet sucked. What do you have dial-up or something?
I tried it; it's good.
Wow. I thought my internet sucked. What do you have dial-up or something?
I don't have my own internet anymore, Currently I'm using my neighbors connection (with permission and the WPA key). It's wildly unpredictable. Sometimes I get 1MB/s, sometimes I can't even see the access point. I think it depends on the weather.
Anyway, what do you use for the graphics? Is it just the default for C#?
Just GDI+ (System.Drawing). I separate some stuff into layers so, for example, it doesn't draw every single block every single frame, instead only drawing blocks when they are hit or destroyed, stuff like that. For external libraries I think it only uses BASS.NET (for sound) and the Windows API code pack (for things like showing the progress in the win7 taskbar for the splash screen). There are a few other references to things like OpenTK but those are only kept around because of a few half-finished ideas to try to replace the BASS.NET Sound implementation with something more open and available.
Anyway,
I made a class diagram of the game a few versions ago. It's pretty big.
Bit of trivia is that the "Spartan" level set isn't actually in the game code itself but rather is actually coded in %appdata%\baseblock\scripts\SpartanLevelBuilder.cs. I keep it there now so that I can be sure that the code that deals with the scripts and integrates them during startup still works.
