[dirGames-L] new FPS demo

[nick kang]

Thanks everybody for the feedback, much appreciated.

UI:
I am using overlays, probably not the most flexible solution, but I had so
much overlay-based text and button code, I figured I'd still use it. I might
look at using planes attached to the camera if the UI ever needs to be more
animated.

Time:
This so far has taken almost 3 months full-time, 3 months part-time, spread
over a year.  I spent a lot of time learning to texture, rig, and crudely
animate in 3dsmax, so probably 4 months of coding total.

Controls:
The mouse smoothing is something I recently added because I usually have it
on in real games, so maybe my implementation isn't quite right.  Set it to
zero if you want the mouse input unprocessed.

Sound:
Yeah, the sound goes silent periodically for me too, on two of my machines,
both with SoundBlaster Audigy, yet works fine on my notebook.  Setting the
soundDevice = DirectSound again seems to restore it (toggling mute (ctrl-M)
will do this).  I began seeing this quite a bit the past year in other SW
games, which makes me think it might be a new bug in the mixer, or it just
doesn't like the channel levels being tweaked every frame.  I recently tried
OpenAL and was very impressed with the quality of the mix.  If an xtra isn't
available in time, I might try doing one myself.

the soundLevel:
I had no idea this would set the system volume on OSX (this property is
internal to Director under Windows).  Will check for Mac, and leave it alone
next time.

Fullscreen:
If the game doesn't exit properly, the task bar won't be restored.  I'll try
seeing if stopMovie catches the CTRL-W though.

Re-mapping control settings:
Point taken, I'll commit the change to a field once a key is pressed, rather
than waiting for another field click.  Now looking at it, it is confusing.

Lack of original art:
Hire artists maybe?  Seems like a straightforward solution.

Re-prompting for Xtra:
I think this might be a problem with the version update logic, where it
thinks the existing local xtra is newer than the one currently served (for
string compares, "9.0" > "10.0").  Try deleting the existing xtra.

Scale of the world:
Yeah, typical shooter environments follow the proportions of "space dungeon
in the land of giants".  I think that's because of the hyper speeds and
jumping heights players seem to like, ever since Quake 3.  I noticed that
Half-Life2 had very realistic world scales, and it didn't seem
claustrophobic because you move at human speeds.

Originality (lack of):
At this stage, replicating a 5 year-old game is the whole point, so I'll
take that as a positive comment ;-).  If all goes well, I hope to get a
little mileage out of this framework, so maybe the first game will be a
small-arena-deathmatch, but hopefully I'll have a chance to build other
games on top of it afterwards, before it becomes obsolete.  The way I look
at it, the success of Quake and Unreal wasn't just the games, but the amount
of other games that was built with the tech.  For an independent developer,
I agree it's pointless to compete with the commercial giants on production
level, so my entire selling point is "deathmatch-in-a-browser", and I'm
hoping there's an audience for just that.  But you bring up an interesting
point, about not exercising the creative freedoms accorded to indie
developers.  I'm just trying to make the kind of game I would like to play
myself.  But good point, something to think about.

Flexibility:
Total agreement, a huge part of the success of the PC FPS genre is the mod
community.  Tapping into that would be a big plus.  I think I'll start with
externalizing the maps, and provide one external script where the mapper can
provide logic for non-standard triggers, tweak shaders, etc.

Multiplayer:
I'm hoping to use the MultiUser xtra in a peer-to-peer arrangement, I'm
planning on not using the MU server application.  One instance of the
Shockwave app will act as the server, listening for connections, and be
playable locally, or at least running as a spectator.  Once that's working,
then a centralized server might be set up so that game servers can publish
their IPs for internet connections.  Basically, the same way most PC
shooters do it.

Other levels:
You're right, the existing map is very low-poly, about 1700 I think,
collapsed by material so there's pretty much no culling.  With a more
complicated map, I would probably have to do some simple form of space
partitioning.  I haven't got around to making another map, but I'll probably
do an outdoor one next, because I want to play balance the rifle properly.

Thanks again for the all the comments,
regards,
-nick