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Epoch Star v0.91.07
Developer   Battagline
GenreRole-Playing
PlatformWindows
Downloads25234

About: Epoch Star is a cross genre Epic Space Adventure / Space RPG in the spirit of older games such as Star Control II and Starflight.

-Explore Star Systems
-Meet Strange Aliens
-Outfit your ship with powerful weapons
-Train your crew
-Choose from hundreds of ships
-Combat with powerful Alien Races


Game Info How To Play Downloads Comments



Please offer only constructive criticism. The intent of the GD Showcase is to help the developer create the best game they possibly can. Show them you support their efforts when posting.


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This is my first game, so I would appreciate any feedback you have to offer. It's still a work in progress, so please be gentle. It's relatively stable, but it doesn't work with all video cards yet, so please let me know if it's not working on your system.

Thanks,
Battagline

[Edited by - Battagline on July 12, 2005 4:53:26 PM]

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Downloaded it and thought it was an amzing little piece of work, on a side no when i had finished playing and exited the game it had resized my desktop wallpaper to 800x600 which is what i'm assuming the actual game resolution is. Strange side effect migh want to look into that. Overall quite enjoyable and the engine effects and space cloude were very nice.

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Thanks for your feedback. Would you mind letting me know what video card your running?

[Edited by - Battagline on July 12, 2005 5:27:01 PM]

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Absolutely beautiful. Keep working at it, and I'm sure you'll be an all-star programmer.

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Such kind words... mmmm makes me happy.

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Just played this game today, its actually quite fun. Hard to beleive that this was made by just one person. The missions are pretty cool, after playing just a few of them, there seems to be a pretty interesting plot developing. Every race seems to have their own story which is an interesting addition to the general shoot-em up theme.

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Being a big Starflight fan i was very happy to find a your game.
I linked to your site on the forum on strategycore.co.uk and told them guys to go and download your awesome game! Link: http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/index.php?s=eff8855c14dd5744e02337317cbb9c95&showtopic=3380

I hope that's ok with you ?

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Quote:
Original post by Anonymous Poster
Being a big Starflight fan i was very happy to find a your game.
I linked to your site on the forum on strategycore.co.uk and told them guys to go and download your awesome game! Link: http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/index.php?s=eff8855c14dd5744e02337317cbb9c95&showtopic=3380

I hope that's ok with you ?


Absolutely!!! I want people to play my game and give me feedback. Right now I'm working on shrinking the download size because many people wanted it to be smaller. But please... if you like the game, tell people about it. If you don't, feel free to send me an email (support@epochstar.com) telling me what you think it's missing.

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The game is cool, but I did discover a serious bug. While I was playing I got an instant message, so I tried to alt-escape out. Windows almost succeeded in transfering input focus away from your game (the input focus was really jumpy, but it wasn't on the game), but the game kept rendering on top, resulting in a complete mess where I couldn't tell what I was doing well enough to either switch back to or shut down your game for about 5 minutes. Thanks to XP's wussification of the task manager, I couldn't even get that to go on top of your game. Basically I just clicked around using flickers of the obscured windows to guide me until I managed to get back into the game, which crashed without an error message a few minutes later. You need to teach your game to share better. Keep at it.

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Quote:
Original post by mumpo
The game is cool, but I did discover a serious bug. While I was playing I got an instant message, so I tried to alt-escape out. Windows almost succeeded in transfering input focus away from your game (the input focus was really jumpy, but it wasn't on the game), but the game kept rendering on top, resulting in a complete mess where I couldn't tell what I was doing well enough to either switch back to or shut down your game for about 5 minutes. Thanks to XP's wussification of the task manager, I couldn't even get that to go on top of your game. Basically I just clicked around using flickers of the obscured windows to guide me until I managed to get back into the game, which crashed without an error message a few minutes later. You need to teach your game to share better. Keep at it.


I was partially aware of this problem. At one point I could alt-tab in and out without incident. But recently I noticed if you alt-tab out of the game, the game just goes away. I've never had the problem you've had were alt-tab resulted in it going berzerk, but I'll look into the issue.

Thanks for the input.

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I'm sure it's a great game, but even on the first menu it was really jerky for me. I'm on quite an old computer but the menu didn't look like it would use a lot of fillrate or vertices.
It would be good if you could get a list of controls from in the game !
Also, after the aliens came on at the start (couldn't kill them because too jerky) I crashed into an asteroid and about 3 secs later the game just disappeared. No error message. Maybe a log would be cool to help you with those sort of bugs.

My computer config is:
Pentium 800MHz 256MB RAM
but new NVidia GeForce FX 5200
Windows 2000 Professional
DirectX 9.0c

I know I can't blame you for your cool game not working on my computer, I know its about 7 years old and I need a new one :-)

BTW: did you use JPEG compression on the menu images in the Arms Dealer bit of the space station?

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Quote:
Original post by DrGUI
I'm sure it's a great game, but even on the first menu it was really jerky for me. I'm on quite an old computer but the menu didn't look like it would use a lot of fillrate or vertices.


I'm a bit surprised by this. One of my computers is a PIII 800, and the game runs fine on it. Do you happen to know what version of my game you're running? If you still have the download file it would be in the file's name.

Sorry it didn't run so well on your computer.

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Version 0.40.01

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Quote:
Original post by DrGUI
Version 0.40.01

Thanks, I'll take a look.

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I was playing your game and when I got to the level where you have to defend the Lagionite Aggressor ship at the Ymorpha system. It won't let me leave the system it says something along the line of "finish mission first", but at the bottom it says "mission complete" and I have killed all the enemy ships on the level. It is version 0.50.03. Besides that it is a really good game.

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Quote:
Original post by wiggyh
I was playing your game and when I got to the level where you have to defend the Lagionite Aggressor ship at the Ymorpha system. It won't let me leave the system it says something along the line of "finish mission first", but at the bottom it says "mission complete" and I have killed all the enemy ships on the level. It is version 0.50.03. Besides that it is a really good game.


Someone else mentioned this at one point. I think the problem may be if the ship your defending gets destroyed. I haven't been able to replicate the problem yet, but I have a rediculous number of changes and fixes to make at this point. Try the mission again and pay attention to the ship your trying to defend. If it happens to get destroyed before it reaches it's target, see if that's where the bug kicks in. I'll look into it when I get a chance.

Thanks

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This game looks awesome, I will definitely try it when I get home tonight :)

Can I ask what language it was written with?

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Quote:
Original post by Jeku
This game looks awesome, I will definitely try it when I get home tonight :)

Can I ask what language it was written with?


Visual C++ and DirectX 8. It's a work in progress. I hope you enjoy it

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This game, just like your spaceship tester, is insanely slow. It runs at 1-2 fps on my computer. Judging by what it's doing and my computer performance, it should be pulling 50-60 fps with no problem. I ran the Michael Jackson wrestling game on this same PC and achieved such frame rates.


Mike C.
http://www.coolgroups.com/zoomer/



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Hmmm... I don't have an integrated card myself, so I'll have to find someone I know who has one I can test this on. I pull down 50 - 60 on this game with my setup:

P4 2.5 GHZ, 512 MB Ram, ATI Radeon 9600

and around 30 with my second machine:

P3 800 MHZ, 256 MB Ram, GE Force 4 (can't remember the exact model).

DrGUI said he had the same problem on a thread I had related to performance.

Linky

Later he said when he ran it in release mode it ran fine:

Quote:
Original post by DrGUI
I tried the new version for you, but I'm afraid it still ran at 2-5 fps!

I left task manager running during the opening screen - because that is just as slow - it used hardly any memory but about 60% of the processor time was kernel!
Hopefully that relevation should help? I'm sorry I can't help more.
I just tried PIX - that didn't work either - probably meant for DX9.

Grrr- silly me! Release mode ran it fine! That hasn't impacted any other games or DX samples though... *feels stupid and contrite*

Suggestion - it would be nice to have a circle or something around the enemy ship when you've locked it - I got confused and died :(

Keep up the good work!



Is it possible you are having the same issue?

Thanks

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What do you mean by running it in release mode? Are you talking about release mode of DirectX?

Mike C.
http://www.coolgroups.com/zoomer/

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I believe so. I put DrGUI's post in my previous post, as well as a link to that thread. I didn't actually do anything to help his performance issue, he fixed it himself so I really can't tell you for certain, but I do believe that he had either installed or set up the developer debug version of DirectX rather than the Release version. He also mentioned that the problem didn't seem to affect any other program, so it's probably something I can fix in my code, but in the mean time, if you are able to work around it, you may be interested in doing that. It would also confirm that the problem is not that you have an integrated card that my program can't yet handle.

Thanks for your help

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I have not tried it yet, but, wow! Looks cool!

Made by just one little you?

[/impressed>

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Quote:
Original post by Battagline
...but I do believe that he had either installed or set up the developer debug version of DirectX rather than the Release version.

I think the SDK installer has an option to be able to switch between debug and runtime on the DirectX control panel.

Quote:
Original post by Battagline
He also mentioned that the problem didn't seem to affect any other program, so it's probably something I can fix in my code,...

Well I only really use Quake and my game...but you said you used lots of pixel shaders...Quake III Arena doesn't use any so maybe that's why it was fast. Now I have a theory that the debug runtime inexplicitly slows down pixel shaders...maybe no optimization even if the flags are set to optimize?

Maybe now my game will be alright if you zoom into the cartoon-shaded model loads instead of slowing to 2 or 3 fps

OMG!! Only 1 exam left!!!!! Then I'm gonna finish my game!!!

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