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The Champion of Dirospear V.1.2.2
Developer   ManaStone
GenreRole-Playing
PlatformWindows
Downloads689

About: The champion of Dirospear is a game in which the city of Dirospear is being attack by orcs and skeletons. The main objective is to protect the cities from the invaders by going into their cities and killing their leaders. Once that is finished, the game is over and the player wins. The player can lose by either getting killed or when all of the city guards die.

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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pretty cool, the UI is nice and the overall graphics reminds me of everquest classic. The only problem was that the monsters would die when I'm shooting a fireball at them so I'd hit one of the guards instead and they'll chase me until I'm dead.

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Thanks for taking the time to comment on my game.

Your fireballs should never 'hit' the guards reguardless of where it is in the game. When you cast a fireball it will keep going to it's target until it hits it or is dead. So it may look like it hits the guard, but it would have no effect.

Btw, I hope you are not saying that the guards are chasing after you. That would be one hell of a bug considering how I programmed it.

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It has some virtues, but it definitely needs polishing.

First off, it didn't work on my home computer for some reason. When the main options screen showed up, it didn't do anything in response to my mouse clicks.

I decided to give it a second chance at the library. It worked more or less.

One thing that turned me off was the scaling of the graphic in the install program. You're obviously using a very small graphic that is getting scaled, so it looks very grainy and unprofessional. BTW, it looks like you're using Inno Setup. Is that right?

Anyhow, once the game began, I noticed the main keys for control are 'a','s','w', and 'd'. I see no reason to use these in lieu of the arrow keys (VK_RIGHT, VK_LEFT, VK_UP, and VK_DOWN).

Also, sometimes you can see underneath the terrain. It looks kind of silly.

I do like how you have a nice sky in the game. Did you use a cube map for that?

Also, the terrain culling is somewhat unrealistic at times. For instance, hills sometimes appear out of nowhere. You may want to investigate more sophisticated terrain culling algorithms. I don't think it's an easy problem to solve without taking a sizeable performance hit, but you should definitely look into it.


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

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Quote:
Original post by mike74
First off, it didn't work on my home computer for some reason. When the main options screen showed up, it didn't do anything in response to my mouse clicks.


If it is not too much trouble, could you give me the specs on your home computer?

Quote:

One thing that turned me off was the scaling of the graphic in the install program. You're obviously using a very small graphic that is getting scaled, so it looks very grainy and unprofessional. BTW, it looks like you're using Inno Setup. Is that right?


Yep, we used inno. We just used the 32x32 icon that was supposed to be the application icon.

Quote:

Anyhow, once the game began, I noticed the main keys for control are 'a','s','w', and 'd'. I see no reason to use these in lieu of the arrow keys (VK_RIGHT, VK_LEFT, VK_UP, and VK_DOWN).


I find it more intuitive to use ‘a’,’s’,’w’, and ‘d’ and the controls are mentioned in the user manual. I’m curious; does everyone usually prefer the arrow keys? I use my right hand for the mouse and left hand for the keys when I play the game. Using the arrows would put my hands too close together and not give me enough room to maneuver.

Quote:

Also, sometimes you can see underneath the terrain. It looks kind of silly.

Doing camera collision was one of our last priorities. It might be fixed in the future, but probably not.

Quote:

I do like how you have a nice sky in the game. Did you use a cube map for that?

Yeah, we used a skybox for that. I’m glad you liked it, I was a little disappointed with it.

Quote:

Also, the terrain culling is somewhat unrealistic at times. For instance, hills sometimes appear out of nowhere. You may want to investigate more sophisticated terrain culling algorithms. I don't think it's an easy problem to solve without taking a sizeable performance hit, but you should definitely look into it.


For doing terrain we used a brute force method and making the viewing frustum larger took a pretty big performance hit. Currently I am looking into the ROAM algorithm, so maybe my next game we will have a bigger frustum. Also, I could have used fogging, but I didn’t have too much knowledge on that and would have had to do more research.

Thanks for the response and giving my game a second chance!

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Sorry for the delayed reply. My computer is roughly a 500 MHz PC with a 3D Rage Pro ATP card. I have 128 MB of RAM.

Although my computer may sound a bit obsolete, many 3d games such as Unreal work fine on it in 640x480 mode.

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


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Great stuff!!! Can u upload the source code as well. If u do ill be greatly appriciated

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Quote:
Original post by Tutukun
Great stuff!!! Can u upload the source code as well. If u do ill be greatly appriciated


The source code is now on the front page.

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It says the application failed to start because stlport_vc646.dll was not found.

mike
http://www.coolgroups.com/

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You may want to use a kd-tree for your culling.

How did you create the current terrain?

BTW, you can create cool smooth terrains by performing a Delaunay triangulation on a set of points in a plane and then raising each point up according to a Perlin noise function.

mike
http://www.coolgroups.com/

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Quote:
Original post by mike74
You may want to use a kd-tree for your culling.

How did you create the current terrain?

BTW, you can create cool smooth terrains by performing a Delaunay triangulation on a set of points in a plane and then raising each point up according to a Perlin noise function.

mike
http://www.coolgroups.com/


To build the terrain I used my own height map editor. I'm going to redo it this semester to that it is a little smoother. I'm also planning on using a LOD terrain algorithm in the future so the frustum can go farther.

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You wrote that the game was created during the software engineering course. Is there any possibility that you would publish the project of the game?

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Yeah, seeing the project might be quite instructive. :)

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Quote:
Original post by Anonymous Poster
You wrote that the game was created during the software engineering course. Is there any possibility that you would publish the project of the game?


What exactly do you mean by this? If you mean you want to see the documentation, everything is pretty much in the code I posted. This project didn’t have too much documentation; a PDL approach was used and anything else was mostly stuff just drawn out quickly and thrown away to get a better picture of the system.

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By software engineering project I understand an UML project with bunch of diagrams documenting the game as much as possible but if that's not the case, then OK... :)

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Quote:
Original post by mike74
I do like how you have a nice sky in the game. Did you use a cube map for that?


Here is a way you can tell if a sky map is a cube or a sphere. A cube, even if the texture is professionaly UVd, may have texture direction changes on top and bottom. A sphere has the texture sloping towards the bottom, also having a "slant towards vertex" effect on the top and bottom.

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