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Submitted by , posted on 06 August 2003
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Image Description, by
Here is some screenshots from my games Stair Dismount (Porrasturvat)
and Truck Dismount (Rekkaturvat). Upper left image is taken from
the Stair Dismount, which was released a year ago in August 2002.
Rest of the images are from the sequel Truck Dismount which has
just been released. Stair Dismount won the Assembly 2002 game
development competition, and the Rekkaturvat is taking part in
the Assembly 2003 game development competition.
Check out http://www.assembly.org.
I didn't post an IOTD of the Stair Dismount last year as I thought
that I'll write a more lengthy post mortem about it. But time passed
and I was busy all the time, so I never got around to doing that.
Development time was just about 1,5 weeks for each. Both of the
games use OpenGL for the rendering. As can be seen from the images,
the graphics are very simple. They are still good enough for the
games to be fun, and focusing on other things made it possible to
develop these games in such short timeframes. For Stair Dismount it
took noticeable part of the development time to just tweak the
physics setup and get it somewhat stable and behave well enough.
I used the same base for Truck Dismount so I saved some hassle,
although I also made usage of some new features I hadn't touched
before in the ODE physics engine.
I made also heavy use of available libraries to put up the game and
all the features in it, which saved me a lot of time. Usage of extra
libraries isn't always a good thing though, especially if you don't
have any knowledge of them beforehand. Before starting to make Stair
Dismount I spent quite some time trying out several GUI libraries
and found out that none of them seemed to actually fit my purposes
this time, or at least not without some extra time to get a good
enough grip of the libraries not to get badly stuck while deadline is
getting closer. I could have used that time to make own GUI stuff,
which I ended up doing anyway. Due to lack of time I ended up doing
the GUI for Stair Dismount in horrible way. As I learned something
from this, I did it a bit better for Truck Dismount - in middle of
the development I stopped and took two days to make a simple GUI
framework. This is still not very much time to do a GUI system so
it's not very comparable to any actual GUI libraries, but it was
good enough this game and still a bit nicer to work with than the
stuff I used in Stair Dismount.
You can check out some development screenshots of Stair Dismount from
here
with timestamps and small comments about the progress. I have took
some similar screenshots from Truck Dismount as well, but I'll show
them up somewhere later.
Here's a list of libraries I found useful when developing these games:
SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer (http://www.libsdl.org)
ODE (http://opende.sourceforge.net/)
Ogg Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com/)
libpng (http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/)
libjpeg (http://www.ijg.org/)
libcurl (http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/)
FMOD (http://www.fmod.org/)
CFL (http://iki.fi/sol/)
zlib (http://www.gzip.org/zlib/)
expat (http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html)
I also used tool called Juice to model
the guy from physics primitives. The body parts are kept together with
spherical and hinge joints. The guy can still get to some poses which
don't look very realistic even that some of its joints are properly
limited. This is because I chose to limit the amount of required
joints because using lots of them pumped up the CPU requirements.
Truck Dismount also has net top scores for comparison with other
players. The net scores can be viewed in the game and also from the
game home page. Stair Dismount also used to have net scores, but I
disabled them after too many hacks as I didn't have enough time to
make an updated version of the game with more preventions for that.
I took a bit effort to make cheating slightly harder in Truck
Dismount, but still it didn't last long. People just don't count
their hours when they have fun with a game and some good debugger
software. I don't validate the scores directly on the server
from the hit parameters as it would be quite CPU intensive, but I
have taken that into account and might make an external validation
software later.
The home page URL for the game is:
http://jet.ro/dismount/
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