SpiceWare's Blog

I would like the firing sound to be quieter.

The heartbeat sound to be faster at the end of a round.

The large rock hit sound to be deeper

The small rock hit sound to be higher

 

Play a game of astroids or astroids deluxe in MAME or maybe watch them on YouTube and you'll see why people say the sounds are "off", (and I'm not talking about that emulation sound versus real hardware sound thing)

 

These requests aren't sounds changes, but tweaks to volume, heartbeat tempo (speed), and note (low, med & high notes). (I know you took the time to explain the sound routines and I didn't understand but most of it, thanks for explaining.)

The game looks and sounds great. I think the heartbeat sound could be more noticeably faster towards the end of each wave, but otherwise I think the sounds are perfect.

 

There is a possible bug with killer satellite. In one game the left half was missing entirely as it moved around the screen (before it had been shot). In another game there seemed to be a column of pixels missing from the right half of the satellite, so that there was a noticeable gap between the halves. In both cases the satellite appeared on the left of the screen moving right. Unfortunately I couldn't find the pause button quickly enough to take a screenshot.

 

Chris

@iesposta - I'm happy with the sound effects, though Bob is free to make any revisions to them that he feels are appropriate. If you want "arcade perfect" your best bet is to fire up MAME. I am still tweaking the heartbeat rate though, at one point the heartbeat on later waves was so fast that it was a continuous drone w/out any gaps. However, fixing it wasn't one of my checkboxes for the PRGE build.

 

@cd-w - I saw both of those while playtest last night. I think the missing left half of the Magna Mine occurs if you die when the mine is spawning, and is a side effect of the change I made to fix Omegamatrix' problem with the small mines circling the screen thus preventing him from respawning. I have an idea on what caused that, but had already shut down the computer for the night so haven't looked at it yet. I only saw the gap issue once and at the moment I don't know what could have caused it. Nathan's also reported seeing the gap.

I think I figured out the "half Magna mine" bug. I couldn't recreate it, but it looking at the code it could occur if the Magna Mine was spawned by the UFO destroying an asteroid(leaving 3 on screen) while you were dead.

 

If you're dead the Magna Mine routine triggers a "Leave Screen" flag. The Magna Mine can be spawned while your dead, it just shows up and then leaves.

 

The "Leave Screen" logic tests for an X value of <= 1. If the Magna Mine was launched from the left side of the screen it started with X=0, if it started on the right side it started with X=152 (and thus the right side of the Magna Mine would be 160/0) The "Leave Screen" logic checks each Magna Mine sprite individually, which is why only one side was removed.

 

To fix it, I changed it to start with X equal to 2 or 151. I plan to revisit the Magna Mine logic to make it not spawn if your dead, but I don't know if that'll be done in time for the PRGE demo.

 

 

Haven't been able to figure out the split Magna Mine though. From the screenshot cd-w sent I can see that it's not missing pixels. The right half should be positioned 8 pixels over from the left half, but for some reason it's positioned 9 over.

I got to 40,000 while playtesting and the heartbeat speed was pretty fast.

I got to 40,000 while playtesting and the heartbeat speed was pretty fast.

 

In the arcade game, the heartbeat speed depends (I think) on the number of remaining asteroids, so it gets faster in every wave, not just depending on your total score:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYSupJ5r2zo

 

Chris

Yeah, that's what mine does too. The speed is set to the initial slow rate at the start of each wave. Every asteroid hit speeds it up.

 

The problem comes in that each round has 1 extra large asteroid(up to 12 max) so the rate of a wave is 7 faster than the prior wave. Wave 1 starts with 4 asteroids, so the speed increases by 28. Wave 3 starts with 6, so 42 and so on. I don't know what wave I was at for 40K, but it was enough to make it too fast.

 

Basically I need to rethink the logic, maybe use a fractional value so the rate starts and ends with the same speed regardless of how many asteroids the it began with. I'll just need a table with 9 fractional decrement values as waves start with 4, 5, 6, ... 12 asteroids.