Gufah?!

Alright, I wanted to create an app that demonstrated the animation possibilities of my framework (also inspired by the haiku thread). Since the turret game was pretty dry, colorless, and not developed, I wanted to create something that had more life. This is what I came up with. I hope you enjoy it!

Screenshot

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{"name":"600076","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/3\/236b0434fa63cda374bc8e728092d06d.png","w":802,"h":500,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/3\/236b0434fa63cda374bc8e728092d06d"}

Download

• Haiku v1

Instructions

• Click elements at the bottom to select your current element.

• Click to place any number of elements anywhere on the board.

• Remove elements from the board with right-click.

• Have fun! Make cool patterns!

• Quit by pressing the x in your window.

Issues

1. There should be no gameplay issues. However, it will sometimes crash on exit. And haven't figured that out yet. It's something to do with an al_destroy_bitmap();

2. Playback is currently limited to 32 samples at a time.

3. Sorry, Download is 12MB, mostly a bunch of small wav files (couldn't get ogg/vorbis to work and just wanted to get the game out the door!)

4. Windows only (so far)

Questions

• Does it work?

• Are there any major speed issues, or timing stutters?

• Post your screenshot!

• I had originally thought to include a quick, short achievements based system to get all 4 elements. Essentially, the purpose being to make the later elements more "cool" once you achieve them and use them. Is it needed? What do you think?

Loading screen was displayed, then the menu appeared(first screenshot you post), and then game got frozen, tried to choose an element but nothing happened, tried to exit the game by pressing x with no good results, had to kill the application.

does the cursor change to a hand when you hover over an element?

Yes, but it takes a while, could it be that the game is just running extremly slow?

That's probably it. Does the title animation play smoothly?

My best guess is something specific to your computer that I didn't account for, similar to Felix. I don't think there's a quick fix for it at the moment.

What does your processor/memory speed look like?

It worked flawlessly for me, (no crash on exit.)

A way to improve it would be to be able to serialise the board to a string, so that you can cut and paste other peoples setup, that way we could post our creations here, and people could just cut and paste it into the program to hear it.

It makes me think of public art, put it up on on a touch screen, with a large display for everyone else to see, some big speakers, then let the public at it. (Most likely committing crimes against music.)

I didn`t see any title animation at all, just a still image, like the first screenshot you posted.
Tested in this hardware: P4 2400Mhz, 1 GB ram, FX5700LE(128MB).

It works, really smooth, even on my sister´s computer with an Onboard Geforce 6100 and AMD sempron 2.1 GHZ. The animations are beautiful IMO

There was a crash when I quitted though, but nothing that needed the task manager.

Oh, there´s now way to win this game? I won´t be able to beat another of your mini-games then Mark.

EDIT: A nice option could be the feature to save the melody.

Paul: It looks like you have enough hardware to me. The game only takes about 2MB of graphics, and possibly another 2 of offscreen memory. I'll try some different programs in the future and see if I can find where the problem is. In the mean time...

Here, just copy this photoshoped screenshot:
{"name":"600078","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/6\/c69f93a29f501f822b8efef485f69dee.png","w":401,"h":250,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/6\/c69f93a29f501f822b8efef485f69dee"}

[edit: new screenshot]

I won!
{"name":"600078","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/6\/c69f93a29f501f822b8efef485f69dee.png","w":401,"h":250,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/6\/c69f93a29f501f822b8efef485f69dee"}

If you wanna spice it up, it's possible to replace some of the wav files with different sounds.

more screenshots, people!

Mark, see your other thread for performance related suggestions.

Works fine here, nice use of the technology, didn't make a good song so no screenshot.

right

You know, I could just use punctuation from the original, leaving out the comma and adding an extra apostrophe at the end.
{"name":"600086","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/5\/05f927302029a36badf717f32d871538.jpg","w":400,"h":300,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/5\/05f927302029a36badf717f32d871538"}
Wouldn't that be more accurate?

Beautiful! I did have issues with some sounds not playing (usually when under heavy load). I also saw that while under stress, the pause when placing a piece in a new position was noticeable (I assume it was loading the audio on first use).

{"name":"600087","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/1\/b1b43d35576270cef21dc98b7972b975.jpg","w":1024,"h":600,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/1\/b1b43d35576270cef21dc98b7972b975"}
{"name":"600088","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/6\/e69de976fa342131584b7365d61a10d3.jpg","w":1024,"h":600,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/6\/e69de976fa342131584b7365d61a10d3"}

Animations were nice and smooth, and the background coloring added a lot.

The sample limit is set to 32, so that's to be expected.

Ah, it appears that I forgot to preload the fire sounds (good thing there's the backup, eh? ). Could you check for me and see if it's just the Fire sounds?

Also, would you try this exe instead? It uses al_reserve_samples(128) instead of 32 so there should be no drop-outs. Also, I preloaded the fire sound in it, so that's fixed.

Fun! Worked perfectly here. If I had to make a suggestion, the wind sound is a bit inconsequential so maybe you could replace it with something else.

Random doodle:
{"name":"600109","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/e\/6e4e4daab3c61b8ed9f073cd5ad6937b.jpg","w":1030,"h":625,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/6\/e\/6e4e4daab3c61b8ed9f073cd5ad6937b"}

EDIT: well, not quite perfectly if I do this. The sound starts to crackle, possibly due to Allegro.
{"name":"600110","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/9\/59cb105b00d2f0c35dfd8f3b7144c504.jpg","w":1030,"h":625,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/9\/59cb105b00d2f0c35dfd8f3b7144c504"}

The 128 sample exe fixed the dropped samples, but performance suffered and the audio would stutter under a relatively light load. Trimming silence from the samples fixed the stuttering, but a full board still gives choppy animations which seems like a bit of a problem. I didn't check to see if it did this in the original, but I'm on a netbook so it could just be the onboard graphics being worse than I thought.

I've uploaded a 5.5MB 7z archive with trimmed samples and both execs. I've also removed the *.ilk and *.pdb files, as well as the 'unused' directory. I'm not sure why they were in there, but the program seems to work fine without them.

Linky to my server because dial-upz won't allow me to attach the file here before my login times out.

Really beautiful, thanks.

I'm on windows 7.
The x button never closed the window for me.

+1

Same for me.

I tried both the Haiku and Haiku128_samples exes. Sound was better with the 128 one, less drop-offs.

You should really develop this!

Ah my young student, you must give wind room to breathe, otherwise it has nowhere to go. Each sound has it's own personality. Complementing them aesthetically isn't a given.

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OK. I've fixed this for future stuff. This is the classic "events getting backed up" syndrome.

That's one way to do it. There are long soft reverb trails on each of the samples; I wanted them to fully breathe so I left them in. Another way to fix it is to limit the number of tokens on the board. But I found that more annoying than the dropouts.

The right way to fix it is to use dry samples and run them through a reverb processor in real-time. There would be no stutters, probably not even for a fully stacked board and only 16 reserved samples. But I haven't even begun looking into sound processing yet.

Thank you.

haha, yea. The whole reason I put that stuff in the "unused" folder was to take it out before release. ahhh....

more screenshots!

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{"name":"600118","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/7\/c77800a73e75ee37b963ac8b88adb65b.png","w":1018,"h":593,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/7\/c77800a73e75ee37b963ac8b88adb65b"}

You could probably turn this into an iPhone game and rip a bunch of suckers off 99 cents at a time.

Cool! After seeing some of the "win" screenshots posted here, I actually tried to figure out how to win the game before realizing those screenshots are Photoshoped.

So can it do this yet:

That would be the next iteration, I suppose.

I do have another composition program called FullScore. It's the real workhorse. It's finally stable enough that I was able to use it to compose the music for the latest trailer I worked on:

Using it, I was able to write everyhing in almost a 10th of the time. Everything is only 1 or 2 keystrokes or mouse clicks away. I'd post screenshots of the program and all that stuff but I'm a hotel room.