This thread is getting long...

I made another update (v2.07). Nothing major, just the restructuring of the way the games are handled. Now all the games should be in separate directories under 'games', although the old way with all files in that one huge directory still works. So if you have a previous version installed, better make a clean reinstall so you don't get duplicated entries. And those who make plugins better make a new directory under 'games' and move everything there

In other news, some work was made in the direction of supporting network play. There will be a central server onto which you will be able to connect. There will be a chatroom where you'll be able to find someone to play with. One person will start a game, the other or others will join. The IGame interface will be updated as necessary. Functions will be added that will allow the games to say whether or not they are multiplayer net games, define how many players can play and to send and receive messages. All without having to know a single thing about network code.

I've made a small part of the GUI necessary to support this but as it currently doesn't do anything useful yet, it is invisible by default. If you want to see how it will look, press F1 in the main menu. An additional button labeled "Play Online" will appear. Clicking it shows a dialog where you select a server and type in your name (just type anything, it doesn't matter at this point). When you click "OK", the chatbox appears instead of the game descriptions and highscores. The chatbox is basically just a list of messages and an editbox where you can type in your message. And a button to define your colour. That's all I've made so far. The chatbox is not functional by the way, that is no messages are being sent anywhere...

Eventually you'll be able to actually chat in the chatbox and then press the "Start Game" and "Join Game" buttons. Start Game will take you to a dialog where you will be able to setup a new game (name, max players, etc.) and Join Game will take you to a list of available games for you to join.

This is all I have so far. All ideas are welcome.

coolness!

It would be useful for testing if you can run the server locally. Any idea how this is going to work? Which networking lib are you using?

I've started working on a pacman clone for AMGC... basically it is working now, except pacman doesn't die yet. Should be done soon.

I've noticed a bug in Quad: When you finish the game, you get in an endless loop and never return to the menu. You just get a popup saying "game over" over and over again.

Ok, I did x = 550 and y = 550, it's out of screen...

OMG, PacRogue

Ok, I moved my butt and ported that game, it's still not a "playable game" since I botched the level loader so the maps are meaningless, and you can't get past level 3. However the engine is fully functional, you can move around and push crates.

Obligatory screenshot:
http://rizoud.yves.free.fr/public/blockman.gif

Now to beautify the code, rewrite that darn level loader, and pre-render the MCGA graphics in 2xSai...

Kudos to my friend Paul Siramy, this was an abandoned project of his.

Great work guys! I need to get home before I can try them though (10+ hours)...

The GUI itself actually does this or at least it's supposed to. I'll take a look to see what goes wrong?

What exactly crashes? Where and when?

That's really strange. I suppose I should actually do some error checking Does that happen with the latest version? Clean install? Only the default games or do you have some extras too?

Ah, ok then! respect! :-)

OK, back to this question now. Unless you changed something in the ini, the GUI itself should run at close to 0% CPU usage. The games though are a different story. Brute force full screen memory double buffering is used and the target framerate is the same as logic framerate, which is 100 Hz by default (you can change that in the ini but you better not, because some of the games are written speciffically for 100 FPS ), so on slower computers a lot of CPU power is needed, mostly going to that final buffer->screen blit. Even on my relatively fast Athlon64 3000+ around 25-30% of CPU is used for making most games run at 100 FPS and around 70-80% for Quad (which uses text output functions and 2D drawing primitives, which are slow). Anyway, I added a targetFPS setting now so that gfx framerate can be limited to an arbitrary value without having to touch logic framerate and the CPU usage drops to around 10% at 50 FPS. I'll upload a new version when I get enough new features in...

Try a clean install and see if that works. My guess is that you changed some settings that made the new version not work. I'll do more error checking in the next version.

EDIT: I finally got a chance to play the two new games.

Blocks: Very nice. But I can't find the exit in level 3! It's not even there. I did however get that bug with cyclic higscore/game over messages though. I can finally reproduce the bug and hopefully kill it!

Pacman: Also nice, I like the text graphics But the game froze at one point and nothing could bring it back. Or maybe the host program froze, I'll have to take a closer look...

EDIT2: Yay, I managed to fix that higscore/game over message bug. Was a simple little error really. I'll upload a new version as soon as the uni server starts working again... :-/

EDIT3: There, uploaded v2.08:

• game over / highscore dialog bug fixed

• error checking - hopefully you will get an error message if something goes wrong when starting up the program

• targetFrameRate = 50 - will make the games run faster / use less CPU

• uploaded the two new games too: Blocks and Pacman - thanks guys :)

Miran, a clean install seems to have fixed it... either that, or 2.08 did.

I'm not sure yet. There will probably be a server (a separate program) that you or anyone else will run and it will act only as a message routing service. It will be up to amgc2.exe to decide how these services will be used. You will be able to login and log out, enter the chatroom and use it, start a game and join a game. The server will only receive messages and send them to those who are supposed to receive them. The games themselves will also be quite abstracted from the network interface. They will only specify which messages they want to send and they will receive incoming messages just like they recieve mouse and keyboard input.

Excellent. Too bad we'll never know what went wrong before...

Wow, that's a lot of levels

Better just use your own file, like blocks.cfg and then use the normal Allegro config functions. Btw, you should put your game in something like 'games/blocks' instead of just 'games' to keep the directory structure cleaner a bit...

Init() and DeInit() are called every time a game is started and stopped (game over or you press ESC and confirm). Constructor and destructor are effectively the same because the DLL are loaded and unloaded dynamically all the time. So basically they are called more often than Init() and DeInit(). At the start of the program the list is created so that's once, and then when you play a game or go to game settings (if the game supports that), the dll is also loaded and then freed when not needed anymore. So basically if you want to load your own config before the game is started (i.e. to know how to construct the settings dialog), you can do it in the constructor. Just make sure you clean up in the destructor...

Probably no. Besides, OpenLayer doesn't work on Linux. At least not on mine...

I could probably make it use plain OpenGL though. Without anyone even noticing too...

I wouldn't change the resolution. It wouldn't be difficult to addapt the GUI to work at all resolutions but I think it's better to have a fixed resolution. Otherwise things just get too complicated. About LUPS I think there's no real need to change that. 100 is a good number and should work for most games. If you need to change speed, just install a second timer, just like my Tetris. And if you want to change the gfx framerate, just chnage that in the ini (it's not in the GUI yet), the FPS and LUPS are independant since 2.08...

Don't know what the problem is. The program runs at 32bpp by default (or it may go to 16bpp if your desktop colour depth is 16bpp and you run it in windowed mode). If you use the Allegro bitmap and/or datafile loading routines without doing anything special, Allegro should do the conversion at load time. If your gfx are 8bpp though, you must first load the palette...