Author Topic: MAP - Grand Illusion  (Read 10152 times)

RadMan

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MAP - Grand Illusion
« on: June 20, 2010, 10:27:17 AM »
This is a beta-test of mine, so test it if you will...

It is designed to take a long time to play, and if you do play, please give feed-back and report any problems

Koss

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #1 on: June 20, 2010, 02:24:27 PM »
It's not started with an error: "property method not found".
Version of Eufloria v2.04.

RadMan

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #2 on: June 20, 2010, 11:38:11 PM »
Sorry about that...

wowo

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #3 on: June 21, 2010, 03:38:36 AM »
Hi,

What I like about your map:

- Multiple moves: generally cool idea
- Leading to stunning visuals
- Unpredictibility (speed, conquering of asteroids)

What I dislike:

- Amassment of seedlings "hanging" somewhere in space
- Game crashing (too much happening?)

thx & keep on experimenting! ;-)

wowo

threephi

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #4 on: June 21, 2010, 04:54:52 AM »
The asteroids all orbit very close to the seedling travel speed so seedlings are all stuck eternally in transit when you try and send them somewhere.  You could make the asteroid speed either slower or faster to fix that.  Same thing happens worse for flowers and laser mines which effectively makes them useless.  Especially if you try to plant a flower on a moving asteroid, the flower gets stuck behind the orbit which means, wasted flower.  All this makes it extremely frustrating to play, with potentially hundreds if not thousands of seedlings stuck uselessly in very long if not eternal orbits.  That right there would make the level unplayable since given how quickly you can grow large numbers as all the asteroids have so many trees.  The game will in short time hit the global seedling cap (5000 total across all factions) and potentially all the seedlings could be stuck in space.  Nonetheless I gave it a go for a while to see what happened, and it crashed Eufloria after about ten minutes (v2.04).

I like the concept and the planet layout, it would be very interesting to play this level when all the problems get worked out.  I also like the increased cost for defense trees, I don't think anyone's tried playing with that before.

BTW you should just keep editing the first post with a link to download the latest build so 1) it's easy to grab and 2) noone grabs a bad build.
« Last Edit: June 21, 2010, 05:07:13 AM by threephi »

threephi

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #5 on: June 21, 2010, 05:35:00 AM »
Also when you pause the game by pulling up the menu, the asteroids keep moving.  They should stop while the game is paused.

wowo

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #6 on: June 21, 2010, 05:47:36 AM »
Finally finished the map without a crash...

What I like about this map (continued)

- High number of trees
- Decent complexity

What I dislike about this map (continued)

- Game end before all asteroids are conquered (I guess all asteroids should be default if not mentioned otherwise?)
- Too slow movement - you can't send little groups of seedling, little speed differences
- Finally this ends up in brute force attacks - no tactics, no laser mines needed
- Flowers and laser mines are too slow and pretty useless - suggest you remove them completely



threephi

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #7 on: June 21, 2010, 06:17:27 AM »
Here's some more notes:

I decided to delve into the code a little bit to see if I could find your orbit rate variable (sMod) and played with it a little... I slowed down the rate of orbits considerably (sMod=1.2) which made it a lot more playable in terms of using your seedlings.

But still, as anikk has pointed out in several of his level's threads, it opens up many cans of worms when you have plantable moving planets.  I don't think the problems are insurmountable, I think it is just very difficult to get all the motion parameters set so a moving planet is fully usable.  Seedlings, flowers, and mines all move at different rates of speed and it will be a very challenging task to get all the orbits set so you don't get any harmonics where stuff gets stuck.

I noticed that the game crash comes when your seeds arrive to attack the large outer planet on the right, perhaps when they breach a tree and start infecting the center.

I'm curious about why you made the game map and some of the send distances so massively huge... after you take an asteroid on the outer ring you can zoom the game map out really, really, really far until most of the asteroids are just little dots.

I also (for the first time in any level) noticed one other very interesting side effect of having moving planets with trees: when you attack a moving planet and your seedlings start infecting tree roots, the seeds' motion along the root path is affected by orbital motion such that the infecting seedlings can be brought to a complete stop if the orbital vector is greater than and opposes their speed along the root path towards the center.  But since the asteroids in this level all follow circular paths, the seedlings do shake loose eventually... I thought that was really neat actually.

RadMan

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #8 on: June 21, 2010, 08:21:26 AM »
Yeah, I was meaning to change the orbital rates, but I apparently never got around to that...

Also, the amount of asteroids needing to be conquered is a mistake that I left in the code...

Finally, I'm working on a better ratio of speed, strength, and health...I just haven't gotten it to work out in the code yet...

Update will arrive shortly...

wowo

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #9 on: June 21, 2010, 04:09:44 PM »
re. last post of threephi:

I noticed the hanging of the seedlings moving to the core as well and actually do like it as it adds a bit to the time it takes to conquer an asteroid...

another side effect of that was that I thought that I could not conquer the little rotating moon as no seedlings moved in for some time... did not relate that to asteroids own movement vector though...

annikk.exe

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #10 on: June 22, 2010, 03:26:25 AM »
Not had time to try this, due to moving house at the moment...but I had a brief read through your code, and it looks sweet! :>

I didn't know you could create your own functions like that.  Very useful...I wonder if I can make Infected AI a single function...  hmm...

RadMan

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #11 on: June 22, 2010, 04:29:48 AM »
Yeah, I used to work with Java so I kinda already had an idea for the syntax and figured that functions must be an option..

AWS

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #12 on: June 22, 2010, 04:34:14 AM »
excellent. more maps! :)
downloaded but havent got to trying it yet.
im sure it'll be good. i make my maps not to be totally undoable, but for longevity, so im eager to try this and see how it compares with the one im currently working on.

keep those maps coming people...

AWS

Bonobo

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #13 on: June 26, 2010, 04:06:28 AM »
Whoa, what a cool map. Took me ca. 1.5 hrs to crush all those bad, bad enemies (first attempt).

I like this map. What I didn’t like was that it was finished (won) before I had captured the large asteroid to the right, I had just prepared a great army and conquered the smaller asteroid which moved towards that large one when game told me that I had won. Hmph.

Thanks a lot, and I look forward to the tweaks you want to make to this level.

Cheers, Tom

naschi

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Re: MAP - Grand Illusion
« Reply #14 on: August 15, 2010, 11:53:13 AM »
liked this map. but there are too much trees so the map was very slow...