Juno Reactor

[Plasma]

Don't you have better things to do than nitpick everything?

[Pieslice Productions]

Just because some people can't stop themselves from drooling and liking 3D games doesn't make QB more and more inconvenient for stuff that it was used for years and will be used in future.

Maybe you should just say openly that you with years became bored and ended up disliking QB and want now to play all those shiny OpenGL games.

I don't dislike retro games, but I switched to C++ because of these facts:

1. If you want to make a QB game that looks cool, you can do it.
- but you have to use VESA to achieve high resolution graphics, and pay the price that in 85% of the nowadays' machine neither UGL or Futlib works at all or works with tolerable frame rate.
My Juno Reactor was a Futlib VESA game, but the fact that it could not run on neither Radeon or Geforce machines made me to port it to Windows or OpenGl.

2. To create good looking VGA graphics, a graphic artist must have great talent to make the pixel art and animation look good. To be honest Lachie, your drawings don't look that good. Neither does mine, but I can still do 3d-modeling. Check out old Amiga games, like Xenon II or Turrican II and you'll see how much work you must spend on the pixel art to make it look very good.
And Frantic Journey has great gfx!

(off topic)
3. You shouldn't hate my Juno, because it's basically a 2D game, with twisted camera view and perspective. It's gameplay is very similar to your Rocket Fuel Mayhem. :wink:

4. OpenGl decreases the game development timeline, because it has pre-made 3d-math stuff and all primitives. and it almost forces you to make a 3d-game because it has basically no 2d-primitives, except some bitblit functions. You can do a shiny OpenGl and the development takes no longer than a typical QB game.

5. Good graphics gives my game players outside the Qmunity!

6. Why hate games, if they look good and play well?

[relsoft]

Actually, I like 2d games better thatn 3d. I don't know why. But a good blend is:

3d gfx
2d gameplay


like:

Thunderforce 5
Darius G

[Pieslice Productions]

Actually, I like 2d games better thatn 3d. I don't know why. But a good blend is:

3d gfx
2d gameplay


like:

Thunderforce 5
Darius G

and Juno Reactor

by the way. will the FJ ever become finished?

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Look Pieslice, I have nothing against you using OpenGL. Gee, by my guest. And since this project was for a while QB I have nothing against you posting it in here. And I do not hate your game. Why should I? Shees.

I was talking to toonski.
Now I see I was a bit too harsh. Maybe you should use a damn MS-DOS boot disk. I don't understand why people keep avoiding this simple and easy solution. You want MS-DOS, put the MS-DOS boot disk in A: drive while your PC boots up. You don't want MS-DOS, leave your A: drive empty. You also need to modify your BIOS to boot from A: drive first.

Still, it's not pleasant to see QB olders speaking like this. And with the rescent almost non-existing QB games production it all makes me feel a bit sad.

Also few more things to Pieslice.

I do not belive like you that only resolutions higher than 320*200 are nice.
I am perfectly aware of the quality of graphic in my games. And it's not nice to compare it to best 2D games ever, like Turrican 2. I mean, Juno doesn't look like Feeespace.
I do plan to improve in 2D, not switch to 3D.
I do plan eventually move to a different developing tool(probably MMF since I'm not so into programming), but I won't spread bad will in QB community before that, if you know what I mean.

[Pieslice Productions]

I apologize, I was too harsh too...

hmmm.
320x200 is still nice resolution.
my point was that if you use hardware accelerated graphics, the display adapter will do some graphics FOR you, for instance perspective, shading and lighting, which are, as far as I know, a pain to draw well by hand.
it means that you can get high quality graphics with less artistic talent. a kind of cheat though.

(drawing and especially animating bitmaps is slow. some high-end 2d-games like demonstar uses 2d-bitmaps, but they seem to be created in software like 3d-studio max. I used 3d-studio to render the sprite characters in MUX. I used 3d-studio to render the weapon bitmaps in TerraScape. still, 2d isn't my cup of tea. you can do it better than me, I suppose)

about the boot disk.
in windows > 98, the disk is not formatted as FAT, but as NTFS, so you can't access your hard disk with your DOS-formatted boot disk.
some more advanced games will require more space than 1.44 megs, so you can't run them on diskettes.
of course you can use tricks like RAMDRIVE, but it's more trouble than it's worth.

[edit]
and you get no mouse, sound, cd and VESA drivers with plain boot disk. some newer hardware has no DOS drivers, so you have to use "sliced" computer. no fun.
[/edit]

[edit mk. 2]
for future. leard directX. it can be used to create 2d. 2d-directx games aren't so CPU-intensive either. in fact they're often smoother than QB games. and they don't require a hell of a hardware accelerated display adapter. except a 2d-accelerated display might be a +
[/edit mk. 2]

what's the line between 2d and 3d.
for instance GC titles Super Smash Bros and Viewtiful Joe are 2d-games (a 2d-beat em up and 2d-platformer) as their gameplay, but they use 3d-perspectives and camera for parallaxes and special FX.
isn't that improved 2d?

[Pieslice Productions]

I might still create a new QB game.
I haven't left the Qmunity.

but it won't be as complex as my previous releases. I try focus on gameplay.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

I didn't knew that think about boot disks. That sux. But I belive you can use mouse with the boot disk if you use a proper MS-DOS mouse driver. Same goes for CD and sound. Then again, how that helps if you can't access the hard disk?

[Pieslice Productions]

there's utility called NTFSDOS, which reads information on NTFS disks in DOS. it's useless for games, because it gulps more than 300kB of base memory. I have 900megs formatted DOS partition in my HD because I want to play DOS games. but most people doesn't have...

and the RAMDRIVE is a program which makes a virtual HD on the system RAM. it's also almost useless because you have to install your games into the RAM before you can play them. tricky. and the RAM drive gets cleared everytime you turn your power off or reboot your computer.

[Z!re]

about the boot disk.
in windows > 98, the disk is not formatted as FAT, but as NTFS, so you can't access your hard disk with your DOS-formatted boot disk.
some more advanced games will require more space than 1.44 megs, so you can't run them on diskettes.
of course you can use tricks like RAMDRIVE, but it's more trouble than it's worth.

All MS Products let you choose what FAT you want, FAT32 or NTFS (I don't know about 2003 and longhorn though, it may be different)

Also there are numerous addons for DOS (or new DOS completely) that let's you access NTFS drives.

Why cant you run games > 1.44MB's from diskettes? How often do you need to access > 1.44 MB of data from the disk?

Just do: "Insert Disk labeled B into drive A:. Press any key to continue" I know it sucks, but if you develop in DOS and are on a NTFS partition, everything kinnda suck. DOS and NTFS don't exactly go hand in hand.