Guitar Villains

[cyxodus]

I'm a student of Wake Tech college's Sim and Game degree and I'm working on a Guitar Heroes clone for class. It's due in two weeks and I'm a bit stuck. I'm having some trouble with collision and I need to add a scoring feature to it. My instructor said that I should post here for some help.

My game can be downloaded from here (http://www.geocities.com/cyxodus/guitarviilains.rar) (24 megs). Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Payton

[Apples]

For the collisions, I would make an infinite loop in "world.my first method" that has an if/else statement inside like 'If object within 1 meter of other object'

For the scoring, I made a world class variable called 'score' and then whenever you want the score going up by one, you do 'increment score by 1', vice versa if you want the score to go down.

[cyxodus]

Thanks for the help. I'll play around with it. I also forgot to mention that the score will need to be displayed during the game.

[Fo_H@wk]

Cool, i'll try out the game.

[Apples]

If you want to have it displayed, you could make another infinite loop that checks to see if the score equals a certain number, and if it does, then some text that you entered becomes visible, in this case a number.

[DrJim]

Very nice graphics :) - unfortunately that may be a problem. I won't go into much detail on the game (looks to me like you just have to add some more code - also see you've gotten some good suggestions) but I will mention the problems I had getting the game to run. At 44 M decompressed it's the largest Alice game - by a factor of 5 - that I've ever tried. You'll probably have a lot fewer problems if you can get the world's file size way down - Alice just doesn't handle large worlds well and that can make program debugging hard - as shown in this case (with my machines). The best code in the world is useless if the machine it's running on can't handle it :( .

For adding collision detection and scoring I'll suggest you have the disk movement method run only while the world is running and "while the disk is greater than xxx from the thumper" - this will avoid you having to do detailed geometries to figure out a hit. When the while test goes false, up the score and then move the disk rapidly out of view - this will make the while test true again. I like this a bit better than the infinite loop/if/else approach but it's just a personal preference - whatever works for you is the right way!

I tried to run the program on two laptop computers - one relatively old and one newer, but still not a "gamer" machine. As a rough guide, Leggo Star Wars won't even try to run on the old machine :p but runs OK on the other. On the old machine, the opening title screens looked fine but when the music started, things got so jerky I couldn't even figure out what was happening - the processor was completely overloaded with memory swaps to disk. Alice kept trying (unlike LSW) - but the results were garbage.

On the newer machine, the title screens were white (didn't think they were even there at first) - the problem was that the spectral highlights were set to no color (or white) with a fairly low exponent. Once I got to a graphics card that could handle this - it's one of the things that gets dropped if Alice does software rendering - I had to reset this to black. After that the titles were fine. That machine even dropped back to software rendering when I increased the viewing area to fill most of the screen, but it still seemed to run OK.

I would be interested to know if others are having these types of hardware problems (and would be happy to accept a faster machine if anyone is giving them away free :D ).

[Fo_H@wk]

yeah the game was pretty good. the only thing is i couldnt figuer out if i was getting the chords right or not because there was no score. but you will probably have that up later once you figure it out.

[stevo420100]

i cant get it to work:(

[cyxodus]

==UPDATE==

Go here (http://www.alice.org/community/showthread.php?p=1988#post1988) to see the final project and thanks to everyone for their help. The only thing left is the final grade. :)