Axiomatic : the old (02.05.05) demo thread [demo pulled]

SuprChikn · Post by **SuprChikn** » Wed May 04, 2005 7:05 am

Finally got around to playing it: So Very AWESOME!
I think I know what I'll be doing for the foreseeable future

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Wed May 04, 2005 7:11 am

finally got a chance to play this... ran great for me so far, no problems.

the graphics are absolutely beautiful, and the gameplay seems great from the few minutes I was able to play (at work)

beautiful game!!

Phantom · Post by **Phantom** » Wed May 04, 2005 8:49 am

Wow how can I have missed this!

I will take a look at this as soon as I get home. Looks dang neat!

emperorsnewmusic · Post by **emperorsnewmusic** » Wed May 04, 2005 11:32 am

This looks great, unfortunately it crashes (sound stuck, 'do you want to send an error report to microsoft' kind of crash) when I try to start a skirmish. To be precise, when I click the 'next', 'prev' or 'cancel' (only cancel occassionaly works as it should, afaict, but that's not very exciting). I can alter the other settings for number of asteroids etc, and everythin seems to be working smoothly up to that point.

I'll send my *.logs and the "2228_appcompat.txt" xml error report to the gmail address you gave. I hope that's of some use. I just tried quitting a few other programs I had running on the off chance that could help, which it didn't. I've tried running in a couple of different resolutions, too. The logs have all my hardware info, so I won't repeat it here. I suppose it might be worth mentioning that I seem to have some corrupt video memory (?) in my system, which often causes all kinds of horrible distortion to appear (not just in 3d stuff), and it can't decide wether it has 32 or 64mb

. But I really don't think that's the problem here.

Looks like great work anyway, I hope we can fix this, I'd like to play it.

[edit] I might as well quickly say:
p4 3.06ghz, 768mb RAM, winXP, radeon mobility 9000 64mb (on a good day

)

SuprChikn · Post by **SuprChikn** » Wed May 04, 2005 11:50 am

I probably should have said that I didnt experience any bugs or crashes while playing. I'm running win2k, AMD Duron 750 (@875), 64mb GeForce2 Pro, and 384mb RAM.

BTW, i noticed that I can fly full-pelt into an asteroid without sustaining any ship damage, just bouce off and roll through space. I was thinking you might wanna make it damage the ship.

and again, Awesome stuff man.

alphageek · Post by **alphageek** » Wed May 04, 2005 12:13 pm

Thanks for feedback guys.

@SuprChikn:
Yes I definitely want to include impact damage. Though I don't view it as critical for gameplay, it will be easy to implement and being able to survive asteroid impacts at any speed kills immersion.

Kezzer · Post by **Kezzer** » Wed May 04, 2005 1:57 pm

I feel the steering is way too sensitive. Maybe have an option to change the mouse sensitivity? Apologies if this has already been posted

Phantom · Post by **Phantom** » Wed May 04, 2005 4:11 pm

Ok, this first crashed my computer 2 times.

After 2 reboots I finally got to play it. I played for like 50 seconds, then it crashed again

But from the little playing time I had, first thing you need to change is steering. First of all, remove the inverse stuff, it just doesn't work on a mouse. Or add an option so you can remove the y-inverse. Also allow keyboard steering.

No Idea what happened with the crashes, it happened every time I included another group of enemy fighters, or too many of mine. (when pressing the add button). The screen just froze and the last rendered frame stayed on the screen until I had to do a hard reboot :/

luckless666 · Post by **luckless666** » Wed May 04, 2005 4:14 pm

alphageek wrote:The GF4MX does support cubic environment mapping doesn't it?

Yes, it does

alphageek · Post by **alphageek** » Thu May 05, 2005 12:21 am

Sorry about the nasty crashes Phantom. I wouldn't have released if this game wasn't rock solid on my machine, so thanks for the feedback.

If you could send your profile.log (as well as Axiomatic.log and Ogre.log) to paul.bridger+profile@gmail.com that would be much appreciated.

As noted somewhere above, you can remove the mouse inverse if it doesn't suit your playing style. In fact, you can even change the mouse sensitivity. Look in the active.keymap file in the cfg directory. I agree, I need some way to change this stuff in-game.
(Similarly, keyboard steering is fully supported. Hell, you can fire your weapons with a mouse axis if you really want to).

Phantom · Post by **Phantom** » Thu May 05, 2005 10:55 am

alphageek wrote:Sorry about the nasty crashes Phantom. I wouldn't have released if this game wasn't rock solid on my machine, so thanks for the feedback.

of course, I know. I'm not mad or anything

I know how beta/alpha tests work, so I knew the risks

alphageek wrote: If you could send your profile.log (as well as Axiomatic.log and Ogre.log) to paul.bridger+profile@gmail.com that would be much appreciated.

Will do.

alphageek wrote: As noted somewhere above, you can remove the mouse inverse if it doesn't suit your playing style. In fact, you can even change the mouse sensitivity. Look in the active.keymap file in the cfg directory. I agree, I need some way to change this stuff in-game.
(Similarly, keyboard steering is fully supported. Hell, you can fire your weapons with a mouse axis if you really want to).

Wow, nice. Sorry didn't notice that

alphageek · Post by **alphageek** » Thu May 05, 2005 11:17 am

A quick note to those with problems (if you're even following this thread

)

If you find the game is crashing when you:
a) add more ships, or
b) seemingly randomly during the game
You may need to update your sound drivers.

After having a look at logs from a few people with these problems, it seems to be often an issue with openAL sound support. Sometimes updating sound drivers can help.
In particular it looks like the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 requires a set of beta drivers specially for openAL.

Alternatively, just chill and wait for the next release which will be based on FMOD and should be more stable.

Phantom · Post by **Phantom** » Thu May 05, 2005 11:55 am

alphageek wrote:A quick note to those with problems (if you're even following this thread )

If you find the game is crashing when you:
a) add more ships, or
b) seemingly randomly during the game
You may need to update your sound drivers.

After having a look at logs from a few people with these problems, it seems to be often an issue with openAL sound support. Sometimes updating sound drivers can help.
In particular it looks like the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 requires a set of beta drivers specially for openAL.

Alternatively, just chill and wait for the next release which will be based on FMOD and should be more stable.

Interesting. But, weird enough, shouldn't this problem then occur on all OpenAL based games?

alphageek · Post by **alphageek** » Thu May 05, 2005 12:30 pm

Phantom, it may be that there is a known small set of cards that have problems with openAL - maybe big-money games can afford to install drivers specially for these cards?

However, there is another possible source of sound issues. Basically openAL has some issues with finding out how many hardware voices there are. I recall reading something about some nvidia openal drivers that will happily let you allocate infinite hardware voices, and then crash when you try to use one that is not really supported.

In my code I initially allocate 32 hardware voices and then use as a pool from which to dynamically allocate the higest priority sounds. OpenAL should be refusing to allocate voices greater than the number supported in hardware (and my code should handle this okay), but *maybe* it isn't and the game is then crashing when it comes to use one of the unsupported voices.

I am ~70% convinced these issues are related to openAL. This is part based on evidence, part simply wishful thinking. In any case, I won't try to fix these errors until I've confirmed they still exist after the FMOD switch.

Also, this switch will give me the opportunity to rip out my soundmanager, which I like, but could be the source of these errors.

Phantom · Post by **Phantom** » Thu May 05, 2005 1:01 pm

Ok, sounds logical enough.
Guess wel'l have to wait

alphageek · Post by **alphageek** » Thu May 05, 2005 1:06 pm

Gratuitous 100th post.

(Yes you will have to wait.

)

alphageek · Post by **alphageek** » Fri May 06, 2005 1:42 am

Bump to highlight limited availability.

(This tech demo will be removed on Monday New Zealand Time.)

jordwest · Post by **jordwest** » Fri May 06, 2005 9:37 am

Great game

I initially had problems with the game (crashed, same as you explain above) with my built-in Intel sound card (laptop). Then I plugged in my generic USB surround sound card and the game worked.

IoN_PuLse · Post by **IoN_PuLse** » Sat May 07, 2005 7:44 am

alphageek:

I've had lots of problems with OpenAL on Win32 as well, I believe the max source count for most "generic" sound cards is below 30, I'm going to be implementing my own pooling soon to combat that. It's lovely that my Audigy seems not to care having between 30-40 active sources, but most other sound cards (including the soundblaster 5.1!) don't fare so well. I've also read (by searching google for openal problems) that it's recommended to create all sources first before playing any of them.

Anyways, FMOD is quite good and will certainly work

I'm not giving up on OpenAL yet myself though.

alphageek · Post by **alphageek** » Sat May 07, 2005 1:36 pm

@ion_pulse
thanks for the infos. Yes I read the same thing regarding creating sources/voices initially. I do this, to a maximum of 32, but during this process I am continually testing for openAL errors. So if openAL were failing to allocate a voice it should be telling me.

Maybe I am doing something wrong with this initial allocation, but subsequently I do voice pooling which I've tested thoroughly. Obviously *something* is wrong, but for now I will continue blaming openAL.

I like openAL and I would rather use an "open" library, but I am also quite happy to pay a little for a good library that will save me time.