Kong v1.1.0 released

SpaceDude · Post by **SpaceDude** » Fri May 09, 2008 9:45 am

I've just released v1.1.0 of my game Kong which uses Ogre for rendering of course. You can download it from the website at:

http://www.konggame.co.uk/

There have been quite a few changes from the previous version:
- I'm now using libRocket for the GUI.
- I've implemented Falagard's Light baking idea ( http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=37128 )
- It now has dynamic shadows using depth shadow mapping

That's for the technical side, for a full list of changes you can see the website.

antarctica2007 · Post by **antarctica2007** » Fri May 09, 2008 9:57 am

that is awesome, a really professional project- even your web sites good!

bharling · Post by **bharling** » Fri May 09, 2008 10:44 am

Love it, really polished, and a really solid feel to the gameplay 10/10. Might have to give this a go on multiplayer in the office today...

itien · Post by **itien** » Fri May 09, 2008 11:10 am

Awesome project, getting better and better. Great work!

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Fri May 09, 2008 11:32 am

Nice work! I especially like the coco-flash.

The menu music is very good too. It's very 'junglish' (both in the electronic and tribal sense (you've heard of jungle and dnb haven't you?) ). One thing though: I liked the old rocket and shock rifle sound effects better, but that's just me. May be it's because I was used to the old ones.

And, what do you think about libRocket? What are its principal advantages? Did you have to write your own wrapper for connecting it with Ogre? I was just looking into the Python scripts and other stuff in the 'rocket' folder in your game. Hope you don't mind.

Once again, nice work, and congratulations on the game! Looking forward to having some fun with my friends today.

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Fri May 09, 2008 11:42 am

Trying to play it online we can't get it working, just returns to the main menu. No firewall, ports forwarded correctly. Works with other servers though...
Just got an exception and "Kong.exe needs to be closed"

But anyway, awesome project!

Klaim · Post by **Klaim** » Fri May 09, 2008 1:03 pm

SpaceDude> Well done!

I'm curious : what did you use before LibRocket and what did make you change for it?

detox · Post by **detox** » Fri May 09, 2008 2:19 pm

Very nice, great polish and fun gameplay

libRocket looks fairly interesting, especially for freeware games.

What are you using for networking? Raknet?

SpaceDude · Post by **SpaceDude** » Fri May 09, 2008 2:56 pm

Thanks for the encouragement guys,

nikki, I'm glad you like the music. I can't take credit for it though

A guy called Roland Shaw did it along with all the new sound effects. Some of the sounds may sound a little weird at first and take a little getting used to. But overall the quality of the sounds is better now. The old sounds I basically just got by searching the net (I'm glad to have gotten them out because I'm not sure about the legalities of doing this).

libRocket comes with an interface to Ogre so it easy to get started but it did take a long time to replace all the menus (I think I underestimated the number of menus I had in the game). I don't mind you looking at the scripts, if I did mind I would have done a better job at hiding them

.

I explained my reasons for switching to libRocket in this thread:

http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=40108

I was using CEGUI before that. To summarize basically I found that the GUI I implemented using CEGUI was too much hard work to maintain and that creating a custom skin for it was not as easy as it could have been. I don't want to criticize CEGUI because to be honest it has tons of features and is probably the most mature out of all the free ogre-compatible GUIs you can find. I just feel it could be easier to lay things out in the windows.

Daerst, Any idea what caused the crash? I'm always on the lookout for bugs so if you can reproduce it please let me know what caused it so I can fix it. As for not being able to create/join servers I would assume it's something to do with NAT. NATs are a real pain in the ass when it comes to making games work over the Internet.

detox, I did originally try to use RakNet for networking but found it wasn't very reliable so I switched to enet ( http://enet.bespin.org/ ).

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Fri May 09, 2008 4:07 pm

The servers always appear in the list, and just now I was able to join my friend (who has not forwarded his ports), while he's still not able to join my server (ports forwarded)... Well, we'll keep trying, if I get any new experiences I'll let you know

Thx for that game, it's real fun

triton · Post by **triton** » Fri May 09, 2008 4:11 pm

Dynamic shadows are not working very well. Some glitches and artifacts.

And it crashes on exit here with an Intel X3100 graphics card.

I really like the GUI, feels very professional. Nice job.

lithander · Post by **lithander** » Fri May 09, 2008 5:02 pm

Really sweet looking and fun to play. A lot of potential to become a huge success imo if you can get it promoted and spread.

Any plans (how) to do that?

Post by **pjcast** » Fri May 09, 2008 11:30 pm

Awesome! Very polished game, nice graphics, and little details everywhere.

A minor critique, I'm not a big fan of the controls. I also try to go forward in direction player is facing, not having forward (w) always go towards top os screen. I think I noticed in your forums a topic on this, would definitely be a good option at least. Also, would be great if i could use my joystick controller on this game

Besides that, I like it a lot

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Sat May 10, 2008 1:54 am

This is very polished. Well done!

Did you use libRocket for the minimap as well?

SpaceDude · Post by **SpaceDude** » Mon May 12, 2008 12:31 am

triton wrote:Dynamic shadows are not working very well. Some glitches and artifacts.

I've noticed a bug that appears in CTF mode only, is this perhaps what you are talking about? I have to look into it.

triton wrote:And it crashes on exit here with an Intel X3100 graphics card.

I'm not sure what this could be I don't have this on any of my own machines

lithander wrote:Really sweet looking and fun to play. A lot of potential to become a huge success imo if you can get it promoted and spread.

Any plans (how) to do that?

Thanks. Well to be honest I'm not much good at promoting things mainly because I don't feel comfortable going around touting how good things I've created are. I have contact a few news sites (gamershell, bluesnews, etc...) by email though, which worked pretty well while the news was on their front-page.

pjcast wrote:A minor critique, I'm not a big fan of the controls. I also try to go forward in direction player is facing, not having forward (w) always go towards top os screen. I think I noticed in your forums a topic on this, would definitely be a good option at least. Also, would be great if i could use my joystick controller on this game Smile

Yes I now have this alternate control style on my list of things to do. I've had joystick support on my list for a long time too but never got round to it. I figured most PC gamers prefer to play with keyboard & mouse which is why I didn't place it very high on my priority list.

Murphy wrote:Did you use libRocket for the minimap as well?

Actually no, this is just a render to texture which is placed on the screen with ogre's overlay system. This is because it's been in the game from the start before I started using CEGUI or libRocket. I will probably eventually move it to libRocket though.

Post by **spacegaier** » Mon May 12, 2008 9:11 am

A minor critique, I'm not a big fan of the controls. I also try to go forward in direction player is facing, not having forward (w) always go towards top os screen. I think I noticed in your forums a topic on this, would definitely be a good option at least.

I can only second that. It is only a small thing to change (I guess), however it would improve the game a lot (imo). You could also let the player choose which variant he/she wants to use.

But all in all, a really funny game. Well done!

Post by **sinbad** » Mon May 12, 2008 12:02 pm

Great update - the depth shadowmapping works fine for me (8800) and looks great.

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Mon May 12, 2008 1:09 pm

SpaceDude wrote:
triton wrote:Dynamic shadows are not working very well. Some glitches and artifacts.
I've noticed a bug that appears in CTF mode only, is this perhaps what you are talking about? I have to look into it.

I can't really say for sure, but I think it may be related to the physics-based cloth animation in the flag. I had a few glitches with the flag too before (the flag would get stretched across the map when a person teleports).

Post by **Falagard** » Mon May 12, 2008 6:57 pm

Nice work!

chmod · Post by **chmod** » Thu May 15, 2008 1:28 am

The download link goes to a 403

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Thu May 15, 2008 7:54 am

Same here

but a Google for Kong-1.1.0.exe leads to other mirrors ^^

SpaceDude · Post by **SpaceDude** » Thu May 15, 2008 9:51 am

Thanks for letting me know of the broken link. It seems the place I was hosting the file has either got some problems or has deleted my account

. I've temporarily relocated it until I can find a better solution, in any case the link should work now.

Los Frijoles · Post by **Los Frijoles** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:04 pm

Very good game, I managed to download it, so I guess you fixed the download problem.

One point of suggestion: Being used to FPS games instead of 3rd person shooters (TPS? 3PS?), I think you should have a control option so instead of W, A, S, and D being up, left, down, right it should be forward, strafe left, backwards, strafe right. Although, after a while it got easier to control and I could see how this might interfere with gameplay...

Also, would it be possible to put dynamic shadows on the characters? I didn't see any and it would make the game look really cool. If realtime shadowing is too expensive, a small texture projected to the ground could suffice (like a fuzzy oval or something under where the guy stands).

Overall, I liked the game, good artwork, and well programmed.

Game_Ender · Post by **Game_Ender** » Thu May 15, 2008 3:33 pm

I have noticed a bug with the path finding:
In CTF with about 5-7 AI guys per team, they will often get bunched up and basically jam themselves together. The only way to free the jam is to kill one of them. After that they start happily running across the map.

SpaceDude · Post by **SpaceDude** » Thu May 15, 2008 3:48 pm

Yeah the AI could use some more work. It's not particularly advanced yet, the bots aren't aware of other players in the map so that's the reason for the bunching up.

Thanks for your suggestion about controls Los Frijoles, It seems a lit of people are suggesting this kind of control system. So I will definitely put that into the next version.

As for the dynamic shadows it's already there. Just go to the settings menu and you have option between No shadows, static shadows and dynamic shadows. In static shadow mode there is a simple circle texture at the player's feet as you have suggested.