Happy New Year all! Hope you all got lots of pressies and are having a great 2007 so far.
As promised, here’s a new release to play with. Here’s what’s in it…
- There a some new and significantly better Sound Effects! In particular the Engine sounds are way better, and both planes have their own distinct sound. My favourite is the new sound effects for when you get hit by bullets.
- Fixed a problem with engine sounds continuing even after an explosion.
- Fireball particles should now look better on lower framerate computers, or when the FPS drops out briefly. Should no longer leave gaps.
- This release also contains a work-around to a known XNA problem when switching to Full-screen. The framework would use a Monitor refresh rate that is way to high for some people’s systems.
Big thanks to Ultrahead for alerting me to the full-screen problem and suggesting the good work-around. The game now forces the Refresh rate to something most people’s systems should be able to handle: 75hz. If even this is too high there is a Settings.Xml setting you can tweak. If 60hz doesn’t work then probably nothing will. I chose 75hz since 60hz has evil flickering. You could go higher if you know what you are doing and what your monitor is capable of, but do so at your own risk. NOTE: the game always tries to use the current Windows Desktop resolution.
Feel free to grab the new release from the Latest Builds page here.
January 3rd, 2007 at 12:47 am
Yes, yes, yes … it works. Wohahahahahaaa … thanks.
Great game, man!
For the smoke trails are you using billboards, pointsprites or normal particles?
January 3rd, 2007 at 5:19 am
w00t!!!
Glad to hear.
For the smoke trails, fireballs, explosions & clouds I’m just using a single quad with a texture. (using the Spacewars’ Shape.Plane(1,1) method).
I don’t know how to do *true* billboards yet, but I really want them to be billboards. With the clouds in particular you’ll notice they’re not true billboards (always facing the camera) with the high altitude clouds. When the camera looks up towards them as the plane flys higher you’ll see they are slightly squished with some perceivable perspective. Not pretty.
Yep, yet another thing on my lengthy todo list. I’ve noticed there’s a Matrix.CreateBillboard() method that looks like a starter. I’m assuming you’d use it instead of applying any Rotation Matrices?
If you have any more great tips, you know where to send them.
January 3rd, 2007 at 8:18 am
” … more great tips …”
Yes, a small radar quad located, say, near one of the screen corners would be handy …
“Glad to hear”
I really like when the planes collide since it’s quite fun to see them fall …