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April 14th, 2008 by Sharky

kick it on GameDevKicks.com 

I’ve uploaded yet another preview build. That’s 3 now – must be some kind of record.

This one features:

  • selectable team sizes. From 1 vs 1 to 5 vs 5
  • improved Lobby screen
  • reduced bullet range so the enemy AI can no longer shoot you from well outside the screen where you can’t even see them
  • new Team score HUD partly complete
  • survivability improved (even in a 5 vs 5 dogfight)

Known issues with this build:

  • Computer team name “Neutral” is wrong. Should be Allies or Axis
  • Scoring not completed. Doesn’t reward/penalize mid-air collisions.
  • epic battles are now possible but a little to hard to complete the kill. Usually ends up in a collison
  • funky new camera stuff occasionally lets your own plane disappear from view briefly
  • I get random mystery crashes on the XBOX 360 version. I’m not sure why yet, but try again 2, maybe 3 times and you’ll start getting a trouble free game. Bizarre. I would love to hear if anyone else is experiencing this on the 360?

Once again, this is a sneak peak release showing off my newest features as I polish them. My old, comparitively boring, release is still available here.

Try preview #3 here

You can download it directly with the following links…

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 161 user reviews.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 6:22 am and is filed under Game Development, PC Gaming, XNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “”

  1. Ziggy Says:
    April 22nd, 2008 at 11:04 am

    I found a crash in the game in the Windows version where shortly after you collide with a ship and die it errors some times. It seems to happen after horsing around button mashing for about a minute. :)

  2. Sharky Says:
    April 22nd, 2008 at 11:09 am

    Yeah. That’s one reason it’s still a “preview” release. hehe.

    With all the extra planes flying around now, I need to look at memory usage. I think all the extra particles (smoke, explosions, bullets etc…) might be consuming too much memory after playing for a bit. Get’s garbage collected, but sometimes not soon enough.

    That’s my guess anyway.

    On the 360 I get similar symptoms. Play for 5 minutes and eventually it crashes – sometimes.

  3. Philippe Da Silva Says:
    April 23rd, 2008 at 6:51 am

    Hi Sharky,

    I installed the preview and I get a crash whatever options I select when I start a round.
    Unfortunatelly, I have no idea how I can help you debugging this windows installation as I have no logs written.
    If you want your readers to help you out, maybe you could just add some try…catch with a TraceListener attached to a file output so that we can at least send you over some exception information?

    Cheers,

    Philippe

  4. Sharky Says:
    April 23rd, 2008 at 7:10 am

    Thanks for the feedback Philippe. I agree, logging would certainly help and I’ll see what I can do.

    I am surprised you’re getting a crash so quickly with the Windows version though. The only crashes I’ve been getting are with the XBOX 360 version and I’ve been looking into that.
    Or if I play for ages I can make the windows version run out of memory (I fixed that last night, not released yet though)

    Have any of my previous builds worked for you?
    http://sharky.bluecog.co.nz/?page_id=27

    Sounds like you got past the menus, so I’m guessing you must have all the prerequisite stuff installed and updated…
    - XNA 2.0
    - and have you done a recent WebUpdate for DirectX? (I’d do this anytime a new XNA comes out)
    - .NET Framework 2.0

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