Tile Wars

I actually liked it. Very simple, and I like the high score list thing how you can pick anyone. Very clever idea! I also liked how you edit your ship. However, you could use a better website layout.

Yeah, that's true!

The web site layout is REALLY simple! I was thinking of a nice background image with the firing space ship or something...

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Original post by Viper173 Yeah, that's true! The web site layout is REALLY simple! I was thinking of a nice background image with the firing space ship or something...

Whatever looks nice ;)

holy shit i was hooked, Too bad there is a limited number of times you can play per day. This is an awesome game for real. I can think of a wide range of stuff you could add to this game to make it really interesting in the design of the ships. Also, you need a real website or something. Maybe a forum so people can argue.

At fist when I played it (I went straight into a fight without going into the edit menu) I was like, "Wow... I have no idea what I just witnessed." I couldn't tell which ship was mine and how the fight was going... in the fight screen I couldn't figure out what was going on and whether the fight would end itself or if I was supposed to end it...

But I didn't pay attention at first. Now I see. It's a really cool game... addictive. You could build this game eventually up, bit by bit, over time, making it cooler and cooler until you have an awesome game.

I think simple ideas that create very interesting combinations and game-play like yours are really good... I saw really interesting ship designs, some that I wouldn't have thought of (like one that had turrets covered in armor that were completely disattached from the ship and were as far away as possible).

The AI is interesting too. It must've taken some thinking to figure out how to have the AI's maneuver and fight (the math involved)? Or maybe not.. For example, how would it know when it is facing the enemy at the right angle. This is a problem I've faced before... maybe that's something you could add - more complicated AI? You could have them doing maneuvers on each other and such, or you could try to add neural-networking and genetic-algorithms for the ship AI's to learn? You could also add more items. You could add shield generators, more powerful thrusters maybe.

For the background you could have a star field. Where did you get the sound effects by the way? Your sound effects were pretty cool. And why is it called Tile Wars? Doesn't it have more to do with space and spaceships?

This is awesome. I'm typing this out as I play it.

First impression. I create an account (name of Jonah) and start a game. What are the controls? My ship is going all over the place and I can't seem to control anything. Run away! Oh, a ship editor. Oooohh, I understand what this game is now. Let's just add a ton of turrets.

Most of my matches end up being an endless chase. The ships need to be able to do more things than just turn in a circle.

I had some absolutely epic battles. I tried a few ship designs, but right now the choices are somewhat limited.

You need to add different types of turrets. Not only light and heavy, but lasers, missiles, seekers, mines, etc. This game is all about strategy, you need to give a lot of choices.

I would love to see the ships be scriptable. If they were, this would be a lot like core wars only more fun and tangible.

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I saw really interesting ship designs, some that I wouldn't have thought of (like one that had turrets covered in armor that were completely disattached from the ship and were as far away as possible).

Yeah, for the record: it doesn't work.

It seems as though maneuverability is based upon how far out from the center you build rather than on total mass or something, so you get punished for going out on a limb, as it were. Another build I did had a really long armored point that was supposed to be kept pointed at the enemy ship, but my maneuverability totally sucked because my ship was so, ahem, long, so it didn't do any good and I just got blasted.

But it's a very interesting game, very addictive and a great concept. I played it until half the graphics stopped working for some reason.

(My only criticism is that you have to stick to a pretty common plan with everything lumped at the center to get anywhere -- but then again I did make some pretty silly ships, and there aren't that many component types yet.)

Heh, I didn't realize that at all. I think that should probably be a rule, your ships must be a single "island", there can be no disjointed parts.

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Yeah, for the record: it doesn't work.

It beat my design though. I had a ring of armor around my ship and some turrets on the corners with a lump of turrets in the top-right corner of the ship.

Thanks for the great feddback, guys!!!!!

The problem that the very first user doesn't know what's going on, I heard before.
What would be a good way to solve this?? Maybe a short describing panel on top of everything that you have to close, like a tutorial....

dbanumgart, yes, the moment of inertia is being calculated and it adds tiles with the radius squared. So tiles that are far away add a lot more moment of inertia, making the ship turn slowly.... I think, I should change this.

Great that you guys like, this way we can invest more time in implementing new features. jonahrowley, I liked the idea of mines. Never thought of that before :)


Graphics failurs!!! I really can't help myself. Those gifs seem to disappear after a while and I have no idea ahy java does this. For the record: I don't like java, but it's fairly simple, free, and common...

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The problem that the very first user doesn't know what's going on, I heard before. What would be a good way to solve this?? Maybe a short describing panel on top of everything that you have to close, like a tutorial....

Just pop up a message saying "Your ship doesn't have any weapons or armor. Use the edit menu." if the player tries to go into a fight without adding anything to the ship.

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Original post by Viper173 For the record: I don't like java, but it's fairly simple, free, and common...

Flash might be a good alternative then. Anyway, I quite liked the concept. It seems pretty flexible. Some things need to be fleshed out more, though: in many cases, ships just don't hit each other so some battles drag on for too long (good thing you added. The slow rotation of the turrets and their dumb behaviour are probably the cause. Some more behaviour patterns - perhaps even scriptable, to some extend - could help spice up battles, too. Also, projectiles seem to move past blocks when you speed up the simulation, so speeding things can alter the outcome...

That, and various interface tweaks, such as highlighting your name in the ranking list (and limiting the list to display only a certain number of players around your position, in case many more people join up), providing different 'brushes' in the editor (clearing 20 turrets takes some time)... Oh, and you can make the link in your first post clickable, since this forum allows some html tags. :)


EDIT: Due to the low battle limit, I signed up for another account. Nothing stopped me from doing so, and nothing stopped me from defeating my other ship. Heh. So much for battle limits. It also seems that someone has exploited the predictable behaviour patterns by putting all turrets on the right side, and armor on the left. Seems to work somewhat. How are new weapons unlocked bytheway? Might be nice to mention that somewhere.

There needs to be a timeout. I got stuck in an infinite loop with another ship. I let it go for several minutes on the fastest speed, but nothing happened. We just circled each other and no one got any closer. I had to retreat, but lost points because of it.

Thanks for the feedback, again.

It's funny how you can figure out all those tiny little possible problems that I partly realized when programming it. I hardly recognized them myself, but so many users can figure out problems soooo quickly!!!

I guess this is why main publishers tend to beta test on customers ;)

Great game, very addictive :)

I have a suggestion for the ship editor. I'd like to be able to check the fire frequency of turrets I've already placed. Right now I have no way of figuring out which of my turrets I need to upgrade, unless I delete them one by one and check how much money I get back. Since you only have a Buy and a Clear Tile mode right now, perhaps you could place some text on top of the tile, or show some extra info when I mouseover a specific tile?

Also, my current strategy involves picking an opponent that will earn me points, modify my ship to make sure I can beat him, and then beat him continually until I pass him on the highscore list. Maybe there needs to be something to discourage me from attacking the same opponent all the time, like receiving less points each time, or not allowing me to attack him for a certain time period because they have retreated for repairs?

Yeah, thanks.

Turret info when mouse over - great!
beating the same opponent over and over again - I realized this issue before, I think I gotta do something against!

thx

Armor costs are quite strange; heavy is the most cost efficient and medium is worst.
Heavy armor should either be actually heavier for inertia purposes or cost more to compensate for the lower inertia compared to the same hit points of protection in weaker armor; alternatively, all armor could have the same cost and mass per hitpoint (with more gradations, allowing the player to spend any armor budget well).

Active armor might be turned into an option for each armor class (e.g. $ 150 to 200 more than plain) rather than having a fixed strength, cheaply and meaningfully expanding the range of options; there might also be laser-reflecting armor.

Many battles end with protracted mutual circle strafing, by itself not a bad thing, but shots stay vastly behind the opponent ship; turrets should use feedback from past shots passing left or right of the target to correct their aim, rather than turning blindly.
Better turrets could turn faster, rather than having qualitatively different behaviour. Payload and turning speed of turrets could be separated (i.e. a $100 to 300 "enhanced tracking" option).

I confirm tunneling of shots through armor layers; it is very visible because presumably unreachable armor segments get hit.

Bullet movement is so random that stray shots can decide a match. Is it on purpose? Predictable aim would allow ship designs to account for where the enemy will shoot us and where we will shoot them.
Randomization of each battle could be ensured with a random starting orientation for the two ships.

AI might turn the ship to expose the most protected side to enemy fire, at least after the core is exposed and hit: it would be realistically non-stupid.
Evasive action might be a more advanced AI improvement.

Hitting covered tiles:
that problem has a history... I really don't know what's causing this bug. The time steps should not be responsible for this. I guess I just gotta spend hours - again - finding the answer to this question:(

We tuned the balancing a bit so far. Sure, armor could be balanced a little better here and there.

Almost everybody comes up with the idea "rotation of the ship in order to cover the damaged site" :) I guess I MUST implement this

thx, LorenzoGatti

How does your collision detection work? Doing swept collision detection on your bullets would be very easy if their collision primitive is a point. A swept point is a line segment, which shouldn't be difficult to collide with quads. Find every quad that the line segment intersects, then find every face that it intersects and the distance from the first point of the segment to the face. The face with the shortest distance belongs to the quad that got hit first.

Representing bullets as points is always problematic. Sometimes problems only show up if there are stutters in the FPS and there is a 2x or 3x than normal time between two frames. You could even cause these intentionally for bonus hits inside the armor. (Of course if you wanted to cheat, you could fire up wireshark and figure out the network interface and just make yourself win all the time.)