Really? Hmm, did you have the rocket launcher? The default weapon can't fire rockets, you have to find the rocket launcher (there are a few in each level, sometimes they are hidden). If you had the launcher and it still didnt work try remapping the key in the options screen. You just have to click on the action in the list you want to remap, then hit the key you want to remap it to. You can bring up this screen in-game by hitting escape.

Oh, oh. I might have picked up rockets, but not the launcher.

Wow man, actually I'm surprised you were able to run it ok on those specs. We tested on a 1.1 Athlon with a GF2MX and it was ok, but I figured anything lower would chug. Nice!

We have noticed sound issues with OpenAL on some older cards and in Win98. That's really too bad cause the music and sound was a good portion of our entry... o well.

The coding was actually a hell of a lot more than just dropping animations in, (not to mention having 2 programmers trying to learn how to model and animate in just a few months is a project in itself). We basically had to do an overhaul of many parts of Torque to get it to do what we wanted. Especially with the buggy and tank handling and the turret cam on the tank. We basically spent the first 2-3 months working in the engine and creating the scripts we would need, then spent the last month and a half creating the levels and finishing up the content.

To anyone interested in ramping up their coding skills I would definitely recommend grabbing an engine like Torque where you can get the source-code and get your hands dirty. It took awhile to get used to, especially how to make new objects and not break the client/server console object model they have. And I'm sure there are many other choices besides Torque for this too, I'm just recommending what I know.

Our biggest complaints about the engine were issues with physics and collision and the OpenAL implementation. There just wasnt enough time to rewrite either of these and still get a game out with just 2 of us coding. Our next goal now that the contest is over is a complete overhaul of the audio subsystem and implementing the newer OpenAL 1.1 specs.

Anyway, Thanks for the comments and hopefully you'll get the chance to play it with sounds eventually.

Just out of curiousity, what OS and soundcard are you running on?

And I'd like to mention a special thanks to Klora Jardi for the hard work on our manual. It makes the rest of our game look like programmer art:)

[Edited by - Selsesstissan on November 8, 2005 9:59:41 AM]

I would say that out of the few entries that I have played, Operation Dog Tag has been my favorite. It actually had a substantial amount of gameplay, and had some nice little polishes, like the well done user manual. At some points it almost felt like serious sam, especially when mowing down a group of pirates.

Quote:Original post by d000hg
I was pleasantly suprised to get this running on my GF2MX based Duron750 system. I selected 640x480 and it was pretty fluid, and I didn't notice any jaggies which left me wondering how that is the case?

Wow cool! That's definitely the lowest specs we've heard about our game running on!

Quote:Original post by d000hg
However I've no idea how it'll score- I don't know how much more the coding is than 'drop some animations into a 3D world in Ogre', and I don't know how much the judging cares about amount of coding done for the entry. But I'd expect this to make top-10.

Oh if only it were that easy[smile]... We actually ended up doing alot more engine programming on this project than we had anticipated, most of it fixing Torque bugs, and adding features we needed the engine to have, like the camera code for the tank. I'd definitely recommend Torque for making games, but only to someone who has a strong background in programming and basic understanding of 3d math.

Quote:Original post by d000hg
Only complaint - no sound or music on my system, which has never had sound problems before. Perhaps it's an OpenAL issue?

Yep, I think it's OpenAL. We've had some people report issues with certain sound cards. It's too bad, because we put alot of work and money(around $700 US) into the sounds in the game. Which sound card / driver do you have so we can check into it?

Anyway, thanks for playing, and thanks for the comments!

Quote:Original post by d000hg
Oh it wasn't meant to sound derogatory - just wasn't sure what the engine did already.

My system has Win2K, DX9.0c and I don't know what the soundcard is. It is a separate card, not onboard sound, but it is about 5 years old. However like I said I've not come across other games that didn't like it since sound cards are pretty simple compared to GPUs!

Oh, sorry I misunderstood the comment. The engine does handle a ton of stuff out of the box, but in a generic way. And there were many bugs to fix.

The card wouldnt happen to be a Aureal vortex or vortex2 chip would it? I know there are issues with those chips for OpenAL. Other than that I'm not sure. Although to be honest, I've encountered many times that when a game crashes to desktop its actually an issue with the sound driver implementation.

It could also have to do with an existing OpenAL driver installed on your system that isnt compatible with the version we used... who knows. If I ever figure it out I'll let you know.

Quote:Original post by Moe
I would say that out of the few entries that I have played, Operation Dog Tag has been my favorite. It actually had a substantial amount of gameplay, and had some nice little polishes, like the well done user manual. At some points it almost felt like serious sam, especially when mowing down a group of pirates.

Hey thanks Moe! We were striving to get the feel of mowing down tons of enemies. I actually would have put even more in but it would have been too much for the min specs of the contest with our current models.

Has anyone tried playing multiplayer yet?

Quote:Original post by d000hg
I've not been able to find what exactly my card is in the past -the drivers probably ahven't ever been updated because without a decent internet connection I can't let it go and look for one.
I'll try again to find the chipset - if I can find newer drivers that fix it then it's not your problem (although why OpenAL should have a problem I don't know)!
Does the game produce any kind of error log so we could see what exactly is failing - as long as I don't have to go through a 90Mb download again I could run a debug/special .exe that has some output...

We did have Logging but I disabled it for the contest version. Although even the logs we did have wouldnt be helpful for openAL debugging, thats one of the big TODO's on our upcoming overhaul:) It seems in the current version of Torque there isnt much error checking in the audio framework going on, so I'm in the process of adding that.

If you do find out the chipset and let us know that would help a ton. What I can do if you're willing to help us out is add logging info to a new .exe build and send you the link to get it. It would just be the exe so would only be a few megs. I dont think I'll have time to mess with it much until the end of this week/beginning of next tho.

Anyway, thanks man!