LOTE, Lord of the Elementals So the deadline finally arrived. A new entry just got added to the list this morning in case you didn't notice. You are welcome to try and critisize it! I was asked for a discussion thread when I was editing my entry, and since I didn't have one, I'm putting this thread here to collect your feedback and pretend it has been the discussion thread from the beginning. The game is about laying down your elementals on a octile-grid board to fight the opposite elementals. The game manual contains detailed information about the game. Here are some more info in case you are wondering: 1. no sound, no music - because I couldn't find an artist. 2. "options" in main menu is grayed - because it's definitely something a game should have, but I was out of time to design a interface for that. 3. only windowed mode, no full screen mode - yes, that's an epic fail of my architecture design that I've hated since I realized it. I didn't have time to correct that. 4. no networking - originally the engine is designed with more than two players playing online in mind. Later I realized I won't have enough time to do it, and I wasn't sure of my network programming skills, so I dropped networking altogether and got away with a max 2 player engine. If you happen to run into some features that seem to be designed for a multiplayer game, don't be surprised. 5. cannot change input profiles - again the engine is ready for it, but I didn't have time to do it. I entered this contest at a very late stage, so there are tons of unfinished tasks out there. I hardly finished testing the engine, so there may be bugs you'll encounter. Feel free to tell me! Also I didn't have time for any optimization. Although its graphics are not complicated, I'm still noticing some performance problems on my computer. And there are lots of things that can be improved: 1. Full screen mode 2. Variable particle rendering with user settings on particle number/density 3. Variable particle rendering to allow users to zoom further if they have strong graphics cards 4. Hall of Fame 5. Custom game: select elemental type 6. Custom game: multiplayer 7. Custom game: LAN/WAN online game 8. User input key mapping tool 9. Options: graphics settings, audio settings, etc 10. Music and SFX 11. AI scripting, Map event scripting 12. Optimization I hope I'll have time and energy to do all these in the future. [Edited by - fang on April 11, 2010 10:49:48 PM]

Thanks for your interests :)

That bug you said - it seems to me more like you initiated a spell that does not take effect instantly but requires you to provide further input. Basically two spells, Teleport ('T') and Flamewave ('J'), will ask where you'd like the spell to be cast after you pressed 'T' and 'J'. You set a spell cast position by moving a blinky cursor and then press Enter to confirm. What you see is probably the spell position selection phase and the spell cursor is out of view because you moved the fire lord away. howeve I should have designed the engine to stop the lord's movement once you enter the spell position selection interface.

I updated the spell key information in the game manual and re-uploaded the game. Thanks for that advice.

btw it's good to know you can easily beat the game :) i didn't do much balance tweaking for the campaign and was actually a little afraid it might have been too difficult...

I only tried it on one Vista machine and it worked. However all the computers I tried happened to have DirectX SDK installed, I don't know it's because of that... I'll look into it tonight.

Quote:Original post by Lesan
I tried the game on three more computers, each with Windows XP. Each has DirectX 9.0c installed, but each says "d3dx9_42.dll cannot be found" on launch. When I download the library and put it in the game's directory, it ends with an error similar to the Vista's one.

It's really a headache... I tried on another two computers, one successful, the other failed similarly to what you said. I'm guessing it's because that second computer doesn't have a good enough graphics card. This game requires support for shader model 3.0. I should have done the checking d3d caps codes...

Another thing that can cause it to crash is that the screen resolution width < 1000 or height < 600, for example if your Windows is running at a resolution of 960x600 or 640x480 and you run the game, it will crash. This is because this game is restricted to running at 1000x600... all from my stupid design.

Can't confirm if it is the lack of d3d caps that causes the game to crash though... what do you suggest me try?

A note on d3dx9_42.dll - my understanding is that this file comes with a specific version of DirectX 9.0c runtime (namely August 09 version), so lack of this file may indicate the Dx runtime versions on those three xp machines are too old? And maybe only copying that one file instead of installing a lastest version of Dx runtime is not working correctly? I don't have experience with this.

Quote:Original post by XDigital
Hi Fang,

I tried to launch LOTE, but failed, too.
Win VISTA 32bit, latest updates, latest graphics driver, Core2 Quad, GeForce 8800GT (Shader Model 3).

It seems that d3dx9_42.dll is needed for LOTE, which is not installed on my computer.

I also failed launching LOTE using Wine on LINUX. But there are other dependencies missing, which should not bother you, cause its not target platform.

Is it possible to compile LOTE with another D3D version?

Cheers
XDigital

Thanks for the info. I got the computer I'm using just a few months ago, and the only D3D SDK i have other than Aug 09 is Feb 2010. Anyway i'll download a previous version of SDK and compile it later today.

Are you sure you have the latest D3D runtime? Have you tried downloading d3dx9_42.dll from web? this is pretty much the first time I ever deploy my program on someone else's computer and although I didn't expect it to be easy, still it's so overwhelming to me... I'd appreciate every advice from you guys.