I've taken on board comments that were made about Torpedo and have modified the following:
Added a better interface to story mode - buttons etc
The game now stops when you have used all available bombs
The hiscore interface has been improved - you can also view online hiscores
Cleaned up some issues, changed to more viewable mouse cursor
Minor gameplay revisions
A few more nag screen occurences.

The new demo is up at the same place, http://www.opticalrealities.com/torpdemo.exe

I would greatly appreciate it if people could offer comments and suggestions - especially those that offered them originally.

I would put this in another post, but I'd rather not look like I'm spamming the forum... basically I'm having problems with alt-tab and directx7.

Am I right in thinking that when the game loses focus, you lose all your surfaces which you bring back with RestoreAllSurfaces()?
It doesn't seem to be working for Torpedo on some computers... I'm starting to think that it may be still going through the gameloop and attempting to write to video memory when it doesn't have focus but I am not sure. Can anybody help me/give suggestions as to I what I might be doing wrong?

You restore surfaces, but not content of surfaces. If they are in the system memory, it is ok, but if they are in video memory, you are in trouble.

Possible solution is to copy surfaces from video memory to system memory when you lose focus, and copy them back when you get focus back.

Ran wonderfully...

Great game there. Almost considering getting it ;)

Suggestion...you have to put in Buy Now buttons...opticalrealities.com isnt exactly the easiest to remember for the customer...

Alex

Sirrus, regarding buy now buttons, do you mean specifically on the nag screen or scattered more often about the place?

Nag screen specifically.

It says Buy Now $14.95...but I cant click it....

Need quicker access to buying screen.

"Component 'MSINET.OCX' or one of its dependencies is not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid"

Torpedo 1.0 worked correctly.

Lizardman, it should be fixed now if you care to redownload

Okay, works now :) It's definitely an improvement. One thing that particularly bugged me was the lack of a target score display in the actual game. I had a tendancy to click through the level start screens and would end up playing the level and not knowing how close I am to winning. Even when I did read the level start screen I still had a tendancy to forget the number. Also there's the usual suggestion that you should improve the graphics a bit. Changing the scenery is good but the red water shouldn't have that gradiated banding since real water of any color simply doesn't look like that. A solid fill like in the blue water would be better.

Hope that helps, fun game :)

hmm, it looks like we had some temporary problems with the download there...

try it again if you tried to download the demo and experienced problems, same link: http://www.opticalrealities.com/torpdemo.exe

I don't like how the target below the ship changes its color when in the right position to hit a submarine - it makes much of the gameplay useless. I'd suggest that bombs explode with a blast radius - this way the player would not only try to hit subs, but would try to hit them when they are closest together so more are destroyed in a single hit. In fact, I think it would be a good idea (and a realistic one too - not that it matters) if the bombs dropped by the sub would be depth charges: the player moves the mouse - and the target - all over the board - the y component gives the depth at which the bombs explode. Combined with the blast radius, this could create some interesting play. The subs could also explode with a certain blast radius - sometimes leading to chain reactions.

pluses:

very cute graphics.

negatives:

the front end user interface needs major work. it is really confusing.

after a while, i get tired of pressing the buttons on the mouse. maybe auto fire option would help? or if i am pressing down, it continues to fire?

needs more variety in levels. while enjoyable, i don't have any incentive to purchase it.

I love games like this, I remember them in the arcades, I'd like to play them again, but to be 100% honest, I'm put off downlaoding (and buying) it by the graphics.
Many people probably arewnt so bothered, but I lvoe really detailed hi-res graphics rather than the 'cute' look.
Just my opinion, hope it does well.

I'm getting a "page cannot be displayed" from the download link and "cannot find server" from the homepage. Do you have a bandwidth cap by any chance?

Nope, none that I'd worry about - unfortunately it looks like someone is attacking the server I'm on...

You should probably consider switching web hosts then.. I'm on United Hosting, it's pretty good, no downtime so far, easy to manage and quite cheap.. but there are of course other hosts out there, do your research :)