Ok, in the interests of "will it run at all" I would like you to try my space shooter, Jupiter Grid.

I would suggest 1ghz + Geforce 2 as a recommended system. Sorry, but the download is currently at 17mb right now.

Any suggestions welcome. Please tell me about the catastrophic problems also.

http://arrowint.fileburst.com/jgrid.exe

WreckerOne
http://www.arrowhd.com

I didn't download it because it's 3 AM and I'm going to sleep, but I wanted to ask something out of curiosity... Most shareware companies around here seem to target very low-end computers (a lot of the games are even made to work on DirectX 5) and attempt to have such a small download file as possible, but not this one... This game requires 1 GHz, a GeForce 2 and the download file is 16 MB, which is quite high in comparison.

Now, I'm not bothered by this since I download files of that size all the time (and my computer is "up to it"), so the question I wanted to ask is; do you believe these high requirements will have a negative effect on your sales, or do you think that the extra eye candy and visuals will make your game more attractive?

It looks nice. The bump mapping on the rocks is fairly convincing.

However, your control configurator doesn't prevent conflicts. In fact, you have q mapped to two actions with your default config. Also, although thrust left and right simply don't do anything. And I really really wanted them to.

Also the rock field was a little too boring for me. You don't really even get to upgrade your ship at all.

The installer was simple and worked well.

I didnt have time to check it out completely but what I played was fun. I also wanted to let you know that your game isn't dvorak keyboard compatible which is slightly annoying.

Looks nice. Handled alt-tab fine. The help text should give the basic controls. Not that they were hard to figure out - but it would save an initial few seconds of confusion. It was fun shooting ships - it was boring shooting rocks. That first level with just rocks tried my patience. Maybe do something to make it go faster. I don't seem to get money from mining only from shooting pirates and the occasional powerup - why should I have to shoot the rocks?

Oh and the text in had occasional artifacts. Lowercase 'k' in particular. Looked like the bug the CD3DFont class that shipped with the DX SDK had where it didn't provide enough spacing between letters and some pixels would 'bleed' onto adjacent letters.

After a few times of hitting escape to go to the menu and F1 to open help it got messed up somehow. F1 wouldn't bring up help and the menu didn't seem to work right either. Hitting ESC a few times cleared it up. Maybe just a fluke.

Overall it looks really good.

Jack

ok I'm going to be pretty picky here, but it's a cool looking game and it could be good :)). You need some on screen instructions, like when you get enough energy something flashes because I didn't read the instructions (NOONE does ;)) and I thought to clear the level you just had to blow up all the rocks, which was extremly tedious. I only did it to get to the next level but it crashed :) (in fact it reset my whole computer, so it might be my machine). It crashed just as I clicked 'next level' btw. It NEEDS those strafe thrust keys to work as I found the general ship physics annoying without them (you should maybe default to wasd being fwd/back/strafe l/r and the arrows/mouse being turn, the mouse movement could do with a smoothing option). The shooting sound was a bit pissy. Maybe you could have a powerup version on the right mouse button that stored the litttle shots into one big fat one. A sound for the thrust and rocks splitting was needed. Basically it needs more 'punch'. A big shot going off should knock the ship back and shake the screen a little. An ememy ship should appear on the first level. In fact most shareware I've played makes the first level majorly boring and only introduces the interesting bits later. This is bad since people only give small games a tiny play at first and then uninstall it.. I do anyway :D
btw if your game does have anything i've mentioned then it's no use if I couldn't be bothered passing the first level. Don't get me wrong, if you work on it, it could be really cool.

btw My machine is an AMD 1700+ with GeForce 4 128meg (not MX), 256meg 'o ram and XP. I played it in 1600x1200x32bit and it was dead smooth, so that's cool

Ran smoothly on P4 1700 Geforce 5200 but I ended up with horrible choppy music (on a SB Live 5.1)...

I'd definately agree about the rocks... you don't want potential customers shooting rocks for 10 mins - they'll soon move onto something else.
Then it crashed - same as above - locked the entire PC

Since your aiming for the higher end audience, I'd suggest putting more action and difficulty into the game.

I personally think aiming at these high specs is a complete waste of time though. Perhaps there will be more room for these type of games in the future.. who nows?

I'm doing a space dogfight game, so it interested me to see the comments about specs.

I'm aiming for an online audience which means that whilst I'm concerned about download size, I would rather sacrifice downloads for visual quality.

As for my own specs, I aim to work on TNT2 and above, but would rather have a Radeon 9800 pro :))

I'll give some comments once Ive downloaded it.

Phil.

Thanks for all the comments, they are greatly appreciated.

Specs:

1ghz +Geforce 2 is only a suggestion because thats the lowest end machine I can find right now. As far as download size, I'm lowering the bitrate of the ogg files to around 64kbps. I also need a better scheme for compressing textures. Once this is done, it may be around 8-10mb or so.

I don't think high end specs or file size will hurt because theres already 40 mil broadband users and that number will only go up over the next couple years. 1ghz + Geforce2 was high end back in 2000, but not now. Most PCs can handle this game easily.

Rebooting bugs:

Nooooo... This is not good. I don't think there's even a way of finding the cause of these bugs without logging every single function call. I was having similar problems a few months ago and the problem was excess heat because I didn't have a case fan. It could also be some bad parameters causing the video drivers to crash.

Gameplay:

I completely agree that shooting rocks is boring. I think I'm going to redo the advancement to be based on destroying a certain pattern of ships per zone. I'm going to couple that with different AI schemes and difficulty levels to mix it up a bit.

The rock parts ARE a dull :) but thats already been said.

I think overall the game needs a lot more polish. I like the mechanical menu system, it works fine for the type of game, although I'd expect modern PC games to also use a mouse for selection.

In game, it uses all sorts of technology, like shaders, but i really cant see where. If youre going to require this kind of technology, then I'd suggest getting some spaceships modelled professionally.

The background skybox could also look a lot better, for some reason it just looks big and blurry and not particularly nice looking, it'd be better IMHO if you actually just did a black clear screen and then plotted some stars in the background randomly.

As far as the gameplay, its reminding me of an old vector game called millenium. I must admit that I didnt give it much of a trail though because it seemed mostly about blowing up rocks. That'd most likely be your potential customers first reaction too.

Keep at it! its got potential.

Phil.

I game the game a long trial because I was trying not to go to bed at the time... about 30 minutes. I had no crashes, but my game was interrupted by my hardware monitor telling me my power supply was under voltage. Apparently, your game pulls a lot of power. I guess that's why you were overheating.

P4 2Ghz, GF4 Ti4200. Win 2000.