Hiya,

As my post count no doubt indicates, I'm new to this forum and I couldn't think of a better way of introducing myself than pimping a screenshot from my new game.

It says here that IMG codes are disabled, so the screeny is located here :

http://members.aol.com/sybixsus/tennis2.jpg


I have a little more tweaking to do, and I'll probably root around for more bugs too. I hope to have the beta version completed fairly soon, at which time I will be releasing a feature-limited demo to help me gauge performance on low spec machines, and get some feedback on the gameplay, etc. Hopefully there won't be any bugs left, but if there are, I'll need to know about them so I can fix it all in the final version.

I have been approached by a couple of people interested in publishing it, but nothing is definite yet, so if anyone has any thoughts or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Hope ya like the screeny, thanks for listening ;)

Hey there Sybixsus! I see you added the 3d people and object shadows after all :) - lookin' good.

One thing that seems odd to me, looking at the player shadows, is that they are both stretching away from the net, as if the light source was in the middle of the screen... call me mr nitpick...

Ah, Hey Anthony,

Yep, I added the object shadows and the 3d crowd. I'm currently tweaking the texture for the 3d crowd. It's kinda crowded fitting 12 people on a single 256x256 texture, but I'll see if I can improve it a little.

In the old screenshot, I was using 2 shadowcasting lightsources, one at each end of the court. I decided to get more performance I would just use one shadowcasting lightsource, which is above the centre of the court, so the shadows do indeed point in different directions. All four stadia in the tournament are technically indoor, so it isn't a sun light.

As a by product, the shadows are a little lighter, which I like, and two shadows being cast on the ball did make it a little difficult to judge the height of the ball on occasions. The three less textures to render should give me a healthy speedboost too, hopefully enough to make up for the extra poly's in the 3d crowd. Thanks to a little clever vertex manipulation I've managed to get the entire 3d crowd down to 12,500 poly's, only half of which are shown at any given time, so I think I'm probably equal or even ahead on performance.

There is an option to enable the old 2d crowd for those who prefer it or need it, so I've lost nothing.

If it plays even half as good as it looks, very nice work :) Looking forward to trying demo.