I am a big fan of Populous - the Beginning. Seeing this fangame brings back memories, certainly. I loved the semi-3D style of that game. I would love to see a similar style in this fangame. I am not satisfied with the current status, but I see that this project has potential. Anyway, here are my findings.
1. Cannot choose installation folder in the custom installer ('...' button)
2. In the installer downloader, a weird % at the end of the filename.
3. The forum message box is bugged. It offsets the lines while typing...
4. Rotating the camera seems unnatural and buggy. Use the camera itself as center instead of where it points to.
5. Do not limit the camera into the world coordinates. The players wants freedom when moving his view.
6. Add a button to exit out of the menu when pressing ESC in-game.
7. There are times when the camera is not rotate-able or movable. Players always have to be able to move the camera.
8. Pressing ESC does not pause the game.
9. The HUD is misaligned top left and you can look through it.
10. Ingame menu does not full work. (cannot click Options, Restart Level).
11. Loading a savegame crashes the application.
Now comes some general feedback.
1. Gosh, the download takes long. Have you optimized the resources properly? How about compressing the download using zlib?
2. Use some shaders to improve the looks of this game. The shading style currently lacks the Populous factor. The game looks too bright and too much like (imho) Facebook games.
3. Ask around the Populous community to create artwork for you. You cannot do this big project all yourself. The site needs a bigger Populous factor, too.
4. The shadows in the game menu make the text unreadable.
5. Clicking once in the menu triggers multiple mouse clicks... It makes selecting options very hard.
6. Add an option for frame-limiting.
7. Add an option to turn off weather effects..
8. The far-clip is way too big. It makes the world seem very empty and isolated.
9. Use an internal mouse representation: the in-game mouse hud lags.
10. Moving the camera is annoying. If you look close to a mountain it rotates nearly circling itself. If you look at a ground it makes a big circle. This is too irregular.
11. Scrolling into the terrain is too slow. Make it more flow-y.
12. The HUD icons are too small.
13. Cool models. They look good if you close-up, but in regular gameplay you do not wanna close-up.
14. The HUD is confusing. I as a Populous 3 fan can recognize some functionality through re-used design, but not much from that. Add some hover-over information to every element with a description. How would I know that clicking on the shaman icon activates the spell menu?
15. Casting spells needs more feedback. I cannot know when my click on the icon was successful otherwise. It it confusing.
16. Please make it look less like "The Sims"...
17. On my computer I have only max 30 FPS. This is ridiculous.
Please take this project seriously. I would love to have a modern Populous game. Although I wonder how you can use the official name for this game ^^ I wish I could help myself with this, but I am occupied with private life and my own projects. You should look out in the fan community for enthusiasts that are willing to work on this project with you.
Hint: make it open-source (if not already?)
Greetings,
Martin
alphawarrior
Posted: 09 Feb 2014 05:19 pm
More things I found.
Bugs:
- cannot disable water rendering in editor
- rotating the camera downwards extending its tilt point makes it face straight up
- selection rectangle is invisible if over water
- you can cast landbridge on water, should not be possible
- sometimes water is z-fighting with the terrain
- spells stay across worlds (load count, loading bar and loading selection)
- on world 3, huge issues with trying to move units (depending on camera angle, very bad a poptb style flat view)
General Advice:
- using middle mouse button, make it rotatable completely (not just up or down)
- add a "Are you sure?" dialog to quit level button
- use mesh shading to give tribes a BIG COLOR TINT on building roof so players know who IS ENEMY or FRIEND
- add an option to disable water reflections
- make the selection rectangle independant from the ground terrain (HUD overlay and calculate entity encapsulation using matrix transformation)
- add sky effects on spell casting (highlight of pop tb)
- maybe add option to options menu (pause on menu)
- maybe add option to options menu (outline game units in tribe color)
- add slider to options menu: adjust overlay time (give it reasonable range)
- add brightness adjustion settings to options menu (unit brightness, terrain brightness, sky brightness)
- every building looks so brown
- add numpad camera navigation from poptb
alphawarrior
Posted: 09 Feb 2014 05:40 pm
And more.
Bugs:
- the building rotation arrow twists around when rotating the camera and at some angles is unreadable
- at some camera angles, lighting mesh is z-fighting with original model (flickering)
- on level 9, if zooming in and moving around, world changes brightness depending on camera rotation (very weird, sectorial)
General Advice:
- the delay between spacebar building rotation is too big
- if spell is selected, color the terrain in the radius in tribe color so player knows exactly where he can cast
- fix GUI obstruction (if mouse on GUI, do not trigger event for world)
- implement GUI hover management, so click only triggers top-most GUI element
- make the wild people die after a period of time and not come back (like in poptb)
- use the tribes color for the tower lighting instead of red default (marking your territory! guiding the player!)
- make the terrain underneath the water be visible (for like 2 units, make ground fade out to reflection)
- add option to scale particle effect quality (disabled, low, medium, high)
- make GUI fade in when it appears and fade out when clicking it away
- make screen fade to black very quick when dialog box appears ingame (behind it)
- add more intuitive features (move to shaman on right-click top right symbol)
- make the level timer bigger, give it some black backgrounds
alphawarrior
Posted: 09 Feb 2014 05:43 pm
If you need any advanced debugging data and provide a documentation and explanation for it, I am willing to give it to you (stack trace, memory snapshot, etc). Hit me up.
alphawarrior
Posted: 09 Feb 2014 06:20 pm
Even more.
Bugs:
- in this forum, I cannot edit my posts.
- in this forum, the bot answers sometimes bug out (icon for invisibility not showing)
- in this forum, not all passwords are accepted (too complex ones always lead to 'Wrong password!' on login)
- big worlds lag very much in comparison to small worlds. add proper occlusion and frustum checking to fix that.
- fireplace lighting flashes around a lot
General Advice:
- add an right-click/hover notion to enemy building (* tribe's building like in poptb)
- add hover and pressed-down images to GUI buttons (circled if hover, darker tint if pressed down, glowing text)
- weather effects lag the game a lot
- add Lua scripting support :p
- add a simple tutorial (voice + text)
- increase the speed of conversion spell (too slow!!)
- increase the speed of braves (also their animation)
- add game speed setting to options menu + implement game speed
- right click GUI for buildings is too complicated
- add right click GUI scale slider to options menu + implement GUI scaling
- always show building info if recruiting unit in it
- show unit info on right click on it (health, unit type, like in poptb)
- make point of interrests glow (dragon statue, totems, pray heads)
- add option to disable foliage rendering
- the firewarrior trail is too long, make it shorter (maybe depending on fx quality setting)
- holding down right mouse button triggers many hover windows?
- make the reincarnation circle of shamans glow
- make shadows fade in when sun rises instead of suddenly popping in
- swarm effect blends in with other effects too much, make it more distinguishable, make it move around the map like in poptb
- add features of modern strategy games (double click on unit selects all of same type in area, etc)
- make buildings glow if mouse is hovering over them (like in poptb)
- hire somebody who can design a proper AI (make it smart, build own haven, build big village, expand to other islands, anticipate enemy move, calculate attack depending on units, etc)
Questions:
- what is the point of lamp posts and how do I remove them once placed?
- what does the weather do? snow, rain?
King Warg
Posted: 10 Feb 2014 12:43 pm
u mad bro?
>_> oh boy..
Quote:
Questions:
- what is the point of lamp posts and how do I remove them once placed?
- what does the weather do? snow, rain?
the lamp posts.. make light, they are a new thing and there isn't a way to remove them yet.
the rain makes trees grow faster if it rains over them.
Quote:
- hire somebody who can design a proper AI (make it smart, build own haven, build big village, expand to other islands, anticipate enemy move, calculate attack depending on units, etc)
probably not gonna happen xD
alphawarrior
Posted: 11 Feb 2014 01:56 pm
Quote:
>_> oh boy..
Quote:
Questions:
- what is the point of lamp posts and how do I remove them once placed?
- what does the weather do? snow, rain?
the lamp posts.. make light, they are a new thing and there isn't a way to remove them yet.
the rain makes trees grow faster if it rains over them.
Quote:
- hire somebody who can design a proper AI (make it smart, build own haven, build big village, expand to other islands, anticipate enemy move, calculate attack depending on units, etc)
probably not gonna happen xD
Nice to see your response :) I will follow your progress. Can you report back when you fixed issues of my list? When you have worked on them, I am sure poptc will become a good experience.
DaysofKnight
Posted: 21 Jun 2015 07:26 pm
I'm going to use alphawarrior's forum setup.
Bugs
-Own followers try to return to your reincarnation site while trying to fight enemy followers.
-Some followers (Friendly and enemy) don't appear on the screen.
-Not all light sources ("Lamp Posts") work when using multiple.
-AI path finding (Everyone's path finding) is a little bad, many followers went around my entire settlement to get to something five feet away.
-More path finding issues involving training huts. Sometimes they will just not enter unless you tell them to again.
-Followers don't properly stand in the same place as other followers (Such as in P:TB where if 2 - 6 were standing in the same place they'd form a ring. That isn't the case in this one, they just stack on top of each other which makes it hard to tell how many are actually there.
Advice
-Perhaps lower the enemy attack frequency.
-The buildings look a little bland to me. (Nice work with the particle effects on Firewarriors and certain spells)
-Missing key commands from P:TB, such as "H" to move the camera to the reincarnation site, "G" to make your followers guard your Shaman, Ctrl/Shift (Can't remember which one) to place more than on building or use a spell more than once.
-Shaman death sounds are the same as follower death sounds
King Warg
Posted: 30 Jul 2015 11:19 pm
u mad bro?
most of these things are already known or just unimplemented parts..
alphawarrior
