Saturday, June 13, 2009

Platformer roundup

I thought I'd check out how Super Tux development is going. I grabbed the lastest svn, compiled, and performance was so abominable that it took me a minute just to quit. It didn't help that it was placed half-off the screen (probably because I have a dual screen setup) Super Tux used to run fine. I'll hold my hands up and say I'm using an nvidia chipset and the open source driver without any significant OpenGL Acceleration, but it's a 2D game. I hope they work on some kind of OpenGL-less fallback.





Mole Invasion


One little-known but very promising platformer is Mole Invasion. The website is mainly in French, but there is a dedicated English page. The game language defaults to English. The current release is version 0.4, and the first thing you notice is the Mario-like logo; obviously the inspiration for the gameplay. The second thing you notice is the performance - it runs great. It's really smooth, the animations are good, the characters move well, and there's plenty of variation. A lot of the levels are obviously made with testing in mind, and some of the graphics are still a bit raw, but otherwise it was a fun experience.



Mole Invasion feels like it is headed in the direction that Super Tux should have been. I can't help but feel that Super Tux development has significantly lost it's way. The first few post-GotM releases of Super Tux were very promising, and very well received. That was now several years ago, and little has changed for the better, some questionable decisions (move to OpenGL), and new milestones seem on the other end of a development void.




The Legend of Edgar


There's a new Parallel Realities game out. The Legend of Edgar is a platform game with a fantasy setting. I had a go with 0.1, which is playable with a single player storyline. For me, it suffers from the same issues I have with Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid - the movement is just way too slow. It takes many minutes to navigate levels to the point that exploring a level is just tedious as you wait for your character to amble his way around.



Remember Frogatto is a old-style platformer starring an anthropomorphic frog, championed by the lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth? It celebrates pixels and thrives on cute blocky graphics. There are updated Frogatto builds for Windows and Mac from the weekend, although pious Linux users must compile from source. I couldn't compile it. I had previously, and it was looking promising! Anybody else managed to compile it on Fedora?




Widelands


The next version of Widelands - based on the classic RTS gameplay of Settlers II - is fast approaching. "Build 14" will come with GGZ support, making it much easier to find multiplayer opponents. Map auto-generation, lots of other small enhancements, more campaigns and a better beta testing phase should make this the Widelands release well worth playing.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Secret Maryo Chronicles is a great platformer, also.

MStoykov said...

I've managed to build it with too small changes. But I get really poor performance (3-5fps). I have hardly any 3d accelaration (I am with ati with R600 chip or something like that), but I don't see why this game should need a 3d .
http://fpaste.org/paste/15185
This is the link to the diff I created. I remove the -lSDLmain 'cause in http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum/index.php?topic=5204.0 savage says it is for Mac :). I am with Fedora 11 if it matters.

p.s. Thanks once again for the latest news and will be glad if you post a little bit more :-D

archl said...

http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=47969

Anyone checked this out? It is 3d shooting game against air raids.

No license specified. But the sourcecode avaible in author's personal page.

3D Graphics Engine - OGRE 3D v1.6.1 (http://www.ogre3d.org)
Terrain Editor - ArtifaxTerra 3D (http://www.artifexterra3d.com/)
Particle Effects - Particle Universe v1.0, OGRE plugin (http://www.fxpression.com/)
Clouds rendering - Caelum v0.4, OGRE plugin
Foliage - Paged Geometry v1.05, OGRE plugin
Terrain engine - ETM v2.3.1, OGRE plugin
Sounds - FMOD and SoundManager class from the OGRE wiki (http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/FMOD_SoundManager)
MySQL connection - MySQL++ v3.0.8 (http://tangentsoft.net/mysql++/)

3D Assets

Most of the 3D assets that comes with the game are from the OGRE SDK. Sound effects that I use came from freesound.org.


http://www.programmingmind.com/base-command-behind-scene

KIAaze said...

http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=47969 looks interesting. Thanks for the link. :)

typo: "should make this Widelands release well worth playing."

P.S: I never had problems with the movement speed in Metal Blob Solid. However, in Legend of Edgar, it did bother me. Probably because the levels are still pretty empty and there's not as much action as in Metal Blob Solid (yet).

Anonymous said...

Froggato wouldn't compile for me until I made a small change, here's the diff:

Index: src/background.hpp
===================================================================
--- src/background.hpp (revision 790)
+++ src/background.hpp (working copy)
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@

#include "boost/shared_ptr.hpp"

+#define GL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES
#include "SDL.h"

#include "texture.hpp"

Anonymous said...

am i the only one that noticed this? :

the one picture for mole invasion has a baddie that looks almost exactly like the one baddie from super tux.

that's interesting.

(the snowball with an aviator hat)

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