Viridian Games

The professional blog of Anthony Salter, game programmer.

Planitia Update 34: Spit and Polish and Bailing Wire

All right, a new version of Planitia is now available. This version features:

* Images are now front-loaded, eliminating the pause when creating new units.

* Loading screen lets you know that the game has not locked up on startup!

* Icons are now the correct color, have the correct icons, and even have tooltips!

* Walkers now have a “farming” animation.

* The bug where units would occasionally walk backwards has been fixed.

* General and Golem units now have footstep sounds.

* Music! The music is “Overture” by Julia Ecklar, and I got it from Podsafe Audio.

Even if you don’t feel like playing it, if you could just download it and tell me what your initial impression of the game is – especially if you’ve not tried it before – I’d be very grateful.

13 comments

13 Comments so far

  1. Mike M December 31st, 2008 6:16 am

    After the ‘one moment please’ thing I just get the (lovely) tinkling music and a blank screen.

  2. Irwin1138 December 31st, 2008 6:17 am

    Played it a little, and it crashed 8(
    But it looks much more mature than the version I played last, with music, animation and stuff.

  3. Dan Cardin December 31st, 2008 8:48 am

    After a few minutes it crashed, but from what i could tell, im really liking the tooltips and the music. I shad that weird problem where i cant stop the camera and it flys in whatever direction i press. I would like to see being able to move troops through the minimap and an icon for the exe :P .

  4. Viridian December 31st, 2008 8:50 am

    No, no, no! You’re not supposed to tell me about PROBLEMS you have with it, you’re supposed to tell me about how AWESOME it is now!

    Mike M: Haven’t seen that particular problem before…not sure right now what it could be.

    Irwin: I thought I had gotten rid of pretty much all the crashers…can you tell me what exactly you were doing when it crashed?

  5. Eli December 31st, 2008 10:32 am

    So cool that you are using music from Julia’s album in your game!

    Sorry for any ambiguity in the podsafe audio credits — I’ve corrected them to be clearer that the song was actually written by a composer named Michael Moricz. So just wanted to let you know as well as a courtesy.

    (You’re welcome to a comp digital download of the rest of the album, by the way, if you want some music to hack with. Just shoot me an e-mail.)

  6. Kyle December 31st, 2008 12:15 pm

    Just wanted to let you know that I tried Planitia. I never tried it before for some reason so i didn’t know what to expect. It was pretty fun. I had it crash once about 5 minutes in on my first attempt while I was leveling terrain I think. Which the game does very well I might add.

    It was very easy to play and didn’t need any real explanation. I figured it out (Except Armageddon) pretty quickly. I tried all the god powers and it ran very smoothly after that first hiccup.

    It is very AWESOME! Oh (and I’m sure you’ve already noticed but) Bioware Austin is hiring a gameplay programmer. Though they are owned by EA now so that is kinda like signing over your soul…

  7. lubos January 1st, 2009 4:17 am

    I pretty much like it! But theres one annoying thing, sometimes the camera keeps moving even if I already released all the keys. And in fullscreen, could you make the panel position independant of resolution?;)

  8. Mike M January 1st, 2009 5:23 am

    Well I’ve got it running (in Vista) by going setting the compatibility mode to XP AND ticking ‘Disable display scaling on high DPI settings’.

    Lovely animations and all that, but the game crashes when I make a Golem.

  9. Enno January 1st, 2009 5:27 am

    Tried it a little, and it crashed when I tried using the golem.

    If you’re putting out betas like this, you might want to add a callstack/minidump gathering facility. In case you have a mapfile or another way of resolving it, here’s the stacktrace of the crash:

    Planitia.exe!0042fe16()
    [Frames below may be incorrect and/or missing, no symbols loaded for Planitia.exe]
    Planitia.exe!00408e87()
    Planitia.exe!0042b820()
    Planitia.exe!004589ba()

  10. Irwin1138 January 1st, 2009 6:13 am

    Viridian:
    The last thing I was doing is getting rid of red invaders in my land. Right after the “village was destroyed” or something it crashed.
    But nevertheless the game is awesome :)

  11. Viridian January 1st, 2009 4:52 pm

    Okay, golem crash has been fixed. New version will go up tomorrow.

  12. Bobby Thurman January 1st, 2009 10:32 pm

    Very cool Game Anthony! It took me about 2 minutes to figure out what was going on, but it was fun after that.

  13. Marko January 5th, 2009 4:03 am

    I still have performance problems with this. At the beginning everything works fine, after a while frame rate drops to 6 fps and everything gets really sluggish.

Leave a reply

Powered by WP Hashcash