We Ride the Lines
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Revision 10.

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Diotoxin
mhenr18
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Post by mhenr18 Thu Jan 30, 2014 9:09 am

Okay so I was going to keep this a secret until I could just release it but I can't handle my excitement as things are actually coming together. Like, we're actually going to have a new version of LR and it's not unsubstantiated hype that won't go anywhere.

So, let's be honest. Unleashed was a series of starts, with some being quite good. However, I made the mistake of starting fresh. It was just becoming this monster of a project that had so much to do that I ended up hardly doing anything.
Now that I have much less time on my hands these days, I've been forced to actually be creative about how I do things as I really want to do something cool with LR.

This leads me to my current project. I've started with LibCinder, a native framework that lets me build cross-platform OpenGL apps and is widely considered to be the high-performance alternative to Flash for creative coding. I've then taken advantage of an awesome "feature" of ActionScript 2: AS2 is derived from ECMAScript, which is the same standard that JavaScript's built on. This means it's trivial to port the existing AS2 codebase to JS - in fact all 3000 lines of the main source file ran without change. There were just a few small-ish changes that I had to make to some external files, but 95% of the existing codebase of 6.y.whateverthehellitis was "ported" via copy and paste. To run this codebase I'm using V8, Google's high performance JavaScript engine (which is used in Chrome).

Now, JavaScript is part of the Web world, but this JavaScript doesn't touch anything related to the web. It's still referring to all of the Flash classes and functions (the building blocks that the original was built with), so for the last week or so I've been recreating that stuff. The awesome part about V8 is that I can create a "bridge" between my high-speed native code that does graphics/UI/window stuff and the JavaScript code, so the Flash recreation is all done with native code. This also means that I can take just the bits that need the speed (like rendering) and make them 100% native, but keep the rest as-is.

In essence, what I've done is build a mini Flash Player tailored to LR. Because I have full control over it, the stuff that needs to be fast can be made fast via native code. The rest (so, simulation & UI) can stay as is, and keep all existing bugs and quirks.

With time I'll be adding all of the stuff I've demoed over the past couple of years to this thing and it will gradually become Unleashed.
But for now, it's Beta 2, revision 10.

I'll be posting screenshots, videos & download links in the next week or so as I get more and more functional (it's pretty scrappy at the moment) - I did say I couldn't wait to talk about this!

(oh and another benefit? keeping most of it in JS means people like kevans can play with the JS code and add their own stuff without worrying about different platforms and that junk. In fact, most of kevan's code would run as-is with a simple copy & paste)

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Post by Diotoxin Thu Jan 30, 2014 9:25 am

yes lads
hypehypehypehypehypehypehype
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Post by -Nexus- Thu Jan 30, 2014 9:58 am

Inverted Onoz 
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Post by Hedgehogs4Me Thu Jan 30, 2014 11:16 am

What I took away from this:

East Coast Music Award script?!

Is this still part of the whole InXile partnership thingamajig that you had? Will they own all the IP rights and such? If so, is there any reason to believe that they might market it aggressively or allow others to do so? Some people have talked about the mythical time of "when Unleashed comes out" as when LR will become big again - do you think there's any potential at all for that to happen?
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Post by mhenr18 Thu Jan 30, 2014 11:35 pm


East Coast Music Award script?!

Hah.


Is this still part of the whole InXile partnership thingamajig that you had? Will they own all the IP rights and such?

My partnership with inXile is simple: If I have something to release, they'll release it. It's their trademark/IP but my code stays as mine, so any future work done with my codebase will have my involvement.

If so, is there any reason to believe that they might market it aggressively or allow others to do so?

If they don't then I'll be getting permission to do so.

Some people have talked about the mythical time of "when Unleashed comes out" as when LR will become big again - do you think there's any potential at all for that to happen?

There's a lot of people who simply don't know about LR. There's a lot of people playing canvas rider that haven't got access to the kind of performance that Rev10 and eventually Unleashed will have. There's a need for the official site to not suck, and for the only remaining community to not be on an ad-supported phpBB forum that's straight out of 2005.

I don't think this will be as huge as it was in 2007 but it'll certainly be something we can finally grow with.

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Post by Hedgehogs4Me Fri Jan 31, 2014 7:53 am

Good answers!

Do you have a rough timeline that you're working with? I'm just wondering when I should start pestering the real admins to get to work on something like a MyBB solution. Wink

EDIT: Also, if this is a standalone program and all, does that mean you could potentially do stuff like put it on Steam?
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Post by mhenr18 Wed Feb 05, 2014 8:49 am


Good answers!

Do you have a rough timeline that you're working with? I'm just wondering when I should start pestering the real admins to get to work on something like a MyBB solution. Wink

Don't do that just yet, anything new should be official. For now I want to focus on dev and get to the community side of things once I have something worth building a bigger community around.


EDIT: Also, if this is a standalone program and all, does that mean you could potentially do stuff like put it on Steam?

That'd be a yes.


Progress:

The basics work - I haven't polished the line renderer to give the same looking lines as Flash (there's no rounded caps atm), but I can use the pencil, line, eraser, hand and zoom tools. I can play/stop and the camera works. Bosh doesn't render yet - you just see contact points and constraint lines. There's a tool panel but you can't click stuff yet as I haven't added in buttons. The underlying core for handling .sol files is half done, but I need to do the UI again as that doesn't port easily. Also, a lot of simpler stuff like snaps, tab showing the whole track, color playback, all of that pretty much worked from the get go in this environment. For now stuff is just bitmaps, I need to add SVG support so that I can load in nice vectors and keep things pretty and stuff.

My plan is to start putting up OSX only builds at some point this weekend, and then put in the effort to get it going on Windows over the next week. The intent is for revision 10 to be identical in functionality to 6.y.2 - any divergence is a bug and I want to know about it.

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Post by Darkness Mon Feb 10, 2014 3:19 am

You mentioned support for Mac and Windows, what about Linux users? Or is there just not a wide enough user base in this community on that platform to warrant an official port?

I am incredibly excited for this. Since being around from the very beginning, I'm really looking forward to see just how much this has progressed.

In the old thread you mentioned fast loading times for large tracks and also a higher threshold as far as how many lines will crash the game. Is that still the same since tailoring your own flash player?

Edit: Oh and you said that all of the old glitches will still be there. Which is good. But don't you think Inxile will want a more... user friendly game? If we're talking about a similar explosion in fanbase as the original 6.2 brought us, then I think that might be necessary.

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Post by Hedgehogs4Me Sat Feb 15, 2014 6:41 pm

Darkness wrote:Edit: Oh and you said that all of the old glitches will still be there. Which is good. But don't you think Inxile will want a more... user friendly game? If we're talking about a similar explosion in fanbase as the original 6.2 brought us, then I think that might be necessary.

Oh good, I can use the 2 cents smiley!

I'm sort of interpreting here that you think the "old glitches" aren't really user-friendly compared to what you think might be necessary for the game to gain popularity. If I'm interpreting that correctly, I kind of disagree, although I do think that LR could probably use a few user-friendly additions.

I don't think "user friendly" means what a lot of people nowadays think it means. A lot of people think it means "easy". You want to do this? Here, eat a cookie while I do it for you, and when you have to do it, I'll make sure you and your mother both can. Sure, that can be wonderful in a program meant primarily at utility and not for recreation (and they can definitely be marketed as "easy"), but we're talking about something here where the entire point is to create problems. That's what games are, and I think that any attempt to minimize a game's difficulty detracts from it in general.

IMO, the big Beta 2 bubble really came from the ability to erase lines, and maybe also zoom. I'm not sure about you guys, but I would've even been fine without red lines. The idea that you can go back without having to save every single time you successfully draw a line, though, that's user-friendly. It saves you from tedium that's entirely mindless1. Trampoline lines, easier gravity wells, bezier curves, and all that business that we saw in Unbound... that's not user-friendly, that's easy.

To me, more user-friendly features would be things like the ability to snap on both sides of a line regardless of orientation so you can put red lines on top of each other without having to do that weird line duping glitch (which I believe mhenr already said he'd do and it wouldn't even be hard), or the ability to rewind (or even just save flags) so that you didn't have to deal with having to go through your entire track every time you accidentally press a button. New features are great, and making other features easier... might be acceptable, I guess, but it shouldn't be confused with user-friendliness.

So I think mhenr should add whatever new features he wants, but I reserve the right to disagree with things that make the game easier.

1I maintain that spending an hour on a line is not necessarily mindless - if something doesn't work, maybe it's because you have too much slope, or you're targeting slightly the wrong area and you could solve that puzzle by capturing the scene frame by frame and figuring out exactly what the position of the line should be, etc. Maybe a few mindlessly repeating tries are required sometimes, but that's the price you pay for having something like this that does take some expertise.

 2 cents 

Of course, that's all way down the road.

Also, +1 for Linux support. My next computer, which will hopefully be a thing eventually, will probably run Linux.
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Post by Darkness Wed Apr 02, 2014 1:43 pm

Hedgehogs4Me wrote:
Darkness wrote:Edit: Oh and you said that all of the old glitches will still be there. Which is good. But don't you think Inxile will want a more... user friendly game? If we're talking about a similar explosion in fanbase as the original 6.2 brought us, then I think that might be necessary.

Oh good, I can use the 2 cents smiley!

I'm sort of interpreting here that you think the "old glitches" aren't really user-friendly compared to what you think might be necessary for the game to gain popularity. If I'm interpreting that correctly, I kind of disagree, although I do think that LR could probably use a few user-friendly additions.

I don't think "user friendly" means what a lot of people nowadays think it means. A lot of people think it means "easy". You want to do this? Here, eat a cookie while I do it for you, and when you have to do it, I'll make sure you and your mother both can. Sure, that can be wonderful in a program meant primarily at utility and not for recreation (and they can definitely be marketed as "easy"), but we're talking about something here where the entire point is to create problems. That's what games are, and I think that any attempt to minimize a game's difficulty detracts from it in general.

IMO, the big Beta 2 bubble really came from the ability to erase lines, and maybe also zoom. I'm not sure about you guys, but I would've even been fine without red lines. The idea that you can go back without having to save every single time you successfully draw a line, though, that's user-friendly. It saves you from tedium that's entirely mindless1. Trampoline lines, easier gravity wells, bezier curves, and all that business that we saw in Unbound... that's not user-friendly, that's easy.

To me, more user-friendly features would be things like the ability to snap on both sides of a line regardless of orientation so you can put red lines on top of each other without having to do that weird line duping glitch (which I believe mhenr already said he'd do and it wouldn't even be hard), or the ability to rewind (or even just save flags) so that you didn't have to deal with having to go through your entire track every time you accidentally press a button. New features are great, and making other features easier... might be acceptable, I guess, but it shouldn't be confused with user-friendliness.

So I think mhenr should add whatever new features he wants, but I reserve the right to disagree with things that make the game easier.

1I maintain that spending an hour on a line is not necessarily mindless - if something doesn't work, maybe it's because you have too much slope, or you're targeting slightly the wrong area and you could solve that puzzle by capturing the scene frame by frame and figuring out exactly what the position of the line should be, etc. Maybe a few mindlessly repeating tries are required sometimes, but that's the price you pay for having something like this that does take some expertise.

 2 cents 

Of course, that's all way down the road.

Also, +1 for Linux support. My next computer, which will hopefully be a thing eventually, will probably run Linux.

I am just now seeing this reply for the first time. Sorry about that. And you are absolutely correct. I misspoke there. What I meant by Inxile probably wanting a more user friendly game, was that they would want an easier game. This is also talking about the old inxile that we have all learned to put up with in the past. Seems like they have changed who they're marketing games towards now though, which is good. But yeah, you are completely right about old glitches being "user-friendly". They just sorta become easier after you get used to them.

I however think the thing that will set this apart from... lets say, Unbound, is if he decides to keep the legacy edition of the game. While I'm all for new features, what will keep me interested is a new polished beta 2.

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Post by aspi33 Wed Apr 02, 2014 2:24 pm

thoughts on making a git for it? inXile kills that idea?
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