First Post!

Hey everyone! As you can tell I'm quite new here, but hopefully I have something that will grab your interest.

After finding this forum as I searched for a cartoon skybox that resembled the one in marble blast (which I spent many, Many hours playing a long time ago), I think that this is the perfect place to showcase my new project, a new marble game that I have been writing from the ground up over the past few days.

You can play it in two versions:

Single Player:goo.gl/T9d8G

Multiplayer:goo.gl/MIM06

The multiplayer is real-time (ie. you can see other people rolling around) but it may not always be populated.

You can also always find both links in my signature.

I would love to hear feedback and suggestions, and hope to keep this blog alive for as long as there is interest in the game.

I'd still like to talk about it with you over skype or something similar, but I would say it's a good start, needs major physics work as your first priority though. Gravity needs to be increased, needs restitution (not sure if this is even implemented yet), friction needs to be increased (this may be a problem related to gravity, not sure), needs an increase in momentum.

Most of this stuff is easier to work out if I show you, not sure how familiar you are with Marble Blast physics.

I don't have skype, but I do use oovoo if you would like to chat.

For both versions -

I increased the gravity, which also increased the friction.
When you say restitution, I assume you are talking about elasticity of collision, which does exist, though it is fairly inelastic, as I wanted it to be possible to stop immediately after landing a far jump.

Also added a 10% increase to speed but will be slowed a bit by the additional friction. (momentum isn't really important unless you are hitting an object, because there is no air resistance. I have a bit of angular drag on the ball to give it a max speed and let it slow down if you aren't pressing a directional key though)

Wow! Very cool game! Will it eventually be downloadable?
Also, is unity better than Torque? (well, the version of Torque MB runs on) If so, does this mean more things are able to be accomplished in this game?

Thanks, I figured a web-player was better than a downloadable version, since all you have to do is refresh the page to get the newest version. In reality, I could export it as an executable file (PC or Mac) with a single click.

Torque is different than Unity, and I've never developed with Torque, so I can't say for sure. I have a professional license for unity, which allows me to do some pretty cool things. I can add post-effects (ie bloom, anti-aliasing, Depth of field, sun-shafts, etc) which when piled up can make even the fastest computer cry. Also, Unity has integration with Nvidia's PhysX. So as you could see in the singleplayer version, allows the ball to smash through blocks and have them all react correctly.

The biggest thing would be that I am working on a source code level, so I don't have to deal with problems that arise as a result of modifying a pre-packedged game. I don't have problems creating levels or texturing, because I do it within the editor that I am designing the game within.

The disadvantage is that I have to program everything... pressing w adds 30 units of torque per second divided by the current frame-rate and hitting an object with the tag SuperJump sets the powerup index on the ball to 1, allowing you to click to use that powerup

Quote:Also, is unity better than Torque? (well, the version of Torque MB runs on)

You just started a debate that I will win on. NO.


Quote: Also, Unity has integration with Nvidia's PhysX.

What version is the NVidia SDK? 3.2 or 2.8?

Jul 18, 2013, 4:37pm, jeff wrote:
Quote:You just started a debate that I will win on. NO.

Just took a look at Torque, it has come a LONG way since I last looked at it. I'm pretty impressed, it doesn't have the same amount of community plugins, but it is definitely a force to be reckoned with.


Quote:What version is the NVidia SDK? 3.2 or 2.8?

I misstated. Unity has PhysX built in, so I don't use the Nvidia SDK as a separate application.
Here's unity's link, maybe you can get info there on what version it runs. unity3d.com/unity/quality/physics . Only standalone simulation software I use is realflow.

Yeah plugin wise is where its lacking, but the nice part about it is that it is free. The downside, without major adjustments to the engine, its only native platform is windows. So that means mac users and Linux users would have to run the engine under winE or crossover. The main issue is that there is only Direct3D, because openGL had been basically stripped out of the engine for some odd reason even though there are GL files.

Torque Game Engine Advanced, or Torque Shader Engine, is what Marble Blast Ultra had used. That engine had supported both mac and windows.

Marble Blast Gold uses Torque Test Engine V 1.2 or something, which is very similar to Torque Game Engine 1.3, which supported mac,linux, and windows.

So yeah it has come along way.

And about Unity, yeah I knew it was native to the engine, but I was just wondering if you knew the exact version or not of what they had used, as I am unaware. Nice to hear about Unity being graphically powerful. It also has a very powerful editor as what I've seen from it.

I am quite fond of the editor, and the multiplatform is what I need most. I have the iOS pro license for unity (with the addition to the regular pro license it cost me $1,500 after a 50% educational discount, so the Torque being free is definitely a major plus). But a single click transfer to the iOS platform is amazing, and I just submitted my first app to the app store yesterday (hence why I can now take on side projects).

Since I haven't used Torque as a developer, I can't really comment on it's abilities, last I interacted with it was the old 3rd person RPG demo Garage Games had for download, where you could run around a mountain landscape .

Side note: Added a loop and corkscrew to the multiplayer map.
(Just so you know, there is no login or data collection, you just get connected to the first open room that exists, otherwise you create your own room)

edit: grammar

3 of us are right now on MP atm,

interpolation will need fixed for rotation, sometimes the marble owned by the other clients don't rotate. Physics are getting to be nice though, and I love the corkscrew.

Ya, I am one of the people online .

Obviously I need a chat function... I'll also try to modify the multiplayer updates to make them more accurate, updating rotation speeds to 100% accuracy may not be feasable however, because the balls are rotating so fast. The way the current system works is by getting a current rotation and position value, and interpolating between it and the previous value. So it's just the update intervals that limits accuracy.

And believe me I know how much work Multiplayer takes just for the bare basics, our current implementation of Multiplayer in marble blast platinum uses a ton of hackish code because we have to use torqueScript only. This is because we can not modify the marble blast engine as it is in exe format as well as being illegal. So yeah I mean our code base we can only get so accurate until we can't anymore because its just all script hacks.

You've done an awesome job so far, keep it up!

Wooooo! I got perfectly updated rotations by updating the angular velocity instead of the physical rotation. The position isn't perfect (you can see this when another person is just holding down jump). But rolling looks beautiful!

Good call Jeff, adds a lot to the feel. Just need to add chat now

I am not getting the Unity player to run in Safari.
Also cannot use most of the keyboard in Chrome. Can only blast and move camera.

Everything works fine on my iMac, but the above happens on my MacBook Air.

That's weird, my macbook air plays if fine in chrome, I may need to dig deeper into unity forums to see if there is a common problem I can fix.