FreeGameDev

MeAndMyShadow V0.4Release Candidate 1

* Translation support
* New background music (by vaev)
* Collectables
* Resizeable window
* OpenGL renderer
* Death animation

Download:

* Source: meandmyshadow-0.4rc1-src.tar.gz
* Linux: meandmyshadow-0.4rc1-bin.tar.gz
* Windows: meandmyshadow-0.4rc1-win32.7z

Found bugs:
If you encounter any bugs see the Bug reporting wiki page.
Or if you want to give feedback see the Giving feedback page.

P.S.
If you're translating the game, don't worry or haste yourself there's still plenty of time between the release candidate and the actual release.

Hi,

I have just uploaded Win32 binary

BTW, an off-topic question: currently does the game really use OpenGL accelerated rendering? Because in the code I only see if OpenGL is turned on, only the last step is using OpenGL. Does SDL_BlitSurface and other drawing functions hardware accelerated?

Hello acme_pjz,

acme_pjz {l Wrote}:I have just uploaded Win32 binary

Great, I've included the link in the first post.

acme_pjz {l Wrote}:BTW, an off-topic question: currently does the game really use OpenGL accelerated rendering? Because in the code I only see if OpenGL is turned on, only the last step is using OpenGL. Does SDL_BlitSurface and other drawing functions hardware accelerated?

It isn't really openGL rendering, all we do is convert the final screen surface to an OpenGL texture and render it on a fullscreen quad.
The blitting isn't hardware accelerated, I think, although hardware acceleration will be used automatically by SDL when possible.

0.4 RC1 doesn't work form on my Windows XP SP3.
There are two issues:

1) SDL.DDL is broken and the game crashes immediately. This was also an issue in the previous version (0.3) and I solved just placing the sdl file of the game with the original dowloadable from the official site. You should fix it, most of people don't know what to do and they Windows can't play this game on Windows.
2) when I open the game it appears an immovable all-white screen, I can see my cursor but game doesn't running. This seems probably an OpenGL issue.

Hello BioHazardX,

BioHazardX {l Wrote}:1) SDL.DDL is broken and the game crashes immediately. This was also an issue in the previous version (0.3) and I solved just placing the sdl file of the game with the original dowloadable from the official site. You should fix it, most of people don't know what to do and they Windows can't play this game on Windows.

That doesn't sound so good, you're the first one to report this so I assume it doesn't happen to everyone.
The Windows builds are made by acme_pjz so I hope he might know how to fix this or what is causing it, IIRC he compiles the sdl dll himself from source.

We probably need some more information in order to fix this so could you tell us if you run 32-bit or 64-bit Windows?
And what is the output when you run the game from terminal?

BioHazardX {l Wrote}:2) when I open the game it appears an immovable all-white screen, I can see my cursor but game doesn't running. This seems probably an OpenGL issue.

You can disable the openGL rendering by opening the config file and chaning the line:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

gl = 1

to

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

gl = 0

Not sure where the config file is located on Windows systems, sorry.
Again terminal output might help us here, and what graphics card + driver you have installed.

Anyway, thanks for reporting these bugs.

Well, it appear the classic Windows error (that one with send/don't send to Microsoft) and in the details sdl.ddl is reported as a problem.

Between I play on a x86 machine (64-bit, right?) and my videocard is an old ati 9250 directX 8.1 updated to the last version with openGl supported. That bright screen appears just one second at the beginning with some games that uses opengl rendering...just one second...

Hi,

Maybe it's CPU instruction set issue, it looks like that your computer is a bit old, maybe your CPU doesn't support SSE2 and SDL.dll is compiled from 1.2.13 source code with SSE2 optimization (official 1.2.14 have a bug in my computer) Now I have downloaded official 1.2.15 dll and upload 0.4rc1 package again...

BTW, the game will be black screen for some seconds after launching (reading files?) I think we should add some message like "Loading"...

[EDIT] BTW, the config file is located at My Documents\My Games\meandmyshadow\meandmyshadow.cfg

Hello acme_pjz,

acme_pjz {l Wrote}:BTW, the game will be black screen for some seconds after launching (reading files?) I think we should add some message like "Loading"...

It loads without any noticeable delay for me, in some cases when my system is busy the "black screen" can take up a second.
From what I can see the most time is consumed by the init() method, which creates the window and initializes the dictionaryManager.
I'm afraid we can't do much about that, because we can only show a loading screen when the screen surface is created.

I checked the code; it's loading levels and calculating MD5 (because I have a lot of levels in my computer)

Hello acme_pjz,

acme_pjz {l Wrote}:I checked the code; it's loading levels and calculating MD5 (because I have a lot of levels in my computer)

I did some basic profiling and I tested one update + render cycling including the initialization.
The most time spent was in the POASerializer::readNode, but the MD5::update method also takes up a lot of time.
For me it still loads in under a second, but if the levelcount increases I can see the load increase since all levels are preloaded.

Is there anything we can/could do about this.
Anyway a loading message is in place here, I think.

Hello,

My suggestion after line 666 if condition in Functions.cpp:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

   SDL_Color textcolor={128,128,128,255}, black={0,0,0,0};
   SDL_Surface* loading=TTF_RenderText_Shaded(fontText,"Loading...",textcolor,black);
   applySurface((SCREEN_WIDTH-loading->w)/2,(SCREEN_HEIGHT-loading->h)/2,loading,screen,NULL);
   flipScreen();


Does it help? It can't be drawn right after screen initialization because fonts aren't loaded yet. For me the start up is really fast but tested this with valgrind to slow down things.

EDIT: Noticed that this loading appereals also when changing settings and saving. Currently it doesn't look so good and isn't needed. The thing is in loadFiles function which is called when language changes to load proper font and levelpack translations. It also reload other things which is unnecessary. Does somebody get long waiting time in this situation?

Hi,

odamite {l Wrote}:EDIT: Noticed that this loading appereals also when changing settings and saving. Currently it doesn't look so good and isn't needed. The thing is in loadFiles function which is called when language changes to load proper font and levelpack translations. It also reload other things which is unnecessary. Does somebody get long waiting time in this situation?

Yes it delayed, but only for less than one second... It looks like the first time running the game the operating system has not cached the level files so it must read files from hard disk, thus slowdown the loading process. Of course, when changing settings the unnecessary files need not to be reloaded

Hello,

odamite {l Wrote}:EDIT: Noticed that this loading appereals also when changing settings and saving. Currently it doesn't look so good and isn't needed. The thing is in loadFiles function which is called when language changes to load proper font and levelpack translations. It also reload other things which is unnecessary. Does somebody get long waiting time in this situation?

acme_pjz {l Wrote}:Of course, when changing settings the unnecessary files need not to be reloaded

I changed it so that it only reloads the fonts when changing the language instead of reloading everything (svn rev 454).
It reloaded everything to update the language of the levelpacks' dictionaryManagers, I simply added a updateLanguage method to the levelpackManager which does this for us.