Quark Robot dev blog

Week #14 update

Quark Robot -

What I've done this week##

It has been a quite busy week and Easter long weekend for my brother and me. Microsoft XNA was replaced with MonoGame. This in itself was easy; swap the XNA references to MonoGame. I chose the WindowsGL version over DirectX and the problems quickly popped up out of the wood work;

  • you can't easily go to full-screen and back - OpenTK with Windows has oodles of issues. These have apparently been fixed but for me they are still present
  • there is no DynamicSoundEffectInstance so you have to make your own by submitting data to OpenAL buffers
  • nearly 50% of the original PCM sounds won't play when XNA could play them just fine
  • converting these to WAV files in memory still produce the same issue
  • exiting the game causes an error with the OpenGL device incorrectly shutting down
  • poor performance compared to XNA
  • the SharpDX version with correctly compiled shaders don't work the same as XNA when they should

I've since ditched MonoGame for FNA which is "an XNA4 reimplementation that focuses solely on developing a fully accurate XNA4 runtime for the desktop" that works with Windows, Linux and Mac OSX (without Xaramin). FNA also uses SDL2 and in my week of experience has better performance and virtually zero issues.

The 'Roadmap' page has now gone - I simply don't have the time to continuously update it. 'Downloads' has now replaced it where you can now grab yourself the latest build (everything up to and including week #13 2015).

Editor

  • tweak to the paint helper

Game

  • fixed a bug that allowed a player to climb an imaginary ladder when blasting under a ladder
  • added gold collection when leaping off a ladder + leaping sideways at the top of a ladder
  • minor performance improvement when drawing the puzzle
  • rewrote portions of movement with ladders to match more closely to the original
  • fixed ladder bug that casued players to "jump" a little on certain ladder combinations
  • fixed bug where monks would attempt a continuous ladder swap (going from one ladder to another rapidly) when there was not another ladder to grab on to
    • this caused the AI to make the have to backtrack to the player which did not match the original
  • fixed issue when blasting a block with a monk on top of it

General

You can play my version of the Mad Monks' Revenge without needing the audio data file - you just won't have any music playing just like you don't in the original without the CD in. This week I added support to play music from the original CD. Just pop your copy of Mad Monks' Revenge into your disc drive and you should have music playing from the CD.

If you have both the original CD in and the music DLC, the CD will be used. Also, quite a few people think that MMR had MIDI music - only The Legend Returns had this.


The MMR CD - courtesy of MobyGames.

  • minor performance improvement to the main menu logo + high score transition effects
  • tweak to double-click support
  • improvements to the input handling for mice
  • added the Bass sound engine back in the project;
  • easier to play and manage sounds
  • plays all the original sounds the same as XNA did (but unlike FNA and MonoGame)
  • cross-platform support
  • can play CD audio (Windows and Linux)

I also spent some time to fix a whack of bugs in my custom tool that is used to create/browse/add/remove and create resource files.

The main menu got another UI tweak. The exit button was re-coloured to match the original editor and options buttons and the hammer was drawn again. The last one didn't look right at all. The hammer still needs a little work but I'm quite happy with it overall.


New main menu mock-up


On the LEFT is the old hammer, RIGHT is the new

What I'll probably do next week

  • work on monk AI on and off
  • testing a Mac OSX copy of the game
  • work my way through some outstanding items on my TODO list