This one comes with power-ups. Loads of them 
-
Drop Wall (R)
-
“Bullet-Time” (T) - don’t do this too often in multiplayer-mode, though, or people will be annoyed
-
Smoke (F) - the idea behind this is to “cover” your wall with smoke, so people run into it without seeing it… there’s an antidote, though: use perspective 1 (or 2, maybe), which is “cockpit style”, so you can probably see the wall under the smoke (while with the overview camera you have which is on 3, the smoke does have the “cover up effect”)
-
Shoot Wall (X) - that’s my favorite
you can shoot a wall in front of you. You need to shoot it early, because it takes a moment for the projectile to gain speed, and when it hits the wall, it’s not immediately gone but “drops down slowly”… so now’s a good time to practice this
DO NOT try to shoot other players. Well, or try it, hehe… If you do: Be prepared to react very quickly (hint: “reflection”)
- Jump (space bar)… another one of my favorites… what I like most is: switch on smoke (F), then shoot (X) and immediately afterwards jump (space bar)… best with headphones and the volume “pumped up”
… btw, the Arena walls are not THAT high, so with a little practice, you can escape “into the void”
-
speed up (W or UP)… you can do this repeatedly to get really fast (which makes some things easier
)… be aware though: each time, you hit W, you “lose” one power-up (doesn’t matter in this release, but will make things much harder in the “real releases”) -
slow down (S or DOWN)
-
and, of course (M) switches on the Map
Keep in mind, you can also look left/right with q,e and a,d, and you can switch perspectives with 1,2 and 3 (not on the numeric keyboard!)
This game is a game for keyboard wizards
Currently, there game is “cheat mode”, so you can use all power-ups at any time (I’m speaking to developers, am I not? ). For instance, you could just shoot like a maniac (and see if your computer handles the many many light sources that you create that way ). In later releases (starting with V0.9), this will be disabled. It’s just for testing, I don’t want to have to search for the power-ups all the time.
I might introduce all power-ups in the tutorial-level, though, because there’s some tricks to using them, and collecting one power-up only gives you “one shot”, so it’ll be kind of hard to practice these “in game” unless I fill up the Arenas with power-ups (like it’s currently the case). If you want to get a competetive advantage over others: Play V0.8 as much as you can, it’ll never be that cheap again
There’s a bunch of other improvements, too (some of which were suggested by people from the forum during the last “game session” we had - thanks for the input!!!), like now you can switch perspectives (including an overview-perspective) when your cycle has crashed but the others are still playing (in multiplayer mode). Also, the chat window can be dragged and resized (this doesn’t work on the Mac Web player - bug filed, workaround: only supporting dragging the window there, no resizing).
And - most important (I think): In multiplayer mode, all players of all teams have to hit “PLAY” before the game starts. This will cool down things in session with many players Also: When you’re cycle has crashed, you can use the chat freely even when you’re still “in the game” (with the different perspectives).
The thing that I’m currently not tooooo happy with is some not so nice lag-effects. I finally switched to some loose synchronisation (instead of only sending positions on turns). Also, the turns are now done server-side and sent to the clients (which obviously takes a moment when you’re the one hitting the key). This does solve the really bad lag-errors, but the game looks much more “jittery” that way, so this is something I guess I’ll have to put some work into… It’s kind of hard to test these things alone, though… so…
TOMORROW (Thursday) we could have a little testing-tournament. Anyone who wishes can join in - theoretically, up to 20 players are supported (with the said limitations, and I haven’t optimized the server, yet). I guess I’ll sign on around 9pm German/Berlin/Rome-time. That would be noon in California and I guess 3pm at the US east coast…
I might set up another “stress-test-tournament” during the weekend…
I recommend using the standalone version (on my machine, the Web player doesn’t use the full resolution in fullscreen mode, seems to ignore the settings default screen width/height - but that might just be on my machine). Besides, as mentioned before: You can’t resize the chat-box on the Mac Web player, but you CAN do that in the standalone. Btw, there’s also another “known bug” with the chat: As soon as the scrollbar appears, you have to “re-focus” the textbox each time you’ve sent a message… sorry about that…
Another thing I’ve noticed: It seems that the sound of the power-ups is extremely loud on Windows XP, while it’s okay on my Mac. Could be the different sound-systems, though. Feedback on this appreciated
So, check it out on
http://www.jashan-chittesh.de/JCsUMTRON_V08/tabid/110/Default.aspx
… btw: This is the 3rd “V0.8” already The very first one didn’t even have images for the power-ups, so I decided to work a little more on that version … oh, for some reason it seems these images are being scaled down on the Windows build (but not on the Mac OS build).
Have fun,
Jashan
I only encountered the lag issue once, though I lost all but one game, to various other things like badly timed jumps and getting freaked out by Bullet Time (I wasn’t aware that that was one of the powerups. At the very end, I lost my wireless connection for some reason or another, and the controls hung and I shot through a stage wall, driving in “the void” for a few seconds before it reset.