I’ve been promising a preview version of my game, Phoenix Final, for nearly a year now. As usual, things take a lot longer than you expect, but I’ve finally managed to put something together which I’m quite happy with. I’d be interested to hear feedback about the gameplay and how it performs on different hardware configurations.
You can download the game from my website. There is only a Mac version to download at the moment. I’d like to see how my bandwidth usage goes before thinking about a Windows version - please bear with me on this.
The game so far is a single level in which you can dogfight with enemy fighters and try to destroy gigantic ‘leviathan’ spaceships by finding and attacking their vulnerable parts. Once you’ve destroyed everything, you can dock with your carrier to get a summary of your score.
Please read the included documentation, as it explains how to fly the ship and tackle the mission objectives in some detail. There’s also a list of known problems. Please don’t tell me that the sound is awful! Trust me, I know!
Thanks in advance for trying the game. Hope you enjoy it!
VERY cool so far! the look is great (i love the hud setup).
runs around 100fps @ highest settings on a 20" 2Ghz intel iMac.
-controls in general are quite good, but i would definitly juice the mouse turning, tons of “drag-lift-drag” with the mouse at the moment (a flip roll 180° maneuver would be cool too).
-i was having alot of trouble attacking the leviathans - it mostly has to do with the fact that the target icons don’t appear until you are really close (and when they do it seemed they weren’t placed right or at least for me didn’t correlate visually with a specific part of the ship except the turrets). IMO i would at least make it so you are able to spot your target icons from quite a distance (but not lock on) so you can plan an attack route as you head towards the ship.
-i find that with the exception of when a enemy fighter zips by everything feels a bit slow. i don’t know how to do it but something that imparts a general sense of speed would be ideal. (floating debris? er, space mist? ; )
its late here but i’ll play it some more tomorrow - overall though it plays well and i can’t wait to see more, again i really like the visual style you got going ; )
I agree. Descent:Freespace had little bits of space dust, just a very simple particle effect, whiz by the camera, and it looked excellent. Maybe something like that would improve the feel of the game?
Also, I frequently had the targeting system lock onto enemies I wasn’t aiming at (where i would have one right under the reticle, but the ship kept trying to pull me off to the side).
this is a great game neil! Perfect for my joystick and you definitely have a purchase here when the final game comes out. I get a low of 130fps when there is a ton of stuff on screen, and an average of 300fps, at highest quality settings at a resolution of 2560x1600.
My brother saw me playing it and wanted to try, all he could say the whole time is “this is such a great game, I’m getting this for sure when it comes out!”
I also like your graphics style its nice and clean and the ship designs are interesting. I agree with the other guys you need some effect to show movement because when you don’t have any object on your screen (like when flying away from the leviathans to turn and do another strafe) nothing is moving and you feel like your standing still.
One other thing is it seemed like occasionally the “nav points” where you need to shoot the big ships might show through from the other side of the ship, if this is true its rather confusing, or maybe I just didn’t see anything that looked like I could shoot it. My brother thinks the “nav points” should be visible from farther out, I kind of like your current system where you need to get close to the ship to find your target then fly out and come in strafing the target. Keep up the great work! Jeff (and some comments from Kevin my bro)
(edit)P.S. if you could add the option to up the sensitivity of the input device that would be great.
The mouse controls are highly preliminary. I personally find them unusable, but I added them as people kept asking for them. I will try to make them more useful in a future version.
Yes, this is problematic. I had forgotten that some of the objective markers are in really silly places (deep within the hull, for example). I plan to do something like draw a box around the exposed part of an objective, and to have it ‘zoom’ to frame the target so you can see where you’re supposed to go.
I’ll probably also have it remember the position of objectives once you’ve found them, so you only have to go hunting for them once per level.
Good idea. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do this before, as it’s something I’ve done for previous space games!
I wrote a little test piece on my lunch break to see how feasible it is to draw streaking dust particles with the GL class, and it seems to be exceedingly easy, so I’ll try to polish this up and put it into the next release. (Incidentally, stretched particle effects look horrible for this, so I’m going to have to program my own.)
Oops, I think I’ve become so used to this that I don’t notice it any more! I’ll try to stop it from changing targets if you’re already happily firing at something.
That’s pretty good performance! Everyone should buy a Mac Pro at once so that I don’t have to make it work on Mac minis.
Oh good. That’s very encouraging!
Will do. The game is a bit lacking in ways to tweak the controls at the moment. I’ll definitely make it possible to do this in a future version.
I actually thought it should have been much harder. I was able to beat the level on my first attempt, which included figuring out how stuff worked, using mouse control. (I tried a joypad afterward and thought it was much better.) The first two leviathans got destroyed by others while I was flying around figuring out what to do, for example. Other suggestions have been mostly covered by others, although I’d also like to have seen a visual indicator for how close missiles are…relying on sound seemed somewhat problematic.
As long as there’s not too much is happening it’s kind of playable on my 9200er. Just when it get’s too much framerates drop significantly. I tried but i wasn’t able to destroy a single opponent. I had a lot of problems with actually knowing where i am from a distances point of view. The most fun was to fly through the decks of a bigger ship. :O)
Mouse controls, it seems like it doesn’t reset which makes it highly awkward to use, atleast for me. The arrow keys reset, so why not the mouse? (or atleast an option, but yeah, I know you are working on it :))
Laggyness, yeah, I know you said it will not work so good, but it worked decently during times when not to many of the space crafts where on display (or the star I think).
I would like some way to easier tell the distance of an object, after awhile some of the fighters are what seems like a minute away at full speed but it’s hard to tell since it’s only a dot in space.
I really liked it though, it has some great potential (and style!)
Thanks to the mouse control I was finally able to play pheonix final an boy was I impressed. It took some getting used to how the mouse is set up but once you do it is really quite good.
I still suggest longer range guns for the fighters, and how missiles behave when shot at the big ships feels wrong to me somehow. I agree that the target highlighting system needs improvement.
It seemed to me that the enemy fighters were very sporadic in how their AI behaved. They would sometimes be very weak but sometimes destroy me without me ever even getting a decent shot off at them.
I absolutely love those huge guns and the new graphics. I have always wanted to play a game of that scale with massive guns like that.
Good point. I had planned to do this, but the current design of the radar code makes it rather difficult to make missiles work with it, so I have left this for a future version.
I tried the game on my PPC Mac mini and performance was pretty bad (although not as bad as for an Intel mini!). I’ll see if I can do something to improve on this.
I’m using a little tool called DropDMG, which automates the process of making a disk image and configuring/compressing it in certain standard ways. You could also get the same result manually from using Apple’s Disk Utility, whatever compression tool you want, and perhaps a bit of command line hackery for certain specific features.
I tried a few different ways of handling mouse input and they were all terrible in various different ways. I think I need to deal with it in a cleverer way, like to have it turn the ship in direct proportion to mouse movements if you ‘keep it in the middle’, but to have it continuously turn the ship if you push it far enough away from the ‘centre’.
Personally, I find the mouse unusable for flying games. Great for games where your up axis is constant, rubbish for games where you can roll into any orientation. I find it quite difficult to come up with a solution which is satisfactory, because to my mind, no form of mouse control is satisfactory for this game.
Several people on IRC have requested this. I have a plan for fixing it - probably something like scaling and/or fading the target markers according to their distance.
The beam weapons already have enormously long range (although you can’t easily tell from first person view)! I could lengthen them further, but part of the point is that you have to get in close. Sniping from long range should be done with missiles.
I’ll do some more work to make the torpedoes perform better. Also, there will probably be more than one kind of torpedo to choose from in the finished game, so at some point you may be able to choose a ballistic torpedo if that’s what you prefer.
Yes, the AI is quite weak in certain situations, but quite effective in others. They can destroy you in about one second of continuous firing, so if you’re getting hit at all, it’s a bad thing. You need to start weaving around if you think someone’s about to hit you.
To be fair, the enemy fighters are just as strong (weak?) as you are, and they don’t have the benefit of auto-aiming guns.
I don’t have anything else to add besides what’s said above. Overall this game is fantastic and I can’t wait for another level. My only complaints were about the ship targets not appearing until you’re practically on top of them and the mouse controls being a bit wonky (I’ve reverted to the keyboard and enjoyed it nicely).
I originally did it with a set of TextMeshes in the view of an orthographic camera overlay, but this required quite a lot of scripting trickery to make it efficient (mainly due to the overhead of creating and destroying lots of radar pointers every frame in an older version of Unity).
Since I upgraded to Pro, I have been drawing all the moving parts of the HUD with direct OpenGL commands, using the GL class from scripting. This was easier and more flexible for me, as I already knew how to write this kind of code. With more recent versions of Unity, I could also use the mesh API instead if I wanted to.
That’s odd. Could you tell me what kind of computer and which graphics card you have?
It’s really simple. Each face has a texture which, in most cases, is just a square with a fuzzy dark edge. This gives a slight highlight to the edge of every quad in the geometry. I have several of these squares in a grid in single texture so that I only need one material per object (as far as is possible). I wrote a special UV mapping script for Cheetah3D to make it easier to apply these per-face textures.
That’s for the larger ships. The smaller ships are similar, but they mostly use flat colours instead of outlined faces.
Ah well that makes sense then… OK I’ve been wanting to do something similar, but since I don’t know OpenGL too well I may look at the mesh class first.
Thanks, I’ll try to track down that problem. If anyone else is seeing similar problems (no gauges or markers on the HUD), please let me know so I can see if there’s a pattern.
