Neverball

cool, another one of those games. i''ll check it out later. seems pretty sweet from the ss.

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shurcool
wwdev

Compiled and ran well for me for the four or five maps I played. The system I ran it on wasn''t too exotic: Debian Sid, AMD Athlon Thunderbird, NVidia Geforce 3 (closed official drivers), Creative Soundblaster Live!, built with GCC 3.3.1...

The mouse grabbing on the menus is a little annoying though (yeah, I read the README ). You might want to make it complain a bit when it fails to initialize something. I forgot to give my sandbox account access to the video and audio groups and it would, predictably, quit, but without any error message.

Excellent game.

Simple graphics but it looks very good and runs smoothly.

We have a lot of ball games here... looks awesome though, I''ll give it a run tomorrow.

Looks cool. Downloading...

A W E S O M E
This is great!

Just one thing, the camera isn''t always cooperating. You know that level with the maze. At some point the camera was too low and didn''t give a good overview. The level that followed, the square spiral I think you call it, it was difficult to control the ball when you went around the corner because the camera didn''t turn in the direction of the ledge. Though I stopped at that level cause I couldn''t make it

Perhaps make the camera reaction a bit more sensitive on the balls actions.

Apart from that... it''s great!

Cool game. I''m a monkey ball fan so i like this

As Structural said, the camera at the "square spiral" could have been better.

Maybe it''s just that I''ve played Monkey ball too much but I think the ball needs some extra pounds. It felt more like a beach ball than a solid globe.

But anyway, the game is really great!

Thanks for the comments.

On camera control: I guess I agree. In the current version, the camera simply chases the ball. So when the ball starts moving it takes a moment for the camera to fall in line behind. The nice thing about this is that the camera can be freely moved using the rotation buttons without conflict.

I think what you may be suggesting is that camera trigger off the velocity of the ball, rather than just its position. This way, as soon as the ball starts moving the camera can swing in behind. Unfortunately, this is in conflict with camera rotation. If you rotate the camera to the perfect angle it''ll just be undone the moment the ball begins to move.

So it''s a choice between "smart" camera and controllable camera. Having had a chance to play with the smart camera, I agree that the change is good. Many levels play differently. Spiral gets easier, Maze gets harder, Ring gets much easier, Qbert becomes impossible, Pacman becomes more fun. I''ll include it in the next release and see how many people complain that they can''t move the camera.

Umm... WinZip couldn''t open/extract the files, even though it can supposedly support .tar files. Any other way to download it besides compiling all the source code?

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HellspawnXIII
"There''s a lot of stuff in this world that needs stepping on."

You know... I liked the camera better the other way
This is far more difficult when you''re balancing the ball on one point, or are maneuvering through tight places.
For example level 11, the slope. Every time you turn around the corner you have to reverse your old mouse position.

Sorry for keeping you on a leash like this. I guess it''s trail and error for all of us.

quote:

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Original post by HellspawnXIII
Umm... WinZip couldn''t open/extract the files, even though it can supposedly support .tar files. Any other way to download it besides compiling all the source code?

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HellspawnXIII
"There''s a lot of stuff in this world that needs stepping on."

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Did you miss the Windows binary package in zip format?

quote:

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Original post by Trurl

Did you miss the Windows binary package in zip format?

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As a matter of fact, I did. Thanks for bringing it to my attention

Anyways, great game! Could use some music, but the graphics are good and it ran very smoothly on my machine. I never made it past level 6 so far, so I don''t know if the backgrounds change later in the game or anything, but it''s a suggestion.

Great work!

Intel P4 2.4Ghz
512Mb RAM
nVidia GeForce 4 128Mb
Win98SE

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HellspawnXIII
"There''s a lot of stuff in this world that needs stepping on."

Very nice, very professional. My only complaint is the controls are a bit too sensitive. Monkey Ball uses the analog stick where you''ve always got a good sense of what is "up", a mouse doesn''t give you that.

Excellent game.

I thought it was a little hard to control as well; I often got confused as to which way the world was tilting (like what Tortoise said). But yea, overall, it was great. I''m convinced I can get a sub-5 second time on level 10; anyone else try that yet?

A little more variety in modes, or other gameplay editions, and you could have a very marketable product I think. It isn''t far off from Monkey Ball, as others have mentioned.

Great game! Very professional!

The only complain I got is that the controls are to sensitive.
All other stuff was great, graphics, menus/gui.

Keep up the good work!

Cool, more comments.

Mouse sensitivity may be configured in the .neverballrc config file, as documented in the README. Change the ''mouse_sense'' variable from 300 to something like 500 to make the input less sensitive.

For those who would rather use a joystick so that they can find the default orientation more easily: Plug in your joystick, change the ''joy'' config variable from 0 to 1, and change the ''axis'' and ''button'' variables to suit your taste. This will enable controls more similar to Monkey Ball.

As for the comment about marketability: it''s an open source project. I don''t have any intention of ever trying to make money from it.

I have a problem:
I''m at school at a windows2000 professional computer logged in as administrator. The game doesn''t run. It exits as soon as I run the program. It comes around to creating stderr.txt en stdout.txt, but then nothing. Nothing is put in these files.

The only significant difference is that this computer has no sound devices. Perhaps it goes tits up when it inits the sound system, I dunno.


______________________________
If Idiots Could Fly I Would Be A Space Shuttle
www.StructWeb.com

quote:

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Original post by Structural
I have a problem:
I''m at school at a windows2000 professional computer logged in as administrator. The game doesn''t run. It exits as soon as I run the program. It comes around to creating stderr.txt en stdout.txt, but then nothing. Nothing is put in these files.

The only significant difference is that this computer has no sound devices. Perhaps it goes tits up when it inits the sound system, I dunno.

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Yeah that''s a sound problem. The next release will dump a warning and continue running without sound.

It''s only been 4 days, but in the time since this thread appeared, there have been 1100 downloads of the Windows binaries of Neverball 0.25.2 and 0.25.3. Given the relatively small number of problem reports I''ve gotten, I infer that the game ran well for a large majority of downloaders.

Therefore, having made only minor changes, I''m going to assume the code is solid enough to call it 1.0. I''m in the process of tweaking some levels. When this is finished, I''ll post a 1.0 release and move on to something else for a while.

If you''ve still got problems with it, please let me know. Otherwise, thanks to everyone who took the time to play.