itch.io

If I install through the itch.io desktop client, the game will not run. Hitting launch will flash a small box briefly on screen and then nothing.

I had to go into the application folder and run boattactics.application, which kicks off another full installation. 

After this, I can run the game with the itch.io desktop client's launch button. This same thing happened on two of my Win10 computers, so I suspect the problem is likely universal.

Not sure why this is a two step process, but would recommend looking into it to resolve the user friendliness.

Thanks for your attention!

Really enjoying the game so far. Quite a few moments where I had to patch together a proper timeline to follow.

The only thing that is diminishing the experience is screen loads. Two problems:

1. There's a few moments of lag when you transition to a new screen. The game is still running during this time, so you've got a short period of jitter. This wouldn't be a problem except for...

2. Screens that you jump UP into. Jitter + scrambling to get a visual on where to land often ends up with me heading down a screen again. Not great.

I'll post again if I managed to figure out how to finish this thing. Thanks again for the game!

I'm able to play the game now! I'm liking what I'm seeing, but here's a bunch of feedback to refine things:

Using an Xbox One controller. Doesn't feel like there's a dead zone at all. Whenever I let go of the stick, the flick is enough to make robo look the other direction. Really frustrating when you missile yourself in the face because of this.

Would be nice to be able to use the dpad on the Xbox One controller.

If your controller is off and you load the game, and then you turn on your controller, the controller isn't auto-detected. Not sure if there's a polling mechanism you can have running in the background?

I think the fight with the worm in the desert area could do with a music change when the worm appears.

I can see that there game "zones", like the city zone and desert zone. These get a transition effect during the load. However, that same transition should apply to doors within a zone, too. Current you press down, there's this awkward pause (more on that below) and then you're insta-teleported inside the door. I mean, it works, but it's jarring.

Awkward pause part 1: when you hit down to enter a door, your robo is frozen and some of the UI disspears, but the rest of the game world keeps simulating. Enemies are still moving and still targeting you with shots, although I don't think they do damage. I think you need to pause everything.

Awkward pause part 2: there is a 1 -3 second pause while going into any door. It feels really sloppy considering the size of the assets that are being displayed. Perhaps that pause is there in order to splice in a transition effect on screen that's currently missing? It feels way too slow.

I don't understand why there are separate Save and Heal NPCs. You can be at 2 units of HP going into a boss fight, but the save point outside of the boss fight doesn't have a heal NPC. So you save, go into the boss fight, die immediately, and then you're back at 100% on reload, even though there's no heal NPC. The heal NPC's animation is a quick lol, but it really seems like you should combine save+heal into a single NPC.

When you transition into the desert, the camera is placed to the left, focusing on the console NPC, instead of on your robo when he walks out of the door. I could understand this happening once in order to draw the player's attention, but doing it every time doesn't make sense.

There are a few platforms that are at the very top of a view. So you can have 3/4 of your body in the screen above, but the camera is still focusing on the screen below. Not a big deal in cases where there is a platform right above you, but there were a few cases where you need to horizontally jump to hit a platform in a screen above you. Feels not good.

Latest version doesn't have the rays problem. Thanks!

Latest version doesn't stutter after death, nor do I get out of memory errors.

I'm really sorry, but I have to retract my SOLVED. I had disabled rays in that screenshot. When testing the new builds, I noticed rays were off, turned them back on, and got this (first few seconds are black screen because my screen recording hadn't kicked in yet):

Didn't fix it. Still have the stutter, still have the crash after second death with the same err.log output.

I slapped it onto my work laptop which has an AMD GPU + i7. The post-death stutter doesn't happen! However, the crash after second death still does, with a slightly different error log:

Exception in thread "LWJGL Application" java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.solarlune.gearend.objects.interactables.Treadmill.main(Treadmill.java:49)
at com.nilunder.bdx.Scene.runObjectLogic(Scene.java:865)
at com.nilunder.bdx.Scene.update(Scene.java:923)
at com.nilunder.bdx.Bdx.main(Bdx.java:338)
at com.solarlune.gearend.BdxApp.render(BdxApp.java:44)
at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication.mainLoop(LwjglApplication.java:223)
at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication$1.run(LwjglApplication.java:124)

FIXED: I went into the Nvidia Control panel and reset my global settings back to default.

After the stutter and then crash https://itch.io/t/130260/stuttering-after-death I get this message:

warning CollisionDispatcher.needsCollision: static-static collision!
warning CollisionDispatcher.needsCollision: static-static collision!
Exception in thread "LWJGL Application" com.badlogic.gdx.utils.GdxRuntimeException: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication$1.run(LwjglApplication.java:131)
Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
at java.util.Arrays.copyOfRange(Arrays.java:3664)
at java.lang.String.<init>(String.java:207)
at com.badlogic.gdx.utils.JsonReader.parse(JsonReader.java:188)
at com.badlogic.gdx.utils.JsonReader.parse(JsonReader.java:55)
at com.badlogic.gdx.utils.JsonReader.parse(JsonReader.java:75)
at com.nilunder.bdx.Scene.init(Scene.java:185)
at com.nilunder.bdx.Bdx$ArrayListScenes.add(Bdx.java:111)
at com.nilunder.bdx.Bdx$ArrayListScenes.add(Bdx.java:122)
at com.solarlune.gearend.system.SysCon.setGameScene(SysCon.java:606)
at com.solarlune.gearend.system.SysCon.loadGame(SysCon.java:506)
at com.solarlune.gearend.system.mainmenu.MainMenuCursor.main(MainMenuCursor.java:226)
at com.nilunder.bdx.Scene.runObjectLogic(Scene.java:848)
at com.nilunder.bdx.Scene.update(Scene.java:894)
at com.nilunder.bdx.Bdx.main(Bdx.java:314)
at com.solarlune.gearend.BdxApp.render(BdxApp.java:44)
at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication.mainLoop(LwjglApplication.java:223)
at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication$1.run(LwjglApplication.java:124)

I tried using the -Xms2048m and -Xmx2048m to increase the memory ceiling, but same errors still happen.

jre\bin\java -jar Gearend-1.0.jar -Xms2048m -Xmx2048m

While Crepescular Ray is enabled, outdoor scenes look like this:

Intel 2600k, 16 gigs RAM,, Nvidia 980ti

(Mod edit: See https://itch.io/t/130268/java-outofmemory-crash for more information on the OOME, specifically).

After death -> continue, a continuous stutter is introduced into the game.  Quitting to the main menu and loading does not fix this state. Upon next death or quit to menu and reload, a crash occurs.

Demonstration. Death occurs at 0:30: