Airburst Extreme Progress

We're back onto AB Extreme as the main project again now The 'plan' is to gold master sometime in April, but that's currently a rough guess at the moment.

Hopefully more news soon as we get the new site up...

ok, plan adjusted for localised disruptions such as having to do a lot more hours at the day job etc. so we won't be going GM in April. Although AB Extreme is progressing quite nicely. More interesting news soon though

hehe that's 2 things we've got to update on the site (someone spotted that we'd managed to lose the Airburst registration button somehow too).

The current ETA for ABE is about 4-6 weeks. Part of the problem being only being able to work on our own projects in our spare time from work (especially when work needs you to do 60 hour weeks). However, things are about to change for the better

This isn't very important, but... can you tell us what AB Extreme will likely cost?

Oh, and please, please please release it soon. I'm dying to know what could possibly have been improved in a game that good.

--IKEA

I'm not certain of the final retail price of ABE, but it's looking like being $30 on the shelf.

As far as differences from the original Airburst, we're hoping it'll prove itself worth the price difference. Apart from dramatically improving on a couple of weak spots in the gameplay (by the sneaky addition of a 4th key per player !), there's more of everything and the whole game has been re-written from scratch, based on a spectacular 2D OpenGL engine.

I've finished tweaking all the new powerup types for Airburst Extreme and I've done a rough calculation of the number of unique levels that there'll be in the game.

While Airburst had around 60 million different levels from its combination of powerups etc. Airburst Extreme has over 200 *Billion* different combinations, just for the single player Levels game alone (and there looks like being around 32 different game types for single player, most of which should be playable in multiplayer and network modes).

Hopefully that should be enough for now

So, when will Airburst Extreme be released?

Should be sometime in early August. We're just putting the finishing touches to the game and doing final testing this week.

I can't wait!

We're having a crack at going GM sometime tomorrow. Adam and I are stocked up on Mountain Dew and Dr Pepper, so hopefully we'll have a version that will survive testing and be on shelves as fast as it can be duplicated

Wow, I've been coming back to this forum every few days to check up and I am SO PUMPED! Airburst is definitely in my top Mac games ever, next to Pop-Pop, and the new version looks so exciting! The best part is the ridiculously low system requirements. You guys are amazing! By the way, will this game feature different graphic settings for different computers? Or will it run with full details on my 600mhz iBook?

The only difference is that we recommend you set the screen resolution to one of the lower settings in the game if you're at the lower end of the system specs. There's an option to remove 'background graphics', which switches off a layer of the background effects, but to be honest, when we tried it on the iBook 500, we found we didn't need to switch it off.

The 'native' designed resolution of ABE is 800x600, but you can set it to whatever screen modes your Mac will support. If you've got less VRAM, then the 640x480, thousands of colours option is probably better.

If you're running on a low end iBook which tends to have a slower hard drive, you may want to switch the music off for the best speed too. (we're toying with providing lower data rate versions of the tracks for these machines).

Make sure though that you've got a reasonable amount of disk space available as Airburst Extreme relies on OS X's rather excellent memory management and so may need some swap disk space. We also found that sometimes on the iBook 500, the game will run really slow on the first run while OS X seemingly takes a guess at where to put everything. On the second run everything was back at 50fps

Assuming I remember to re-enable it, I'm putting in a startup key (hold down L while starting ABE) which will force the game into its lowest settings. That way, if you're running it on a really marginal spec Mac, you can overide the default settings on the first run and go into the game with the settings all at minimum (so you can at least get to the options menu if the default settings make it all too slow ).

Ooh, I assumed the game would run 1024*768. What did the original run at? Anyway, I just swapped in a new 40gb drive into my iBook, so harddrive stuff shouldn't be a problem. I'm crossing my fingers that Airburst will look great.

Oh, and even if I could have performance running it 800*600, it would look bad stretched on my iBook, correct?

Actually, OpenGL copes with the screen sizing rather well and 800x600 shouldn't look too bad.

Once we've got the GM candidate done, we'll be putting a downloadable demo together, so you'll be able to try it out on your iBook and check that the speed is ok

...You ever going to do Windows ports? I love the games you guys make, but I can't see myself getting a Mac anytime soon.
Besides, you still owe me that free registered copy of AB I won in that raffle on IRC, what was it, a couple of years ago now?

I thought we sent you a registration code after the raffle Cruller ? (if not let me know and I send it again )

We're not planning on doing Windows ports anytime soon. The Windows game market isn't worth the effort unless you're ID. We're planning on looking into porting the odd game to consoles at some point in the near future, but until then Strange Flavour is a Mac only games developer.

Mmm consoles. I've often thought about Airburst on the gameboy or some other console. I think 4 players with their own controllers might trump either 4 people hooked up through a network or 4 people fighting over one keyboard

What's happening? Anything new since 4 days ago?

well, we sent in a possible GM candidate on Sunday night and with a few tweeks and some testing it looks like a possible

I'm just finishing off the demo at the moment

Is the demo ready yet?!

Just uploaded it (and a custom coverdisk one) to Freeverse last night

I can't seem to find it on Freeverse or Strangeflavour. Care to post a link for us, please? Thanks.

--IKEA

Nooo why is Freeverse holding it from us! We wants it!

It might sound like a strange idea, but we want to do final testing on it before it's released

The demo's due to go up on monday sometime, we're doing final tests etc. first

All right, great. Can I test?

on monday yes

Well, it's monday now. Is it going to be released later today?

hopefully yes. Testing threw up a couple of minor bugs in the networking code which I've been fixing and testing over the weekend.

(update): Demo's been ok'd. We're now just moving the sites over and sorting out the links etc. Hopefully we'll have the demo online while it's still Monday somewhere in the world

It may take 24 hours for the DNS to propagate though, so don't panic if you get the old Strange Flavour site

update 2:

direct link to the demo

ftp://download4.freeverse.com/Mac/ABE_Demo_10.sit

and once it's updated and propogated, have a look at http://www.airburstextreme.com

enjoy!

*nudges text back to the left*

I don't mean to spread alarm, but... THE LINK ISN'T WORKING FOR ME! PANIC! PANIC! NOOOOOO!

...

Yay, Airburst Extreme is awesome and all. I had to turn the graphics down to thousands of colors for it to be playable on my iBook 600, and still the game slows down a bit every once in a while (the ball will slow down). Maybe 10.3.5 will help with this? I haven't installed it yet. Anyway, I am very excited with this, and will be experimenting more later. One thing I did notice, however, was that the exit screen was very long and annoying. It took like 5 minutes when I had millions of colors on! I just force quit the next time. Anyway, looks very good so far.

It's great! Except why doesn't it save what level I get to? Is that because of the demo? And where do I buy it? It's not in Freeverse's store yet?

The demo resets the games and levels each time you play it (the actual game remembers the ones you've won). We originally did this in the demo to reduce the numbers of people playing the demo at the same time on GameSmith and flooding the system. For various technical reasons with GS, we decided it wasn't a good idea to let the demo version play games over GS anyway, so I may actually make the level/game save feature work the same as in the actual game when I tweak the demo (also going to make the end game advertising blurb a bit shorter )

We're just waiting for the DNS of the new sites to propogate before all the retail version goes on the site, but this should be within the next 24 hours.

How long till Airburst hits stores? Also, PLEASE consider adding a minimize feature (I want to chat with a friend or two while I'm getting them set up for a network game) and also a way to switch the music. I want my old in game Airburst music back!

It's down to just how fast the CDs can be duplicated, manuals and boxes printed. Hopefully within a couple of weeks

As far as a minimise feature is concerned, sorry. Airburst Extreme is an arcade game and shouldn't be played with other things distracting you

As far as the music is concerned, we actually had a method of letting you run an "Airburst Extreme" playlist in the background from iTunes while playing Airburst Extreme, but it proved to be unreliable.

The original Airburst music was made of short 4 bar music files played end to end, whereas the Airburst Extreme music is done as full length tracks, so they're not particularly compatible.

Darn and darn

Are you sure about the minimize thing? Most games let you at least command tab out, it's really helpful to be talking through ichat to someone when you're meeting up in the game or whatever. Is it not possible to let ABE be hidden or tabbed out at least?

And the music, will the playlist thing be a possible future feature? I bet Freeverse could help, I think they have similar things for Big Bang Chess and whatnot.

As far as the music thing is concerned, we're more than likely going to borrow Big Bang Chess' iTunes playlist linkup for Airburst Extreme in a future update. There's also a possibility of integrating iChat into it theoretically too

The link still isn't working for me, and the airburstextreme.com link still only links to the Parent Directory thing that's empty. Any ideas as to what could be causing it? Firewall? ISP? Safari settings?

(I'm guessing the ABE.com doesn't work because it's not fully updated yet...)

the DNS for AirburstExtreme.com and the new StrangeFlavour.com are still updating, so while some people can see them, most still can't (which is why we've not done a press release yet).

The download link above is a direct link to the file on Freeverse's servers, so should work fine whatever the status of the DNS data. The possibility there is that you're using an ftp server that's incompatible with it. (Works fine under Safari).

Let's start with the actual bug: I tried, partly for testing's sake, partly because I had nothing else to do, playing the Tutorial game with BCM as well as Moon. It worked fine with BCM, but Moon threw up an interesting error...
http://stuff.sonicenema.com/abe_bugs/4.jpg
Whenever I get to this screen (link above), the game just repeats the screen and the screen after it. What I mean is, it throws up the screen reading "If you don't use your power on thrust, you can use your character's extreme power," then the screen saying "press down to activate extreme power," and then infinitely back to the ""If you don't use your power on thrust, you can use your character's extreme power" screen.

Another thing is the way BCM and Flux are standing in the intro for Story mode.
http://stuff.sonicenema.com/abe_bugs/3.jpg
As you can see, their feet are not touching the shadows. It's not really a bug, but it should be easy to fix.

Also, there's a spelling error that appears twice in the game;
here: http://stuff.sonicenema.com/abe_bugs/2.jpg
and here: http://stuff.sonicenema.com/abe_bugs/1.jpg
highlighted in red. Use "it's" only in "it is," not in the possessive form...

I really don't want to be a nitpicker, and I don't want to bother you with irrelevant stuff. I think that overall the game is really great, and a step up from the original, but we're supposed to be testing, right?

Oh, and another two features I'd like added to AB Extreme:
1. You can choose your character only in Tutorial mode and not when starting Story mode (haven't checked the other games yet); could you change that, please? Thanks.
2. You can connect to GameSmith with an existing account, but you can't create one. Again, could you change this?

...Whoah, I hope that helped more than it annoyed!

Cheers,
IKEA

P.S. ...do I get a free copy now...? (I'm joking, of course...I'll pirate it :P)

couldn't actually access those pics, but I'm scanning for the typos (really embarrasing if they're there, I'm a real grammar nazi )

(update, found and fixed for the full version. thanks for that)

As far as the story mode goes, you play through Story mode with the 4 original Airburst characters, starting with BCM and switching to the other characters as you progress through the plot. The Demo version of Story mode is only there to show what it looks like and to introduce the demo.

and I'm hoping you're only joking about pirating the game too IKEA, apart from the probability of getting banned from this forum for even suggesting it, stealing Airburst Extreme is probably the best way to make sure the Mac only ever gets hand me down games from the PC years after it was popular. (not to mention the whole thing of Adam and I going bankrupt if our games don't sell).

and I'm hoping you're only joking about pirating the game too IKEA, apart from the probability of getting banned from this forum for even suggesting it, stealing Airburst Extreme is probably the best way to make sure the Mac only ever gets hand me down games from the PC years after it was popular. (not to mention the whole thing of Adam and I going bankrupt if our games don't sell).

Why would I put a " :P" smiley next to the sentence, other than to indicate I was joking?

I'm still reelling from getting an apostrophe wrong! In such an abvious place too.

Right, I got the link working. It turned out to be my firewall - everything worked perfectly once I switched it off.

Also, it seems my keyfile isn't working and Airburst (original) is bugging me for a code. Is there any way I can get the code without reregistering or am I going to have to buy another copy of Airburst to get these "features only for registered Airburst users"?

If you registered you original Airburst through us via the old Fairtunes system, send me an email with the original name and email address you registered as and I can send you a copy of your original keyfile.

If you registered via Freeverse and got a code rather than a keyfile, they have an automated system that gets you a new copy of your code, via their website (go to the support link)

I'll try that in a second, but you've given me an idea...

*checks parent's archive of registration emails, maintained RELIGIOUSLY*

Hmm... what's this?

*retrieves keyfile.sit*

*expands keyfile.sit from sit file*

*plonks new keyfile in folder, deletes old*

*notices that the "new" keyfile is half the size of the old one*

IT WORKS! Thanks for that speck of inspiration. Strange Flavour saves the day, and a few quid for me. Joy.

Now, I shall return to the demo, emerging only to eat, sleep, and groan about what happened to my old keyfile.

So is something up with this DNS? It's been 48 hours since you said 24 hours...