Programming: Beanie Fighter
Posted by llemarie on March 23, 2008
Live greetings from Breakpoint!
After a year of on and off development, with serious on development in the last few months, I finally got to submit my new 96KB game entry for Breakpoint. It ended up in a huge anti-climax, when nobody else submitted an entry and the 96KB game competition had to be canceled. The game was shown in glorious 12m wide 1080p though, in front of a great crowd!
I also gave a seminar, called Multicore Mayhem, presenting a technique for distributing code to the available CPUs. The video will be available on the Breakpoint website after the event.
Update: Due to a technical problem during the recording, the video is not available unfortunately…
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Download the game here.
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llemarie's weblog 
merlucin said
Hi Lionel! I was amazed the previous year with your game, and the feeling still continued this year while watching it in the big screen. Don’t worry about the lack of entries in the breakpoint, I am sure that you have the glory that you deserve, at least from my side 🙂
I couldn’t find you at the event, I will try the next year… 😦
llemarie said
Thanks Merlucin, hope to see you next year. If you’re looking for me at the Breakpoint venue, msg me on http://www.party or catch me on irc.party, I’m not hiding (:
Lionel.
GaJiN said
Hey Hikey,
gimme your email so I can send you screens from Beanie showing bugs on my pc…
Cheers!
llemarie said
Hi GaJiN,
You can mail me at beanie@hikey.org , thanks!
Lionel.
Silver said
HI!
Love the game, but i was wondering if there was any reason i was getting the black walls, they seem to just be loading areas(as i can go through them and eventually disappear until the textures appear) i move just fine in the loaded areas but the game just doesn’t load fast enough to even be able to beat level 3.
Is there anything i can do for this? i have already set all the quality options low.
Thanks -Silver
llemarie said
Hi Silver,
GaJiN above was reporting the exact same bug. I understand that in his case the loading was so slow that even level 1 was unplayable.
The problem, as I discussed with him by email, is that the level is cut into “rooms” which are roughly 1/4 the size of the screen and loaded in a background thread. On some machines (even fast ones), the thread doesn’t seem to run fast enough to load the rooms in time for the character to go through them.
I’ve made a new build of Beanie Fighter which may improve the room generation:
http://llemarie.googlepages.com/BeanieFighter-RamzesXIII.exe
The clouds are not dynamic in this version, but you can leave the textures to high, it shoudn’t make a difference.
Please let me know if it works for you.
Best regards,
Lionel.
Silver said
It looks like its going faster than before but its still not quick enough to advance any farther than the previous one. Looking past this bug, it really is a good game and concept. I hope this can be cleared up soon.
-Silver
llemarie said
Hi Silver,
I’d made a mistake in the code this morning. I’ve uploaded a new build at the same address above, please give it a try if you have time and let me know.
The issue is that it runs fine on my machines, so I can’t tell if there’s an improvement or not, I can only try to guess what the problem might be and blindly fix it.
Best regards,
Lionel.
Silver said
Works perfect now! thanks for fixing it, I’m addicted
llemarie said
Hi Silver,
Thanks for the good feedback! I’m glad you like the game (:
Thanks very much to both of you, Silver and GaJiN, for helping me fixing the game, it’s not easy to do when the problem only happen on other people’s machines.
Lionel.
koanoy said
Hi Llemarie,
When I try to open the game, my antivirus says that there is a trojan horse in the game. Can you fix it? Thanks 😀
llemarie said
Hi,
I’m sorry, I cannot fix that. The point of the game is that it fits in 96KB, so it is using an executable packer (kkrunchy). The packer (which essentially compresses the game executable into an auto-extracting archive) is flagged by some virus scanners for some reason.
Best regards,
Lionel.