Not dead yet!

Sunday, November 16, 2008

I feel happy! I feel happy!

We have been keeping very busy as usual - spending a lot of time dealing with some nasty memory issues and other non-glamorous things. But to keep our spirits up we started on a new game mode, check out the screenshot and maybe you will be able to guess what it is!

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks awesome!

Also for the memory stuff, just make sure to test on a lot of systems, I've seen a lot of indie games have half of there users to crash consistently.

David Marsh said...

It is not anything due to hardware, it is a specific problem with the active X flash control we use for gui's that loves to eat up memory but not release it. We are trying to move over to the flash "plugin" which cleans up it's memory much nicer but it is requiring a lot of work.

E. Elwood said...

That's a nice looking soccer ball. Or foot ball.

David Marsh said...

it's a kart-ball!

Anonymous said...

David, out of curiousity how much RAM does it take in a 16 player race?

David Marsh said...

I can't say exactly, because it depends on which items people are wearing and what level, etc - but if I had to make a price-is-right style estimate I would say around 300 megs

Just last week I converted all our texture assets from .png to .dds files which took our memory usage down a notch.

Anonymous said...

A game like this I think personally needs to run on 512 MB of ram and an equally powerful integrated GPU on a low resolution.

I say that because this should appeal to large audiences outside the "gamer community", and outside that status quo you have low pc specs. Also, if the RAM changes from the amount of items a person is wearing your doing it wrong. Other then that all I'll say is be a programmer and work your magic.

Thanks
-Tom

Jeremy Gonyea said...

It's monster ball from Descent 3!!

David Marsh said...

the reason why what people are wearing matters is because if a lot of people are wearing the same thing then it will take up less memory.

We will have setting that should allow the game to use less memory, such as using lower resolution textures and things like that. That being said, our target market is steam users, of which you can figure out the average pc specs pretty easily: http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

Anonymous said...

This striked me as more of an open-browser, just sign up and install in one button and have fun KartRider type game when I first saw a few videos, later I saw the steam group when I read over the blog across. But I know you shouldn't change everything via an anonymous blog commenter but, when you release the game you should try and make an easy get and go type thing so lets say a 7 year old and can download ZeroGear with a steam account without getting stuck somewhere in between.

This should be done pretty easily with just a simple vimeo video and website setup

Anonymous said...

Eh, sorry I got a little sleepy and I went offtopic and a bit radically idear'd in my drowsiness. Just ignore these 2 posts lol.