Thank you guys!

With this one we'll have average review rating of 75% (gamerankings.com, 7 reviews including the IGN one so far).

So, again, thank you all for being so helpful when the game was being made!!

This is actually one of the first games that didn't got totally smacked by bad reviews Great job!

Cheers

hey by the way here is the german demo where you can play the complete first act. so no one hour only gameplay!

http://www.frogster-interactive.de/downloads40!1.html

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hier gibts die deutsche demo des kompletten ersten akts, also ohne zeitlimitierung!

http://www.frogster-interactive.de/downloads40!1.html

There is also an english version of this one act demo. You can get it here

o_O I'm mentioned under the developers? what have I done? *interested*
(is the Audio.dll mine?)

The game is the first game made with 3DGS where I can not see that it is made with 3DGS with the first view.
Great job.

Tough there are serveral big and small minus points. Some months more development time would have been a good idea.
Biggest minus point are the loading times. Even A6 won't have to reload a whole level only because you change from above floor to the cellar A normal camera switching would be better here.
Additionally there are some other small design faults. The first one I've recognized proptly was that I have to click all the time to move the character. Why am I not allowed to hold the mouse button?

But okay, overall the best game made with 3DGS so far. Respect and Congratz.
Thanks for this game,
Timo Stark

Hi Timo,

yes, we used your public dll plugin, therefore you're in the credits, I hope you don't mind . Keep up the excelent work!

For those of you who wonder about the technical details: Damonica was made about a year ago. We couldn't use compressed textures, no reliable multitexturing shader was available (FYI just the models used for terrains use about 80 MB), there was no reliable bone animation (so each vertex-animated character can take up to 8-10 MB), once allocated assets (bitmaps) could not be removed from the memory, for a panel to have solid background the backrground's uncompressed picture had to loaded into the memory etc. (Other than that - the scripting I did could be better, but I guess no one's perfect and there really isn't an additional Sleep instruction so that you have enough time to really apreciate the beatifull loading screen ).

I'm not very familiar with the latest A6 versions but from what I've seen and tested (using DDS does indeed make a difference) a great step forward was made and some 90% of our problems have been solved. If we were to make the game now, not only would the loading be faster - there would be _no_ loading at all (except the initial one) because all this could fit in memory and many things would work and look better. But such is the life...

As a sidenote - let me just say that I think that the update system that 3DGS uses is very unfortunate. For example: you can see on beta pages that dds support is available. You know that if you used it, it could have extreme impact on how your game works and looks like. But the fact that the dds is available in beta is useless - you can't really be sure if it comes out in weeks, months or even a year and you have deadlines you have to meet with the publisher not giving a damn if your engine is ready or not. I think it has been said numerous time - "use only what is really available". Unfortunately it means that if such a small but critical feature as dds becomes available in beta, you can start to use it say half a year later, making it even harder for the engine catch up with the latest technology (not that dds is anything new ).

In my opinion, if a feature has been tested and is "ready to go", it should become available as soon as possible. There should definitely be more smaller updates. I know if it had been this way, Daemonica would have looked - and to some degree played - better.

Just my two cents...

EDITED: oops, I seem to hijack my own thread. Sorry...

templar, its very interesting to know how you and your team solved certain problems.
our team is using almost the same approach with the models as ground.

this is what i got so far. i used wed to make a block and imported it into med to save it as .mdl i found out you have to use many small blocks for a greater model because if you just use a very big model made out of a large block in wed with only 4 edge vertices a6 displays small gaps between the models. so basically everything is based on a small wed block with a 256 texture on it. the biggest blocks made out of 4x4 of those small blocks use 1024 textures and we wont go higher than that. look here:

http://www.ackbytes.de/upload/pawned2.jpg

dds textures are already available in the latest beta i think. we will use them, the only fear i have is that if i make a level out of those models i may end up haveing like 40 models with different 1024x1024 textures, 20 with 512x512... maybe thats too much?

can you remember how many different ground plates you had in one average level? you stated you did use 512-1024 so that would be pretty similar.

Hey Templer,

Yes with the new features:
str_remove / str_create
pan_remove / pan_create
txt_create / (remove functions is missing atm)
bmap_remove / bmap_create
level_free / level_mark
dds textures

all your problems could be solved. JCL announced some time ago, that they will change their update policy after the final A6.4 release.
I'll request it another time in the ask conitec forum, because your points are really good.

TripleX

PS: Are you a 3DGS-Beta Tester? In this case you could at least test the new features.

Also mir gefällt eines an dem Spiel nicht die lange ladezeit zwischen den Levels
ansonsten sehr gut gelungendes Spiel

@TripleX: no, I'm not a beta tester because otherwise I would definitely be tempted to use some features from beta and rely on them - which could be disasterous if they didn't make it into a public release before the deadline. Also when making Daemonica we had so little time that I had not the luxury of testing many new things and therefore as a betatester I would be of no use