Score Rush - 2010-NOV Trailer (Xbox LIVE Indie Games; Shmup; Shoot 'Em Up; 2D Shooter; STG)

[zydricpurdy]

people at register.com were talking about this game and that a guy from town made it...gotta say its pretty good

[matthewdoucette]

@zydricpurdy Very cool, thanks!

[DJBonseye]

cool!

[qaanalyst]

Woot - just scored 51.66 million! :)

[JDoucette]

@qaanalyst Great :) Onward to 100 million!!!

[qaanalyst]

@JDoucette

Yay, just got over 100 million! Next task - beat the game to unlock all the other difficulties. :)

[JDoucette]

@qaanalyst Woohoo! Remember you can get friends to help you on that challenge. ;)

[matthewdoucette]

@qaanalyst Not bad not bad!!

[rudiwolleri]

HOLY SHIT.

[JDoucette]

@rudiwolleri Ha ha ha, great response. "I'd buy that for a dollar" comes to mind. Maybe this should be our tag line, haha. :P

[matthewdoucette]

@rudiwolleri I like this reaction!

[qaanalyst]

It's out now. I just downloaded it. I didn't even bother with the trial and just bought the game, as Xona knows their shit when it comes to shooters (sorry, hate the term, shmups). BUY THIS PEOPLE!

[JDoucette]

@qaanalyst Thanks!! :D I prefer "shooter" myself too, but we may hurt ourselves using that since the public now thinks of FPS's when they hear "shooter". So I prefer "shoot em up" now. But to each his own! ;)

[qaanalyst]

@JDoucette

Yeah, "shoot em up" works for me, too. :) This game would have even been better with leaderboards. :) Any reason why it wasn't able to be added?

[JDoucette]

@qaanalyst Indie Games are not allowed Leaderboards, we aren't even allowed to use the word "leaderboard" for our own P2P score sharing hacks. I assume you're referring to the P2P hacks, and I've found they cause frame skips which ruin all the efforts I've placed into allowing fine tune precision of control and 60 fps without frame skips.... but.... a LOT of people are requesting them... so... this weekend I'm having another look. No promises, but maybe a less extreme solution may work.

[qaanalyst]

@JDoucette

I don't even know what P2P is. ;) Yeah, according to a couple of the posters on neogaf, there are a couple of indie games that do support leaderboards: MotorHEat and radiangames Fireball.

[JDoucette]

@qaanalyst P2P is peer to peer sharing, and Indie Games MIMIC leaderboards by connecting to other players in multiplayer games in the background (sometimes you can hear their voices, haha) just to share scores, not to play an actual game. Leaderboards is a Microsoft term for their Leaderboards. We have no access to them. Neogaf is talking about P2P scoreboards, not leaderboards.

[j0mb13]

It's 12:59am PST where is it?!?! hehe

[matthewdoucette]

@j0mb13 LOL!!!!!! It's out now! Check the description for the link!

[FireballFlame]

Now this is bullet hell!

0:41 reminded me of Touhou :]

[matthewdoucette]

@FireballFlame Hahaha yes it is!! At least a North American version of bullet hell!!

[Xalterax]

Their engine is a beautiful thing to behold. After dealing with TorqueX choking far far far less, I remain envious. I am convinced you need to make it yourself or there will be too much unoptimized code. Having played this, I was not a fan of shmups per-say. I am now. =)

[matthewdoucette]

@Xalterax Thank you. Jason will be pleased by that comment I'm sure! And I hope we capture a few non shmup fans in the mix. It's a hard thing to do. Most often than not you lose both the shmup fan and the general gamer when you try to capture them both. only a select few have bridged that gap. geo wars is a noteworthy effort on this.

[PixelOutlaw]

That looks amazing!

It seems like the hardware is great for tossing around particles.

Just out of curiosity, have you guys tried to max out the machine with a bullet hell sprite test?

Anyway, it is great to see your work again.

[matthewdoucette]

@PixelOutlaw We have pushed it to its limits. Some of what you see here is close. The engine is actually heavily optimized, and it doesn't take much to break 60fps in XNA on an Xbox 360. Some shmup devs only have a hundred objects on screen before it happesn (unoptimized of course). We are still entertaining more optimizations to push it further. Hope you and the Shmups Forum crew like it! Decimation X3 is coming soon too!

[Th3dz]

@matthewdoucette I always feel collision kills performance the most. When I've tried maxing out on bullets I can get a lot of them, but with collision on, not quite so many. I guess it comes down to ruling out what possibly cannot collide. Of course, inlining coding certainly helps too! So what is the magic number of bullets that makes it skip a frame? :)

[matthewdoucette]

@Th3dz Of course. When discussing performance, when someone says "bullets" they mean "bullets with collision". Drawing just bullets is relatively easy to do in large quatities without a performance drop. It's the calculations that kill you.

As for the magic number, there is none! Depends on how many players, their powerups, how many enemies on screen, how many enemy bullets, how many player bullets, etc. All of them can tip the 60fps limit! Plus, you'd have to ask Jason! :)

[matthewdoucette]

@Th3dz Oh yeah, not to mention to depends also on particles, explosions, dead enemies, etc. Lots and LOTS of stuff happening on screen. Each fighting for a piece of that 1/60th of a second pie.

[TrueSoreThumb]

@matthewdoucette Your optimization coding logic.

Give it to me.

I want to know how to handle that many objects, and what most other developers don't do when it comes to saving CPU cycles!

[matthewdoucette]

@TrueSoreThumb Again, you have to ask Jason. Not sure if we'll be sharing it before we make use of it ourselves though. Jason's Duality engine (Duality ZF, Score Rush engines) won a technical excellence award for being so powerful. And, Jason just envisioned an even cooler optimization that we may implement for Duality ZF, but certainly will afterwards. This is only the beginning!!!

[ZacharyB]

@TrueSoreThumb

I'm no programmer, but would it be faster to only draw the collision boxes for those bullets closest to the player?

[TrueSoreThumb]

@ZacharyB The thing is, collision boxes aren't drawn, they're checked-- but I suppose it makes a bit more sense to check only those within X distance of the player. But not all the optimizations can some from just this.

[matthewdoucette]

@ZacharyB Problem is, how do you know if they are close? if you are doing a distance check, well then just do a distance check to see if they are so close that they are htting the player, job done. You can't optimize out something with checks that are more or equally intensive. that said, there's creative solutions to doing everything faster. it's what seperates the men from the boys so to speak.

[Snip3rFire]

I need to buy some points... how much will it be?

[Snip3rFire]

@Snip3rFire 80 points, just saw the end of the video.