Hey Justin,
I think I might have figured out the problem. It seems if you had played an earlier version of the game that did not have the mouse speed preference, the game is recognizing that you had already played and the basic Prefs were set so it was skipping setting the mouse speed pref at all.
Negligence on my part. Sorry about that and thanks for your patience.
Thank you for your help! There could be other users experiencing the same thing. I think that now I can at least make a fix for it so that won’t happen even if I don’t get why it is happening!
Not sure how that got zeroed out, could it possibly be a shared setting that all Unity games use and one of them sets it to zero? Not really sure how all that works.
At any rate, it works, and will give it a whirl tomorrow. Thanks for the help!
Justin, thanks for the effort you’re going through to try this. I’d like to ask you to try opening the options menu (from the main menu) and changing the mouse sensitivity. Maybe it is an issue with the preferences and the mouse sensitivity preference is somehow getting set to zero on your machine. If that were to fix the problem I would at least know where the issue is stemming from.
Thanks.
Hey, no dice on any of those solutions. Even redownloading a fresh copy, I have the same problem. I may have to just try it at work on the lunch break, perhaps a different computer will not have the bug.
Justin, if what I suggest below doesn’t work, you could try downloading and playing v 1.0 – even if not for the judging I would like to know if the problem exists there too.
Here’s the link: http://www.ramdreams.com/UDG08ChasmBowling.dmg
Wow, that’s bad news! I haven’t seen or heard about that before and can’t imagine what is causing it.
The game has shortcuts in it to skip to scenes. When you start in scene one, please press 2, 3 or 4 to skip to those scenes and see if the player works right in them.
Other than that, if you haven’t tried deleting the copy you have and redownloading it, it might be worth the time to try that out.
Again, this is the first I have heard of the problem and don’t know where I would begin troubleshooting it as I can’t reproduce the problem here…
Hey Ben, you don’t have a feedback thread at iDG so I’m posting this here:
I can’t seem to turn around once the game starts. I can look up and down by moving the mouse vertically, but cannot look left and right with mouse horizontally. I’m playing version 1.1.
I’m going to hold off on voting just in case there’s a fix or a workaround but as it is I can barely get into the game! Not being able to look around means I fall into the pits almost immediately. Let me know if there’s a fix or something that I’m missing!
Thanks, Matthew for the feedback. They are good points. I did want to implement a better system of point reporting but as I don’t have standardized pin formations, I thought that I would need more stages than just “strike” and “spare” and wasn’t able to come up with a good system on time for the contest – also, the biggest programming struggle was getting the pins to behave well and tell the game when they fell. So while doing a formation by formation pin count is a great idea and doable, I haven’t been able to implement it yet.
Having a 3D character bowling would be great but I think it would be very difficult to do it well so that it didn’t detract from the game – if well done it would make the game better, I think, but if not well done, it would make it worse.
And as to the ball controls – I got caught by the convention bug on that one! You are right that using the mouse as you describe would be better (and as I have been doing iPhone stuff in Unity I should have known to go with that!). Maybe I’ll try to implement that as the standard option and have the power bar as an alternative and get a new build up before the voting period ends.
I have a few other projects I need to put some hours into first though – and lots more voting to do!
Thanks again for the feedback.
Hi Ben, I like the game a lot. The graphic look and concept for the game are very nice. I found the first level very fun. I kept falling off of platforms or hitting the hoops on the second. Several suggestions.
I would like a 3rd person perspective with an avatar to give me a better understanding of where I am within the environment. I find it difficult to navigate treacherous bridges, walk to the edge of platforms, and jump through flaming hoops without one.
A better concept of how the score works. Other than a small congratulatory message, I don’t feel rewarded for a strike or spare.
The instructions on the first level tell you to use the arrow keys to move, but you introduce jumping with the spacebar in the second level. The keys are awkwardly placed for this. I noticed you have the w a s d keys for movement too. Much better to get people using these so the spacebar works for them.
Lastly, like Lincoln, I’m not nuts about the timed power bar. Its become a bit of a convention in this type of game, so I found it easy enough to use. I just never liked the convention. I am a big fan of wii sports. I know you don’t have the luxury of a wiimote for this, but there are some cool tricks you could do with the mouse to get a better physical bowling feel for the game. For instance, you could mouse down to start your swing, then move the mouse to swing your arm, then release the button to let go of the ball. The distance you moved the mouse and speed as you release determines the power of the shot. You could even use the angle of your mouse move to create spin on the ball. Get this working well, and I would buy this game.
A little of both, I think. On the one hand, it’s frustrating to have to completely restart, but on the other hand, as long as you’re careful, you shouldn’t have too much of a problem. I like how it looks enough to get past that, but some other gamers may not.
As for the time issue, regardless of how fast it is on my computer, if you’re not multiplying by Time.deltaTime and FixedUpdate() is not time-based, it will go faster and slower based on the framerate, so someone on a fast computer could find it rather impossible.
I read in the docs about FixedUpdate and Time.deltaTime but wasn’t able to convince myself either way so I posted the question on the Unity forum.
At any rate, if people are having trouble playing it because it is so fast, I’ll certainly need to make some changes. Lincoln, is it a “I want to throw this blasted machine across the room ‘cause this power meter is being such a pain the …” or is it something that is hard to get used to but can be reasonably painlessly adapted to?
Thanks.
Actually I am still much a newbie myself – I’ve just been a newbie for a long time…
You may be right about needing to multiply by time.deltaTime.
Off I go to look it up!
Hmm, I wouldn’t know.
Also, I wasn’t aware that FixedUpdate() was called based on time; I thought you had to multiply by Time.deltaTime to be time-based rather than frame-based.
That said, I’m the newbie and you’re the pro, I’m gonna’ go look that up.
Either way, I love this game; keep it up.
Thanks for the feedback, Lincoln. A and C are good points and I may well add those changes. As to B, part of the challenge is getting the timing of shooting the ball right. The code for the power meter is in a FixedUpdate so I think it should be a standard time, but I could be wrong. On my machine it takes about on second to get to full power. Is the power loop happening on your machine so quickly that getting the timing right is just not doable?
