TERRA0NOVA'S PROFILE

Just beat the game (awesome job, by the way), and that bug didn't appear since act four, and going back I am having trouble reproducing it. I did copy the files into the same folder the demo was in, so that could've been the problem. I guess that will just be a phantom bug - perhaps it had something to do with my save file from the demo?

My only other comments on the game is that it moves too quickly and ends too soon :P . So much left unanswered - leaves room for a sequel lol. You know a game is awesome when you don't want it to end - I think I agree with Craze that this is the best 2k3 game out there.

Ok, I am now in phase 6, and I have some bug reports and suggestions.

First, there is a glitch that causes the phase placeholder character to appear in your party at seemingly random points in the game. While this doesn't sound like a big problem, the placeholder character is always first in the party, and so you use it's walk sprite (nothing). This problem goes away when you save the game - but you might have to walk for quite a while "blind" feeling around for doors before you get to the nearest save point. I noticed this most in acts 4 and 5, hasn't happened yet in act 6, which is good, because the underwater facility was tough enough to traverse.

The boss battles with scott in act 5 were very tough - mainly because I hardly use scott and hadn't really leveled him up much. I have a pretty much perfect combo going with Leon, Erin and Celia, but it was tough getting scott, dread and jake to take down the guy with the vaders (I choose them because I needed as much HP as possible, I tried using indy... dead from their basic hit). I was very relieved to get my party of choice back at the end of act 5 and act 6.

Finally, the underground water facility (1) is very difficult. Unlike all of the other maps, traversing randomly is hopeless, you will eventually get stuck. If the water level is empty, and you are back at the start, you are stuck and have to exit and re-enter the area. Finally, I had to map out the area and eventually figured my way around the area and the effect of the teleporters well enough to locate every area on the map - and it was the last reachable area (I believe) where I found what I needed to continue :P. The main fix I would have on that level is to make it so you don't get stuck in the first area where whether you go left or right, you can't get down from the channels when the water level is low. Also, I don't like how shift doesn't work underwater... when lost underwater, there is no avoiding repeated battles every x steps.

Ok, I was planning on fixing the problem in Firefox 3, figured it was probably some input problem since the keyboard and mouse were not working. I opened the game in Firefox 3, skipped the intro immediately, and then tried to move. And it worked. Trying to reproduce the error, I waited about the same amount of time as I did last time, then skipped the intro. And it would not work. The menu would not open either, which meant that the game was paused (it pauses the game for the intro, then unpauses it - there must be some race condition where it unpauses it when you click skip intro, and pauses it based on a timed script in firefox 3). This problem does not exist in chrome or firefox2, which must mean that firefox 3 has some multi-threaded javascript issues (there are no threads or synchronization in javascript, but some browsers when an event is fired run javascript in a new thread, allowing variables to be modified at the same time).

The quick fix is to either watch the whole intro (it should run faster the second time you watch it), or to skip it immediately. As I fix up the code, I will see if I can fix this problem, although it's going to be more difficult than just handling input from a new browser.

@Radnen - Try the game out. It's pretty fast in good browsers (firefox, chrome, safari). Basically, any browser with a good JS engine runs the game well (so, not IE). In IE, it runs pretty well, you might have to disable tile animations, as those probably hit the performance the most when the scene is full of water. And yes, MMOs are possible, although ajax is not very fast, so I would probably need to use a java applet to get fast enough networking for an MMO. And, theoretically, there are not operating system limitations, but there are slight differences between browsers in different operating systems, so I can't guarantee that without testing it in lots of browsers on lots of OS :P .

@GameOverGames - Yea, I didn't use any HTML 5, as no browser supports it fully, and right now browsers tend to only support a subset of the features. I might be able to improve performance by using HTML 5, but performance is not much of an issue, and the game can run in pretty old browsers (like IE 5). It's pretty much all absolute positioned divs (relative to a container), and DOM javascript, which avoids browser dependencies and rendering differences. If you'd like to help program, even if you can only help a little, that would be appreciated. Right now, I am fixing up the HTML tactics engine, making it more flexible, object oriented and customizable, so I could definitely use help and bug fixing with that.

@GreatRedSpirit - Haha. I'll have to be careful once I start writing the PHP code to make sure there are no injection attacks :P .

Haha, I've seen these in quite a few RPGMaker games I've played, but never really knew where they were from. Being overused isn't bad (as standard graphics from rpg makers are usually overused), but having pixel artists to make unique graphics for use in the engine would be best (but obviously a lot more work).