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GOLGOTHA DEMO 5 README
- Excuses and Lies -
This is a demo, not an alpha, beta, not anything
we think resembles the completedness or competetiveness of a finished product. This
section explains some of the problems you may have with this demo and talks a little
about where we plan to go next.
Troubleshooting (Excuses):
3DFX broke: You may have a Voodoo Rush card. Delete glide2x.dll from the
installed Golgotha directory. Should work.
Explosion Probs: Every little shard of explosion has an accompanying smoke trail of 8
to 10 polygons. A lot of simultaneous explosions can make your system run out of memory
and crash.
Disappeaing Smoke Trails: Smoke trails sometimes won't show up.
Supertank Not Selected: When you build a supertank, it won't be automatically
selected. Need to do it manually.
Crash on Production Pad: If you have filled up over 3 production pads with vehicles
and order up a jump jet or helicopter, the game will crash as it tries to put it on the
"5th" square (which doesn't exist).
Jets and Trikes Lose Control: After either of these vehicles targets an enemy, these
vehicles will not be controllable from then on.
Helicopters Suck When Right Above: The turning radius on guided missiles is quite
large. Helicopters can not hit vehicles right below them very well.
Flimsy Buildings: Vehicles will pass through buidlings in the name of path-finding.
Compatibility Problems: Requires DirectX 5.0. You can find the English drivers at
the Microsoft DirectX page.
Sounds Cutting Out: Only 8 simultaneous sound effects. They will sometimes cut out.
Just Darned Effective Engineering Vehicles: When an engineering vehicle enters the map tile
containing a takeover pad, it will take over the pad without having to drive to it.
Flickering Objects: If there are too many objects on the screen, they will start to flicker
because there are too many to draw at once.
Undrawn Edges in Strategy View: In Strategy View, the edges of the view area will commonly
not draw.
Path-finding: Formations don't go immediately to where you send them. They may
back up some.
Steep Slopes: Formations can get stuck on steep slopes.
Install Problems: The game requires almost 40Mb of hard drive space. Make
sure you have it.
Numlock: If you can't seem to fire your supertank weapons or use other
numeric keypad keys, hit the [Num Lock] key.
Queued-up Formations: It's meant to be a feature, but may appear to be a bug. But right now
you can have no cash, summon up several formations, and tell each one where to go,
and as you make the cash, those formations will slowly appear then automatically
leave the pad and head where you told them to. If your units don't seem to be
building anymore or leaving the pad, watch your cash for a while. You may have
spazzed out and summoned up one or more formations of vehicles.
Other Production Problems: Formations will not appear on the production pad
if other vehicles are on the pad. Move them off first.
Missing Supertank: Supertank blends in pretty badly with the production pads,
especially in double-pixel mode. If it's missing but apparently alive, it might
be there.
Formation Travel Problems: The artificial intelligence and path-solving code
for the formations is brand spanking new, relatively untested. Your formations will
behave a little strangely but will usually get to where you want them to go.
Hybrid Ground-Air Formations: Don't group air vehicles like helicopters and jump
jets with ground vehicles. Silly things happen.
Egypt: Egypt has trouble with the AI right now, especially in the city.
Jerky Movie: The movies are jerky.
Mouse Trails: We've seen the mouse leave trails on some video cards.
Supertank Undead: When the supertank dies, sometimes his ARMOR doesn't go to zero.
He's probably dead if he doesn't come when you call him (hit TAB or BACKSPACE).
Crappy Sky on 3DFX: The sky on the 3DFX is low-resolution.
Textures Res In: Textures often start out low-res and "res in" to a higher
resolution.
The Future (Lies):
This section is by Dave Taylor so that he can take full responsibilty for this painful subject instead of
the company.
"Like it or not, game developers and lies are permanent bedfellows. We all try to keep from doing it, but this
industry was built on the shoulders of high school and college drop-outs, so it's all the fault of truancy
officers, steep tuition, and really stunningly bad professors.
The above listed bugs are all fixable and not limitations of your hardware. The cost of fixing each one
varies. We seem to have an endless list of features to add and bugs to squash on Golgotha. We don't
like to commit to any one particular bug fix or feature because we might commit to the wrong ones, find
out they're too hard, and end up out of money or behind schedule. Your only assurance is that we're working
as hard as we can, often working weekends and into the wee hours, trying to make a game that we think is
as kick-butt as we can make it. Though by no means wealthy, we're still self-funded, so I think we're in
better shape to make killer games properly than the other guys. We have recently gotten really excited about
Golgotha's progress. We feel Demo 5 is a huge improvement over Demo 4. We're seeing the kernel of a damn
sweet game in this demo.
With that in mind, listed here are some of the issues we plan to address before we master:
Color Reproduction: We've noticed the colors look pretty drab, washed-out.
We're pretty sure this is due to an ambitious image compression scheme we attempted
on textures. We plan to remove this and store textures in full 565 16-bit color.
Texture Management: The texture manager is pretty broken. It needs rewriting. This
is why you see textures "res in" all the time, and why the textures seem fairly low-res
even though we actually have extremely high-resolution textures (often 512x512). We
exploited this problem in the demo by shipping no textures larger than 64x64. Made the
demo a lot smaller. The texture manager will almost certainly be rewritten.
Install Proggy: We intend to update the install proggy so that you don't need to
use a file extractor. So you run one proggy, it installs everything, runs the game,
no worries. If we write our own, we can use the same one for Linux as for Windows.
Linux Stuff: Need to write a masm-to-gas translator so that we can get high-speed Linux
software rendering. Also need to add sound & GGI support.
Big Gameplay Mods: Formation creation will become paramount. Timed release capsules are a
priority, and support for formation macros will keep your mind off micro-managing formations and focused
on protecting them in the supertank and wreaking havoc on the bad guy.
Missing Content: There should be 20 levels (20 to go), 20 level scores (7 to go), 20 vehicles (10
to go), 10 special buildings (8 to go), 20 engine movies (20 to go), 20 engine movie scores (20 to go),
and 20 comic book frames (20 to go). The content often waits until the very end when you're trying to do
a game that dances on the leading edge.
Control Optimizations: Of paramount importance, honing the user interface will take time, and
of course also needs to support a complete remapping by the user.
AI and Path-Solving: Both still in their infancy, these should improve quite a bit.
Multiplayer Support: Also in its infancy, but we have grand designs.
We Broke A3D Support: Dunno what we did, but it broke. Sorry.
Level of Detail: A real bitch, but we would like to get a better view, further towards the
horizon, when in the Action View. This basically begs level of detail optimizations, which are
just pretty darned tough and take a lot of time to do right algorithmically.
Optimizations: We are talking about doing hand-tuned assembly K6 and K6-3D
optimized versions. May do this for various peripherals out there, too.
Direct3D: Almost had it solid for this demo, but there's clearly something we don't understand
about it... like... why it doesn't work.
Engine Movie: The engine movie editor is shaping up well but needs a lot of mods to support
the elaborate plot.
Status Bars & Radar: These aren't final. 8 vehicles is probably not enough per level in
the later levels. The radar needs a little clarification and brightening. Also need a tool
to help navigate in the Action View.
Well, that's about the extent of my lies for now. I would now like to rant a bit. It is extremely difficult to
be an independent game company in today's market without a sugar daddy. We feel we're a dying
breed. We really like the feel of being on our own. We enjoy our jobs more, can make executive design decisions
right here, and still think that we can write better games than our competition. But the game publishing system
doesn't work on these principles and
threatens to squash indies on a daily basis. Small game developers are either selling out, becoming contractors for
a big publisher, or just plain folding at a record rate.
So actually, I'm not ranting, I'm asking for a favor.
It helps a lot if you have some convenient way to show your
support, even if it's just an e-mail saying you dig what we're doing or a suggestion or contact to help us out. For instance,
we really appreciate the loads of support from Linux fans on our recent announcement that we're publishing Linux
Golgotha through Red Hat. That was just completely not necessary yet completely cool. Likewise, if you get this demo
and dig it, please recommend it to someone. It's that sort of simple favor which can translate into the bucks to keep
us alive and independent for our next title. Enough soap-boxing. Thanks for playing Golgotha Demo 5!"
The following sections have more detailed help with labelled screenshots:
There's even more about Golgotha and Crack dot Com. Click on one of the links below to go to the Crack
dot Com web site or check out the It's Golgotha Dammit
and Golgotha Connection web sites.
- Main Crack Page - Golgotha - Abuse -
- Crack News - Press Releases - Corporate Information - Crack Employment Opportunities -
- CrackCam - Employee Fingers - Homepages - Contact Crack - Crack Links -
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