MechaSource - Beta SDK Discussion, Develop, share and play games

i hope you understand he's kidding

doesn't matter, it's getting annoying, unnecessary, and Guinea already said there'd be punishment for it either way

If he wasn't kidding I'd have suspended him right away, so no complaints please.


Get back on topic now.

2009

good show mecha

good show

I must say that you have done an extremely good job sticking with this project and never giving up or quiting or growing bored with it. I will certainly try it when it comes out...

Plus having the patience to create/oversee a bunch of launch games in the meantime.

btw was pressure an april fools joke

focus has moved away from Portal for a bit and we're now looking more at Super Mario Coz. GameBoy is a great key to this and will be helping me out a lot once I've got the main engine elements fully completed.

This post has been edited by MechaBowser on Apr 4 2009, 04:32 PM

I will now present to you a little graph that has had relevance to me the last couple of days

You keep asking "why does Mecha not release MS instantly and release the games later?!". Here's the answer.
Around the time I started MechaSource it was slow. Well back then it wasn't slow because I had never tested its capabilities with any projects that required a lot of power.
Then came Portal.
And oh boy did I quickly figure out that the way MechaSource processed functions were slow. I realized I needed some sort of system, some sort of arrangement that could keep track of all objects and easily return them to MechaSource. This is where the MMF interface was taken into use, and the performance rose from lag-hell to no lag at all.
Quickly came all the particles and special effects that I so enjoy, and new limits were set and new bugs unintentionally created.
Soon came Super Mario Coz, and with that, the bugs from Portal quickly reappeared. I was able to isolate the bugs and forward them to RII, who fixed them and everything had a major performance boost. Not only that, but he added the local variables that allows me to get info about objects without having to freeze MechaSource every time for every info.

Result: A total performance boost of 600%. Running old backups of MechaSource makes games like Portal and Coz almost impossible, and the frame rate is about 1/7.
That's a lot. Or should I say a little. If you had x7 the money in your wallet chances are you would be out buying a widescreen TV
or PC
widescreen PC
If you had 1/7 the money in your wallet you'd probably be running home to mama.

anyway everyone loves performance, and hopefully I'll be able to boost it further and further as time passes. If you're still questioning why I'm still waiting until I finish the games, then I'll make another graph that does nothing but show about the same but with different words and then give you a load of other reasons that take basis in the same deal!

Everyone wins!

This post has been edited by MechaBowser on Apr 11 2009, 03:08 PM

If you release a small beta to a few more people though, then you have more Bug Testers who can help you find and fix bugs much faster. I might be able to run it on Linux soon, too, as I am upgrading WINE from V1.1.16 to 1.1.19, which has SEVERAL DirectX Bug Fixes. Hopefully that means I'll be able to run GM6/7 Games too. I suggest giving out the Beta to one or two Linux users with the latest WINE, and have them test MechaSource for bugs, and use MechaSource to test WINE for Bugs. Everybody wins! You don't have to do that if you don't want to, of course.

dunno, don't like the idea of a (most likely) 10 paged error log with so many errors I'll be crying in my sleep and have every linux user on my back telling me to fix them
I prefer just to call it "not designed for Linux"
also I'm already stocked on testers and I prefer to keep it small and simple but thanks anyway

Are you Black Squirrel?

no, we just happen to share the same interest!

I love graphs and carts

I love Graphs and Charts too. Makes everything easy to visualize.

Wow all of this bears striking resemblance to Valve.

When its done release dates
Charts with questionable data sources (see TF2.com)
Obscurity

Mecha is now the indie valve.

not to mention the program itself pretty much is steam with fangames.

wasn't it almost called mechasteam in it's really really early stages

yep, as suggested by Ravan.

Other names: MechaUpdate, MechaWare, MechaShare
and others I forgot

but in the beginning, it was only meant to be a game update program. And only meant to be containing my games.
Then it just kinda evolved from there.

edit: DY, when you're saying MS is just Steam with fangames, you're wrong. Its solo purpose is not just to distribute fangames.

This post has been edited by MechaBowser on Apr 17 2009, 12:37 AM

So mechasource has more changes in the concept than I expected!