Author Topic: Axe Contest poll and judging starts  (Read 76050 times)

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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #180 on: September 24, 2010, 06:19:15 pm »
Yeah I am happy that certain of the people that focused too much on the troublemaking decided to move on from that stuff and focus again on the most important part: calcs, and I am happy that newer users in general focuses on constructive stuff as well. Hopefully next year there are even more releases. I am curious if most contest entries will get finished, because there are quite a bit of stuff in there that could deserve a feature if finished, IMHO. Those programs would attract more people in the community.

Offline Michael_Lee

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #181 on: September 24, 2010, 08:04:36 pm »
Well in 2008 the community went through some bad shit. A lot of people turned against Omni because of our anti-trolling policies and because a lot of good people left around 2007, a lot of the people that remained around were people who did not care much about the communtiy and troublemakers. This lead to Omnimaga demise and then there was an increased amount of people losing interest for calc stuff since it seemed like it no longer mattered how much work you devoted on games/softwares for the community. All that mattered was if you advocated trolling behavior then you were considered as cool. In addition to that, Cemetech was still recovering from the Jatol incident so besides UTI, there wasn't much activity elsewhere. 2008 was the year there was no z80 POTY, btw.

Quick question: what was the Jatol incident?
My website: Currently boring.

Projects:
Axe Interpreter
   > Core: Done
   > Memory: Need write code to add constants.
   > Graphics: Rewritten.  Needs to integrate sprites with constants.
   > IO: GetKey done.  Need to add mostly homescreen IO stuff.
Croquette:
   > Stomping bugs
   > Internet version: On hold until I can make my website less boring/broken.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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« Last Edit: September 24, 2010, 08:10:27 pm by DJ Omnimaga »

Offline Michael_Lee

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #183 on: September 24, 2010, 08:13:14 pm »
...
o.O
How horrible.
My website: Currently boring.

Projects:
Axe Interpreter
   > Core: Done
   > Memory: Need write code to add constants.
   > Graphics: Rewritten.  Needs to integrate sprites with constants.
   > IO: GetKey done.  Need to add mostly homescreen IO stuff.
Croquette:
   > Stomping bugs
   > Internet version: On hold until I can make my website less boring/broken.

Offline Darl181

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #184 on: September 24, 2010, 08:14:08 pm »
Good thing most of the 'new people' that are still in high school are less inclined to be of that spammer/troller/etc type.  Of the people that I know that have a ti calc, it's only the kinder and (for lack of a better word) wiser bunch who knew about any of the calc websites.  They'd be too busy with their phone or something.  And anyway, most of the people who go to ticalc.org and/or other calc-related websites (such as this one, cemetech, etc.) probably go just to download games.  They probably don't know a thing about how the files are made, or the people who made them.
Vy'o'us pleorsdti thl'e gjaemue

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #185 on: September 24, 2010, 08:28:23 pm »
...
o.O
How horrible.
Indeed. This is why I have an hard time trusting other web hosting providers nowadays and why I initially thought about moving to Surpasshosting. 1and1 and Surpasshosting were around for years and I doubt they'll vanish anytime soon. When/if I move to that hostfolks thing, I'll backup more frequently I think, in case, plus I'm keeping my 1and1 account so it can still be useful in case of emergency. Another thing that I saw happening with some hosts is data loss. They would have a server crash or poor manipulation and would lose all your stuff. In 1and1 case, I only suffered data loss once due to 1and1 fault: only around 2 days of posts on TIMGUL in October 2008.

Good thing most of the 'new people' that are still in high school are less inclined to be of that spammer/troller/etc type.  Of the people that I know that have a ti calc, it's only the kinder and (for lack of a better word) wiser bunch who knew about any of the calc websites.  They'd be too busy with their phone or something.  And anyway, most of the people who go to ticalc.org and/or other calc-related websites (such as this one, cemetech, etc.) probably go just to download games.  They probably don't know a thing about how the files are made, or the people who made them.
Well to be honest this doesn't matter. I know trolls that were 13, 18, 25 and even 30 years old. Some people are just rude by nature and don't want to change, and some people just love to cause trouble or to discourage programmers. Fortunately they are not as frequent nowadays. On ticalc.org, back then there were like 200 comments on news articles and only 170 were not spam.

Offline ztrumpet

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #186 on: September 24, 2010, 09:24:16 pm »
It's great that the community's so active.
As an update, there have been 40 people vote in the poll. :)

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #187 on: September 24, 2010, 10:34:32 pm »
Yeah. I was happy when things started to pick up last Winter. 2 years ago many would have thought that the days where many new great games would come out in one year were over and when Omni restarted, we thought activity would remain between 400-1000 posts in a month forever.

Also nice to see there are still some votes. Hopefully I should be able to start judging tomorrow. I will probably post my personal comments on the games and if an improvement I wish that happened did not happen since the deadline, I'll suggest it.

Offline Deep Toaster

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #188 on: September 25, 2010, 10:23:38 pm »
...
o.O
How horrible.

Wow, that absolutely sucks... Is that why some Cemetech topics are all jumbled up now?




Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #189 on: September 25, 2010, 10:39:05 pm »
No, that was caused by a server hacking back in early 2005. Back then they used Designerz-Core. Kerm managed to backup from a corrupted database but all posts are messed up.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #190 on: September 26, 2010, 06:35:08 am »
Ok so I have begun judging contest entries! I will probably wait until posting the scores, though, because I do not want to influence other judges or people votes, but I will most likely give criticism and comments on each entries in the next few posts.

This is how score is broken up:
Originality - 20/20 (If the author received too much help on his entry or if it was a team project. Also includes if the game is just a generic game you find on ticalc.org everywhere, with no innovation.)
Gameplay/Controls - 20/20 (includes speed)
Graphics - 20/20
Entertainment factor - 20/20
Useability - 20/20 (if game bug/errors hinders gameplay/usage, if the game is a major PITA to start, if it's easy to get used to it, if it crashes every second or so)

I have judged 5 entries so far and I enjoyed all of them. of course there will be criticism of every single entry since I have to judge them and give scores in many areas, but there are quite a bunch that will remain on my calc (or I will download updates) when I am completly done with judging. So far here is what I have below. I hidden it with a spoiler for people who want to wait at the end of the contest to see. Click it to reveal what I have so far:

Spoiler For Spoiler:
Minesweeper, by Michael Lee
Originality - A minesweeper clone, but with many features not present in most ticalc.org clones at once
Gameplay/Controls - Fast, except scrolling and menu selection is a bit hard due to the way key delay is handled. Nice controls and easy to use game.
Graphics - Beautiful 3 level grayscale graphics. The grayscale vanishes completly during scrolling, though, and in this contest-submitted version, there are some display glitches. Menus are well layed-out.
Entertainment factor - Great replay value and should entertain any puzzle/minesweeper fan.
Useability - If there are bugs, they did not seem to hinder gameplay except once, where I had all flags but game would not end. I did not get constant crashes. It would be nice if cancelling in the option menu did not exit the entire game, though, but instead, returned to the main menu.

Splut, by Ikkerens
Originality - This would have gotten a very huge 20/20 because the game by itself is very original and I never saw anything like that for the calculator before, but since it is a team project (the levels were done by someone else), there is a penalty of 5 points on originality.
Gameplay/Controls - Key detection is way too fast, making it nearly impossible to choose stuff in the menus and inside the game, it makes it extremly hard to control your character. The control choice is fine, though.
Graphics - Awesome, perfect graphics in-game and nice menu layout. This gets a perfect score.
Entertainment factor - If this wasn't for the key detection being too sensitive, making the player give up faster, this would get max score. The difficulty for levels besides that is very good and there are levels that are easy enough for beginners and hard enough for experts, with multiple difficulty settings.
Useability - Took a while to get used to and I had some crashes on exiting in the contest-submitted version, from time to time. Besides that and the key detection issues, the game should be easy to use.

Jump, by Ztrumpet
Originality - An interesting platformer concept. Simple but pretty efficient.
Gameplay/Controls - Not too bad, except that there seems to be collision detection issues when falling on the edge of the next platform (you fall through the floor). Also, having to press 2nd to see the score and being forced to input a name is pretty annoying when you want to replay immediately afterward. At first, when I died, I thought my calc froze. Other than that, controls are pretty good and simple.
Graphics - Simple but nice at the same time. Smooth framerate and nice block jumping animation
Entertainment factor - Extremly addicting. It would be even more if going through the score/game over screens was not this long.
Useability - It only loses one point due to the score/game over screen issue and the collision detection problem, but it is not enough to hinder gameplay that much.

Blur, by FinaleTI

Originality - Tunnel game clone, although there's an easter egg and unlike most other tunnel games, this one scrolls left instead of up/down.
Gameplay/Controls - Not too bad, although a bit hard and if you trigger the easter egg, it is barely even playable.
Graphics - Kinda simple, although they do the job well.
Entertainment factor - Some easier difficulty modes and/or increasing difficulty, starting from something a bit easier (larger road) would be nice. Kinda entertaining/addicting for a while, though.
useability - No bugs and errors. It may just need some difficulty adjusting.

Wacky fun Random Numbar Generator, by Snake X v1.0000069
Originality - Number guessing game.
Gameplay/Controls - Quite slow-paced but controls are OK otherwise.
Graphics - None
Entertainment factor - It can be addicting for a while, especially for people who expect to see Nick Disabato password for real, but it gets boring after a while since it's just a guessing game.
Useability - If someone ports WFRNG to another calc or language, it would at least be nice if it did not have bugs... WAIT! Bugs in a GUESSING GAME?? Ok. Well it's still a classic I guess :-P. The Game.

More will come soon!
« Last Edit: September 26, 2010, 06:36:51 am by DJ Omnimaga »

Offline Happybobjr

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #191 on: September 26, 2010, 12:12:27 pm »
wacky number gen crashes my calc after 2nd guess every time (ram clear after a freeze)
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Offline Deep Toaster

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #192 on: September 26, 2010, 12:57:02 pm »
Quickly tried the WFRNG, and to continue my critiquing:

WFRNG in Axe: Originality score is definitely over 9000, but I have to admit, with the bugs, I'm a bit disappointed in this port of such a legendary program.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2010, 12:57:53 pm by Deep Thought »




Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #193 on: September 26, 2010, 01:21:04 pm »
Yeah personally I laughed to see a bug in a guessing game, but it was ported in a few hours without knowing how to use Input yet, so I guess it is ok. But yeah, while it is the game of all game, I had to be serious when judging :P

I thought about posting an alternate joke review of WFRNG but I feared it would be too NSFW for this board :P

Offline Builderboy

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Re: Axe Contest poll and judging starts
« Reply #194 on: September 26, 2010, 01:36:17 pm »
Im going to keep all of my judging a secret too, but rest assured its all coming along nicely and i am greatly enjoying these games ^^