Mosquito Ops Thread

[*DAMN Mauti]

Mosquito Ops, has finally been released and can be downloaded from *DAMN Mac Downloads or directly from the Mosquito Ops website.

At the website you also gonna find a lot of information about the game and its development. The PC version will go online as soon as I received the final built from my teammate.

If you have questions about the game, or just wanna post some appreciated feedback, do it here.

I hope you enjoy the game, have fun being a mosquito,

Mauti

[*DAMN Mauti]

We have reached the first 1000 downloads. Thanks to everyone and I hope you have fun playing.

If you have troubles or any other issues let me know, and I gonna answer as soon as possible.

[*DAMN Mauti]

From the Macworld forums:

I just downloaded the game and my initial reaction (after playing for only a few minutes) is the controls need to be more intuitive.
For instance, the mouse should be able to be used to control axis and the arrow keys used to control forward and reverse motion.
So that you could get more of a feeling of "flying".
Being able to configure keys is paramount.
One thing that is always important in a game is being able to look around and get a feeling of your surroundings, I felt that this was very difficult to do.
I'll go back and check it out further.
I think many people will quickly give up on a game if this is difficult.
But for now, this is my initial reaction.
Jim

Thanks for the feedback Jim.

About the controls:

The reason why you can't configure the control layout is that it would have required lots of extra time in GLUT. GLUT is very basic and GUI options are even more back to the roots. Of course we could have written all information to a textfile and then you can costumize this, but in the end there was no time for it and for the lecture we just had to create our own engine and 1-2 levels you can play.

The controls scheme itself is very similiar to a first person shooter; AWSD is moving forward/sidewards and with the mouse you control the viewing direction. The only difference is that contrary to a first person shooter you have six axis of freedom, so if you look up and move forward you fly upwards.

To be honest we found this way very intuitive, but it's hard to be objective if you test the game day in day out.

What maybe helps is to turn off any action cam modes. Just press "5" and "6" to get rid of some cam features. Then the cam and mosquito doesn't move that much.

If you just want to look around you can press "2" to go into FREECAM mode where you can explore the level. The Freecam ctrls are the same as the mosquito but without any cam features and it is like you would control the mosquito from 1st person view.

Hopefully that helps. Just imagine you are playing Wing Commander or any other space shooter. Their controls are pretty much the same.(all this hints are related when you are flying in walk mode the cam can be moved along the z-axis to get a better overview).

Thanks, and such feedback is really appreciated and will help to improve quality in our next project!

[*DAMN Mauti]

Not much of a game, but for a school project made in 12 weeks without prior games programming knowledge it was a pretty nice demonstration, and I'm hoping to see future cross platform projects from these guys. I gave up on it though, due to a steering bug where the mosquito would always start traveling sideways on its own accord.

Hi, thanks for your comment.

I'm one of the developers, the bug you mention only appears on the Mac. We guess it has something to do with GLUT, another reason why we gonna switch to SDL for our next project. Usually it helps if you press the same key, in which direction the mosquito auto moves, again. Then it should stop.

Bye,

Mauti

[Civrock]

You should post this on the IMG forums as well as Games4Mac.de, if you haven't yet. You'd probably get more feedback from Mac gamers there.

[*DAMN Mauti]

Hi,

if you enter Mosquito Ops in Google the first two pages are almost covered with reports about the game. I also sent a mail to games4mac 2 days ago with no response. However macinplay reported as german site and IMG posted about it yesterday.

I also got some response in the different comments areas of the posted news like Macworld and IMG.

However I'm missing feedback from guys like you and other guys that were recently here on the forums ;-)

At all any constructive feedback will help to improve our next engine and game.

Bye,

Mauti
ps: hope you are fine. Still in the US?

[maio]

The concept behind the game is very nice.

My most relevant bugs are:
1) the mosquito frequently gets stuck inside walls or other objects
2) the derive effect someone else told about. I've seen that after issuing a mix of random controls it sometimes gets ok again
3) the magnetic effect of lamps is too strong
4) the load keeps high even when the game is in pause

also, some feedback letting you know more explicitly when you're sucking would be good.

I've only tried the mac version.

bye

[*DAMN Mauti]

Thanks, for this very detailed feedback.

1.) Unfortunaly that's true. That's our fault because of how the collision detection works and we also had some issues with Misfit. It didn't close all objects perfectly. So sometimes there are small distances inbetween parts of an object. For our next project we gonna use another collision detection lib.
3.) Just use the mosquito time to escape from lamps. Then the force is weaker. But else issue noticed.
4.) That's because it just stops the interal time, so no movement gets updated, but the game still renders each frame new.

@ Feedback: yes: you are right.

Thanks, maybe we gonna release a small update to cover some of the issues.

PC version should be online tonight or tomorrow. My teammate only has a PC so I have to wait until he sends me his built.

Thanks again for this good feedback,

Mauti