Wii SpaceBubble 0.3

A new version of SpaceBubble is released with the following changes:

24/01/2009 Version 0.3
– Added scrollbar to highscore and release notes screens.
– The fifty highest local scores are showed.
– The thirty highest global highscores are showed.
– Improve button layout.
– Improve third intro screen.
– Build game with libogc 1.7.1 and devkitPPC r16 compiler.

10 thoughts on “Wii SpaceBubble 0.3”

  1. Soory to say, but I’d some issues with this release. Mainly the network stack seems not to work at all, or at least quite seldom. The status shown in the lower left corner shows INIT and the Error after some time. I did not remember any issues concerning this in 0.20. At least it worked for one time and brought me to the 1st place in your score. Did I say that I love the global high score? Some of my scores are still missing in your list bit are shown in my local score.

    A very serious issue are severals crashes when trying to show the global scores inside the application. It’s also very often but not always. When it works it shows that there are no scores because of missing network connection and once it showed the online scores but not including my scores. I use a WPA2 WLAN/WiFi connection.

    I still have these issues with not recognizing pressing key A.

    Is the game limited to 6 levels? This should be noted somewhere, meaning the “user documentation” should be extended :-).

    Please check for an other name for the global settings, at least as along as there are only the players name is listed.

    I’d love to see a multiplayer and/or online mode.

    Thx a lot,
    Jan

  2. Just to add a missed detail: I did not have any craches with 0.20 and I had seen the global scores from inside the application without any problem.

  3. Some more suggestions:

    – Showing the “Game Over” string is hiding parts of the board what is a little bit distracting for ambitious players
    – Why not showing a global Top100 or even Top1000? 30 is a little bit less IMHO
    – Global Score: If you recognize the user/Wii it would be nice to mark the entries by the specific user
    – Global Score: You could also mark new entries in an different style
    – Running out if time is not recognized easily and happens tooo suddenly, would be nice to get some acoustic hints for every 10 seconds and the last 10 seconds, just to make it dramatic 🙂
    – What about a bonus if you clear the whole board and/or for remaining time when finishing a board?

    Regarding the network errors and crashes: Once the application has an connection and is running and showing the global highscores it seems to be stable. I also broken highscore screens without scroll bars and text running out of screen at the bottom for the first minutes when the game was started.

  4. Jan: The LAN Wii Adaptator doesn’t work for the PlaatSoft games.

    I think, TOP50 is good 🙂

  5. Hi Jan,

    Thanks for you feedback. Strang problem? I have at home a Wifi (WEP / Mac filtering) securited network and i do not face any crashed during the start up of the game. I started at lease 50 times. I will retest release v0.30 with my Wifi node disabled. Maybe then this issue will show up.

    Do other people face the same problem. Please let me know?

    Some technical background of the showed network thread states:
    INIT: Wifi layer is initialized.
    ERROR: Wifi layer failed to initialized. Retry after 60 seconds.
    REQUEST1A: Fetch the latest available version of SpaceBubble from internet.
    REQUEST1B: Send to Google Analytic some information.
    REQUEST2A: Fetch release notes information from internet.
    REQUEST2B: Send to Google Analytic some information.
    REQUEST3A: Send score and fetch global highscore * information from internet
    REQUEST3B: Send to Google Analytic some information.
    IDLE: Wait for network event.
    RETRY: Http requested failed, retry after 20 seconds.

    * The highscore is send as XML message. The incoming http data is check for the end xml tag, if this tag is found the xml information is decoded. If not error ocure during decoding the information is displayed.

    wplaat

  6. Hi all,

    About this top 30. I have choose top 30 to minimize the xml (6K) data size. Each day my web service is already called around 2000 times (6K * 2000 times * 30 days = 360MB each month). My website provider charge me for the used data volume each month. So i have to take this in mind.

    wplaat

  7. So, after some more testing:

    – I could not reproduce any errors or crashes today so there might me some issues with cosmic waves yesterday…
    – I do not use a Lan Adaptor (@ML), just the build in wireless

    Issues:
    – After Game Over the Stop button is quite large. If you click it on the right side, and you click it twice like in the game you select Reset in the oncoming main screen and the game exits without any warning. Even worse: Your score will not be submitted to the global highscore.
    – Sometimes I’m pretty sure the moves shown in the lower left corner are not correct and now I’ve a picture showing this. Please check http://tei.ch/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=32134 This happend about 15 seconds before the time run out and proove me wrong, there are just no matching bubbles!?

    Further Improvements:
    – Please show the sum of points you’ll earn after seleting a some bubbles before the 2nd click, you can also show the last points earned (I’m pretty sure there is some nice animations 🙂
    – As long as this is going to become one of my favorite homebrew apps please provide a wad file as well 🙂
    – Concerning the traffic issue on your web server: Charging for traffic is not state of the art anymore in 2009, you should consider to write your provider a friendly mail or have a look for some competitors :-). Is the xml highscore compressed when transfering? Is the whole xml highscore transfered every time or just a diff?

  8. Hi Jan,

    Thanks for your test work. You are a good debugger. I have add your nickname to the credit page as reward of your work. ;-} On this moment i am building a hotfix to solve your network problem (found the issue, there are some not init variables when the network is in error state, coursing random crashes) and add some more nice idea’s of you (clock sound, bonus points, etc..). Please check the release notes later this evening and check out the new version! wplaat

  9. Thx a lot .-). I’d also thought about checking the code but it seems that I miss some parts of libjpeg. Where exactly did you get jpeg/jpgogc.h from, seems not to be part of my environment which worked fine for other homebrewapps….

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