The Daily Click

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Author:	Pixelthief
Added:	01/06/2003
Overall:
Average:	7.5/10

This made for a nice little engine, but managed to dissapoint me. I think the main probly could be that this 3d Space Engine could probably benefit from some actual mathematical programming, or at least some trig thrown in there.

Presentation: Considering this is only an engine, it was thrown together nicely. A couple cut-scenes, despite having no real importance helped in this category. There was a nice little radar in the bottom right, but since it was wildly inaccurate and not helpful, I can't really add or subract for it.

Gameplay: This may have been a demo of an engine, but it shouldn't have been released buggy. Besides the obvious problems such as the non-sensical scrolling and primitive enemy ship fire, there are also some hidden problems with the engine. If you look carefully, you might notice that if you hold a direction that goes past both the planet and the moon-like object, you can sometimes see about 3 rotations for the moon in the time of one planetary rotation. This is a tell-tale sign that the 3d Space Engine is not really using any trig, but rather just simple AO tricks. Oddly, strafing only seems to make some irrelevant AOs move left and right, not actually altering the player's position. Hmm.For an example of trig in use with a space engine, I would recommend taking a look at Chancy's 3D Space: http://www.clickteam.com/CTforum/showthreaded.php3?Cat=&Board=fac&Number=127123&Search=true&Forum=fac&Words=space&Match=Or&Searchpage=3&Limit=25&Old=allposts&Main=127123

Were it cleaned up, this might prove to be a nice game.

Graphics: The graphics for this game were quite good. Compared to the actual engine these were quite unbalanced; the graphics were much more true to 3d than the engine.... These were very well done and made up for many problems, and the in-game resizing in TGF is not always a simple feat.

Sound & Music: Blah. Very Blah. I only took a minute to count but I could only find about 3 different sounds in this whole file. This is OK since it is an engine demo afterall, but was still very lacking

Lastability: It's and engine.... Hard to say. Mostly I only really ran it after the first time so that I could count samples for this review.

Overall- This engine could seriously benefit from some cleaning and debugging. One might also contemplate including some math as to correct the horrendous problems that plague the movement. In the end this engine came off well, mostly due to its excellent graphics.