Announcing: Steamworks Simulator Open Beta

FIRST General Forum
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Introduction:

Hey everyone! I’m happy to finally release the first beta version of my Steamworks Simulator! You can download it HERE.

Since, this is my first beta version, there are some known issues. For example, yes, I know you can drive through the airships/robots/gears/pegs/dividers/almost everything except the field walls. In case you find any others (I’m almost certain you will), please report them in this thread. However, I still think it’s pretty cool. You can drive around with field oriented swerve, score gears, and climb. Since I’ve probably put almost 50 hours into this between learning the game engine and writing this game, any other comments (positive or not) are greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance, and enjoy!

Features:

  • Field oriented swerve robots
  • Floor gear pickup
  • Climbing
  • 3v3 alliance gameplay (2 AI bots on your side, 3 AI bots on the other side)
  • Propietary material technology allows for permeable airship, gears, and robots (i.e. I haven’t figured out collision detection yet)

How to install:

  1. Download from the link above
  2. Unpack the ZIP file
  3. Read the README file in the extracted folder for controls and a more relevant overview
  4. Run Steamworks Simulator.jar in the extracted folder (you need to have Java installed obviously, best results in high resolutions/fullscreen)

Some of my early testers have reported difficulties running the game, so please report any issues you may have and I’ll work on helping you fix them!

Screenshots:

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The google drive it’s located on is private

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I think I just set it to be public, try opening it again. I’m not very good at Google Drive :smiley:

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Nice work!
Though I’m currently unable to see any of the red robots or field borders. Is there any variation in the behavior of the AI robots from match to match?

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Sorry about that! There is supposed to be random variation in robot speed to keep the robots from morphing inside of each other. If you shared a few screenshots, I might be able to help figure out what’s going on!

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Awesome start to this! I always love when someone posts simulators/games for the current years game.

The main things that I’m noticing at the moment are:

  1. I can’t see the field perimeter or red alliance
  2. There is no live score on my screen (appears there should be from your screenshots)
  3. I can climb a rope that my partner has already climbed.

That last one arguably isn’t an issue, as I suppose one could climb an already climbed rope IRL (albeit, tough to do).

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Nicely done so far! Any reason why the field/whole game is so dark? Screenshot

Also, as far as I can tell, there are no opponent bots playing on the field.

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For some reason, the IDE rebuilt the game between when I tested it and when I zipped it. Here’s the updated link. I also updated the link in the original post. Please let me know if the darkness issue persists, because I wasn’t seeing it on my end.

I have the logic written to stop two AI bots from climbing the same rope (as you probably realized) but don’t yet have that written for player to AI interaction, so it’s just not a feature right now.

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Cool! That fixed the brightness issue and there are now opponent bots moving around the field. (btw I believe that the ropes drop too early).

What’s the next step you have planned?

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The ropes drop after the alliance reaches 4 rotors, which tends to be between 30-40 seconds after it starts.

I have a few things I need to do, to name a few:

  • Add collision detection (which I am dreading because it will require a rewrite of a lot of stuff)
  • Add Xbox controller support
  • Add multiplayer support
  • Add fuel shooting
  • Add accurate match lengths
  • Rework the logic for the AI robots’ pathfinding to be more realistic
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After the welcome screen, when I click continue, I get an error that says:

Failed to create display
LWJGLException: Pixel format not accelerated

I’ve tried manipulating all the settings, with no change. I’m using a laptop with built-in graphics and OpenGL 3.1, if that’s useful information.

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From what a quick Google search could find, it seems like the issue might be your graphics driver. If you try updating your OpenGL drivers, it may fix the problem.

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Three things i would really love to see

  1. 1st person (drive team)
  2. you don’t go through the walls or other robots
  3. retrieval zone ramp pickup

Awesome game though!

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And illegal and risky :wink:

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Do you have source code somewhere for this? I would enjoy taking a look at it.

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I don’t have source code up at the moment, but the code I have is very messy and almost unreadable and I’m not proud of it :smiley: I’ll try to clean it up and post it once it’s closer to being done though.

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This is probably a problem on my end but, I was wondering what I could do to fix it. For whatever reason, the jar executable won’t run. The executable from this simulator works fine but, I can’t get yours to work and, I was wondering if you knew why. Thanks

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Are you running it from the command line or from the file exporer? I know some of my early testers we’re unable to run it from the command line. If you are running it from the command line, try running it from the file explorer. If the problem persists, try reinstalling it.

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Update: I was running it in the file explorer and had no luck. So I updated java and restarted my computer. Now, the executable runs but every time I try to get past the welcome screen, I get “Failed to create display LWJGLException: Pixel format not accelerated”

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Another user was having this issue too, try the advice here.