Zeta Flow

Is there a contest to see who can put the most guns on a core and I just didn't get the memo for it or something?

Maybe I am just not the right kind of player. Just seems neither fun nor fair to put 500 spread shots, 200 lasers and 300 rocket launchers on a ship. And then put it on rotate to ship. And then put it on follow ship. And then make it three quarters of the screen.

I really wish some of the people that are just joining us would actually take the time to play other levels and read these here forums before they go create "The Totally, Completely, Unabashedly, Most Difficult, Hardest, Most Impossible, Laggiest Piece of Uber PWNAGE Ever Seen by Zeta Flow."

I gotta say, I am really digging the 3-5 FPS on some of those levels. Even more fun is when a laser hits you, and the game sits there for 10 seconds deciding if it should actually kill you or not. Your hopes raise while you furiously jam on the attack and move keys. Then you get the end of your pitiful existence screen because the moron who created the level only gave you one life.

I'd also like to know how this and this have 5 star ratings when they are obviously some of the worst levels I have seen. And before anyone goes "Oh, it's just because you can't beat the levels that you think they both suck." I have to just say that I have beaten BOTH levels. The former on my first attempt. That idea was played out on page 5 for about 30 different levels, all of which are pretty similar to that one. The second one is a bit better, but still is kind of a let down, all things considered.

I don't know, maybe it's just me.

Eh. Everyone hits that phase once and a while. Like fanfiction.

The problem is the 'newbies' don't take it seriously most of the time, and have no desire/incentive to improve their mapmaking abilities...

Or, like me, they are just lazy.

From your description I was expecting more of those stupid "I'm gonna pile on five million spreaders and lasers and then everybody will see what a big tool I have" levels, but actually, I didn't see either of these two as really bad. The first one was pretty cliched, and it took me a few tries to beat it because I kept getting swatted into walls by unlucky rotations. The second one was actually a halfway interesting design but had the major flaw of inescapably trapping your ship if the random movement decided to go downward right at the start. And neither of them were rated above 50 by the time I saw them. I'm guessing the five-star rating came from the creators rating their own levels high right at the start. That tends to be a self-correcting problem. I still think creators should never rate their own levels, though that would be impossible to enforce since they could just play without logging in first.

I've been generally distressed at some of my attempts and design tinkerings lately...

I wanted to use some design ideas that would look visibly more engaging, but it seems to come at a high frame rate cost. About what frame rates do you generally all find desirable for a level? I can't help but notice even the most interesting levels 'lag' quite a bit, but I'm not sure what the consensus is...

As for the other, I've been experimenting with 'starting and stopping' rotations, but I seem to have a frequent problem where they won't stop at 90 (or 180) angles exactly, adding on a bit of distance in either direction. It's especially annoying because I'm trying to figure out Horizontal Movement and/or things that spin in a circle and stop at the "NESW" directions. I think that the speed should be divisable into the total angle of rotation evenly (no '2' speed if it's only going a difference of 45 degrees), but that might just be an erroneous observation because I get that problem sometimes anyway...

The frame rate depends very much on your computer.
For example, with my own win98 computer, playing the game
is really different from playing it with some decent computer.
It's so much slower, the whole gameplay changes.

aye, that makes sense... I'm just saying, at what framerate (since you can bring up that information) do people tend to prefer things to be at? I mean, what's reasonably playable for most? I know when it gets to me, but I haven't played this particular one long, and I'm lenient for such hings usually...

I usually prefer things fast. But for a cleverly designed level, I'm willing to put up with low framerates and semi-jerky play. Below eight or so, though, it starts getting really annoying for me.

For comparison, Spidertail starts out at 12 FPS on my three-year-old WinXP box. That feels a little slow to me, but not badly so because I like the design. If you point me to a particular level, I can tell you how fast it runs on my machine.