This is something I've been thinking of doing for awhile. The
automatic leaving can be frustrating if you were trying to collect
the money dropped by the enemy and you're suddenly forced out of
the mission. This prevents that by simply waiting to do the exit
sequence until no worthwhile collectables are left in the area.
Ellesh and Mars are excluded since this won't really work in those
areas. Also excluded by Classic and Nightmare difficulties.
I reduced the chance of smoke happening a given frame from 1/5 to 1/10,
and removed the check that stopped adding the "engine" effect to the
player if low on shield, so it now shows both when damaged.
At first I just went in to fix some places that were missing gettext
translations, but on the way as I was doing that, I noticed some
places where ngettext should be used, a bug in the fallback legacy
text rendering, and some things that could be structured better in
the Autoconf / Automake setup. Fixed those.
The original method just looked for non-firing targets, which caused
Sid to piss around a bit with the non-target transports. This new
method just targets the specific classes Sid is always going after,
cargo ships and bosses.
The way it previously was, in particular, Sid 100% refused to attack
fighting vessels and Phoebe and Ursula 100% refused to attack
non-fighting vessels. This was most notable with the Urusor mission,
where Sid would just become completely idle after disabling the last
non-combat vessel and would often just drift off into the distance
as a result (especially annoying in Classic difficulty as this
could make it very difficult to find the remaining enemies).
So now, instead these targets are treated as "undesirables", which
normally will be avoided but will be accepted after 30 frames.
This stops allies from idling around forever.
This rule has also been applied to a rule that didn't allow targeting
enemies beyond a particular distance.
I'm keeping it in Classic difficulty for now, but might add an
exception later.
I completely forgot about this stupid feature of the original game.
Nonetheless, it's a part of the original experience and thus has
been added back in, albeit implemented in a slightly different way
(the result is still the same). Because this is such a stupid and
badly designed mechanic, this is of course in Classic difficulty
only.
No, really, just added the whole thing. This took literally the
entire day. I'm soooo glad it's working now!
Also includes tons of other small fixes I didn't bother to keep
track of.
The fix is simpl to make blitTextInPlace center text to the
screen rather than the text creation doing it. That way you don't
get weird behavior with screen_blitText (which already handles centering).
The old one still remains while I adapt the code to the new one.
This is simply a decoupling of the absolute position of text from
the creation of the text, to better facilitate position adaptation
to changes in screen size. Position indicated at creation remains
only for relative position (for use by e.g. credits and status lines).
Problem 1: fullscreen switching was leaving artifacts. Fixed by
drawing all black when switching fullscreen (and switching fullscreen
is now handled by its own function).
Problem 2: the mission briefing screen would distort if you changed
fullscreen during it. Fixed by redrawing the screen (it was previously
only drawn once).
This way preserves checks for Classic difficulty within (where
auto-camera-centering is implemented) so that if the edge behavior
ever changes again, it won't have unintended side-effects. The
conditional is also inverted to make it easier to read.
I think this should be good, but I can't test it right now because
I don't have a Windows compiler handy at the moment. Will make sure
to do so before making a release.
The modern version sells for rockets (i.e. you get rockets back when
you sell your secondary), but the original instead left you with
no secondary at all in this case. This behavior has now been restored.
At some point I replaced the "Target" text with "Sid", "Phoebe", and
"Kline" for those respective characters. Classic difficulty now always
uses the word "Target" once again.
The main problem with this bug was simply that it caused a constant
cycle of resurrection and death, which generated tons and tons of
powerups. It was only realistically achievable with cheats enabled,
but still, this seems undesirable.
It's not exactly the same technically, but in function it is. The
only functional difference is that the original would sometimes show
an unexpected health bar for a small(ish) enemy, whereas the new
implementation never does that.
Also different is that exact location is still shown. Will fix that
next.
So, that segfault? Turns out there's a place where I forgot to check
if something was NULL before accessing it, which turned out to be
important because for some reason, gfx_textSprites[TS_RADIO] got
set to 32 at some point while gfx_messageBox remained NULL.
This may be indicative of a memory leak somewhere, but it's
also possible that maybe it was left-over from a previous mission
or something, which may have been what made it so hard to spot (that
would make the bug time-sensitive as well as context-sensitive). In
any case, at least the segfault is fixed now.
This is something I forgot about before: the executive transport
A.I. was changed by me at some point from "Normal" to "Evasive".
This change re-introduces "Normal" A.I. for this ship in Classic
difficulty.
Layla Marchant
Crestwave