There are only a couple changes that I've left in:
1. On normal missions, the edge of the screen still doesn't slow you down.
2. The shop still does not have the old bug where selling was based on the price of the next item.
3. Not sure about this, but some powerups don't spawn if they're of no use to you; I believe this was not in the original, but it's been left in anyway.
4. Not sure about this either, but I believe the original had the 3-way spread much wider. This has not been adjusted for Classic difficulty.
Other than those three, Classic difficulty is now exactly the same,
including a re-implementation of the whole "score" system where destroying
a ship nets you money instantly and the absurd system where you buy only
10 plasma capacity at a time. I might adjust 1, 3, and/or 4 above later
on.
Limited damage prevention to only at the "low" and "critical" levels,
plus added a delay for when damage is first inflicted by rays.
This prevents ships with multiple concentrated shots from having
a disadvantage, and it helps make rays easier to avoid at the same
time (just get out of the ray in time and you don't take damage).
Of course, neither of these apply to Classic difficulty, although
the ray damage delay does apply to Nightmare difficulty (which,
given how unpredictable rays are, I think is quite reasonable).
Limits the damage you take somewhat. Basically, this is intended
to prevent sudden deaths; if it doesn't look like you're dying,
you probably won't suddenly get axed. Of course, this is disabled
in Classic difficulty.
The mistake caused the Classic game to deviate from the original
by not allowing Kline to drop mines in the Elamale mission. For
some reason I accidentally put that check in for Moebo instead.
Whoops!
At first I was going to just not bother with the resizing thing, but
then I found out that SDL actually has a scaling function built-in.
So rather than depending on SDL_gfx for this one purpose that never
sees the light of day in practice, I have handed that job over to
that function.
The fake "windowed fullscreen" is less invasive, but it sometimes
causes ugly artifacts and as a general rule isn't really all that
useful.
However, I also defined it in defs.h, so that it can be more easily
changed in the future.
In particular, sizes larger than the background work properly now
(in general; there are of course some things positioned badly still,
but everything updates correctly at any rate).
Ultimately, the following were removed:
* The portrait of Chris on top, which was superfluous.
* The text telling you who you were communicating with. Both superfluous and prone to inconsistencies.
* The button allowing you to return to the list of missions. Instead, you can click anywhere to do so, or just click on the "Missions" button again.
So now, the only thing left preventing 640x480 from being a usable
resolution is the shop. That's going to be a tough one...
It's not perfect, but I honestly just can't be arsed to figure out
how to use the Windows API to do the same thing that pwd.h does.
At the very least, Starfighter can now be successfully compiled for
Windows with MinGW simply by defining the "SF_WINDOWS" environment
variable to 1 (or any other non-empty value). The only downside is
that it uses the current working directory to decide where
.config/starfighter should go, meaning it can't be installed into
restricted directories like Program Files.
gfx_drawLine only supported drawing straight horizontal and vertical
lines anyway, so the method it used was completely pointless. It also
wasn't used anywhere other than gfx_drawRect.
I've made a couple of improvements here:
1. There is now a limit to how much value can be in a single
collectable. This means, most importantly, that there will be
no more 1000 plasma collectables or anything else ridiculous
like that. It also means that bosses now tend to drop a ton of
different collectable objects.
2. Collectables dropped by ships now live longer if a lot of
collectables were dropped. In practice, this only affects bosses;
no normal enemy drops enough to trigger this.
The combined results of these changes are that you're less likely
to get stuck with a useless item when you kill a boss (such as
plasma you don't need) rather than money, and you are more capable
of collecting the huge wads of cash left behind by the bosses that
drop more.
Classic difficulty penalizes you for selling items, so it's best not
to automatically sell anything that doesn't need to be. It could be,
for example, that you want to switch to a laser and then back to
rockets, in which case the auto-selling could make this much more
costly or cripple your missiles when you come back to them.
It looks like I'm finally almost done with this! The only thing left
is gradually replacing "Starfighter.h" imports with imports of what
actually is needed.
I did one structural change to the way ship_fireBullet works. It
previously had two separate places for reducing ammo from the player.
I changed this so that it removes ammo in the same place regardless
of which weapon it is, but then performs the plasma "out of ammo"
action afterwards. It seems to work properly.
Also fixed a flaw in the saving which would in some cases cause
the stationed planet to not get saved properly.
This was done with "replace all" actions, but I have checked and
the only collatoral damage has been to capitalize some instances
of "objective" in comments.
At first I was doing the same thing to them I did to the bragging
messages, but when it came to actually thinking of things these
characters should say, nothing I liked came up. The main problem
is nothing fits the characters' expressions. Add to that the
complexity of making this really work right, and it's just not
worth it.
The Sid death message has also been removed, both for consistency
and because of the mismatch of Chris's face with what he said there.
I considered rewriting it, but I don't think the intro text really
adds anything. Starfighter is an action game, not an adventure game,
so it's just out of place to show a paragraph of backstory before
the game starts.
Julie Marchant