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.
The explosions of mines off in the distance are extremely annoying in
the Mars mission, in particular. There's no real point in them
doing a timed off-screen explosion, anyway; if they just disappear,
the player won't notice.
SDL_GetTicks() returns Uint32, but I was using the long int type,
which could mean signed or unsigned, not to mention any size. Changed
missionCompleteTimer and timeTaken to Uint32 for consistency.
Changes since version 1.4 summarized:
* Lots of code cleanup
* Removed preservation of permissions when installing
* Replaced symlinks with copies
* Added .desktop file (from openSUSE package maintainer)
* Fixed mouse cursor position bug
* Removed a broken event from the Odeon mission
* Moved almost everything from the "data" directory to C source code
* Renamed "Original" difficulty to "Classic"
* Made Classic difficulty closer to the original
* Repositioned the logo and menu so that it's a bit higher
* Fixed the bug that caused mobile rays to shoot 5 green bullets
* Radio messages no longer suppress the "Target" text on the target arrow
* Friendly ships now have green arrows
* Sid, Phoebe, Ursula, and Kline now have special text on their target
arrows and shield displays
* Some dialog changes
* Plasma and rocket ammo is now much cheaper ($1)
* Fixed being able to get hurt after the mission is over
* Changed the Poswic mission target to Sid
* Removed the brief stop at the end of the Ellesh mission
* Kline now permitted to drop mines in all of his appearances
* Kline now switches primary weapons on Venus (like in prior appearances)
* Executive transport AI changed to "evasive"
* Experimental fighter now more likely to run away with powerful shots
* Renamed "Comms" to "Missions" and adjusted its look
* Removed instant teleportation between planets in Spirit
* Added small interception chance to Spirit
* Move very quickly between planets if no interception chance
* Now, portable save format
* Some tweaks to the Status screen
* Updated documentation
* Play sounds more quietly when further away
This prevents the weird effect where you hear a bunch of sounds of
majorly different volumes starting and stopping. If, for example, you
have several mines exploding nearby as well as several mines exploding
far away at the same time, you will hear the near ones and not the far
ones.
Several pointless lines have been removed, and I've added a workaround
to fix a segfault that was happening when Phoebe or Ursula were not
wingmates yet.
This format is actually portable, and there isn't a risk of it just
breaking any time the format is changed, since the version number
can be read independently of everything else.
I understand where this came from; obviously, this was how travel
originally worked, and then the version that made interceptions
possible was added later. But the thing is, making Spirit a special
case causes the interface to suddenly change on you, and that breaks
the flow of the game for no particular reason other than saving a
bit of time. So this special code which causes you to instantly
teleport in Spirit has now been removed. There is still no danger
of encountering interceptions, but I'll be changing that for all
non-Classic difficulties as well in another commit.
This oddity was caused by exactly what I thought it was caused by:
the code assumed that all bullets are created equal, and each bullet
had a 1 in 50 chance of causing the ship to run away. Well, the
charger inflicts so much damage that 50 shots would be a ridiculous
amount of damage for even the experimental fighter.
So now, except in Classic difficulty, whether or not it runs away
is determined partly by how much damage a weapon inflicts.
Specifically, the chance is now the damage of the bullet out of 150.
High-damage weapons are still a useful idea; after all, a 100 damage
weapon is 100 guaranteed damage, even if the fighter is likely to flee.
However, it gets rid of the skewed nature of the fleeing behavior and
prevents the charger from subverting the purpose of the behavior.
onpon4
Richard Smith