God, this one was definitely the biggest headache of all of the
magic number erasing. Never did I expect such cryptic problems.
The first problem was that the entirety of the player's weapon
struct was a part of the save file, *including the weapon's "image
indexes"*. Since the indexes have been changed, and the originally
used one is now unavailable when it's requested, this was causing
a segfault later on. Had to fix this by setting the image index
when the game is loaded.
The second problem was related to another bug I've been confused
about for years: the one that causes mobile rays to fire 5 green
shots. The entire reason those shots were green was because
the weapon's image indexes were undefined, and *that was causing
them to default to 0*. 0 was simply the index of green plasma.
Of course, though, now attempting to use that image causes a
segfault, so for now, I've fixed this by changing the image index
of the mobile rays to the red plasma bolts.
There are still some magic numbers left, related to the intermission
screen. But the hardest part is now done, thank God.
The fourth is simply a duplicate of ship_collision for bullets. A
bit redundant, but I figure it's clearer of a definition. Besides,
this opens up the door to possibly making bullets a different struct
type in the future, if that turns out to be desirable.
I honestly don't understand why these cheats were here. Preventing
enemies from moving breaks some missions and doesn't do anything
useful, and preventing enemies from firing is basically no better
than the invincibility cheat (and might even be worse, if it applies
to Sid; I didn't check).
In particular:
* The charge cannon in that difficulty now behaves as originally.
* Cash is now rare, not nonexistent, on interceptions in that difficulty.
Now, rather than powerups being replaced with ammo, their collection
effect has been changed from "make the plasma ammo at least 50" to
"add the powerup's amount to the plasma ammo" (i.e. powerups are also
treated as plasma ammo). This left the initial ammo of a powerup a
little low, so to compensate, I increased the collectValue of the
transport ship from 30 to 40.
Additionally, transport ships now show up in interceptions again,
but powerups, when collected, do *not* increase ammo. If you have
no ammo at the time, the powerup does nothing. If this happens with
the Super Charge, you get a humorous message.
This is mainly because the old "limit" functions were all restricted
to certain types, which is incredibly silly given how simple they are.
Macros are much simpler, and a warning gets raised if they're used
improperly with multiple types, anyway.
In the process, I also found and fixed a bug: it seems the original
author intended for escaping enemies to gradually accelerate to
fleeing speed, but the low value was indicated as the max value, and
the way limitFloat was written, that caused the max value to be used
(it was supposed to reduce the speed to a minimum of -15, but it
instead effectively assigned the speed to -15). It might be a good
idea to re-implement the old buggy behavior intentionally; depends
on whether the acceleration of jumping looks better or worse than
just immediately going to jump speed.
Kline previously had a maximum of 500 or 750 health, and uses some
hacks to cause it to flee just as it was destroyed, and to advance
to new stages in the final battle.
I've replaced this with a much larger amount of health, and progression
being based on how much health he has.
Also some other stuff.
Started out adjusting prices, then ended up doing other things
while testing. Committing this now before I start doing other
random stuff!
But all of the changes are related to balancing difficulty, mostly
with prices, except for a couple bugfixes in the shop. Most notably:
* Ammo now costs $10, not $50. You no longer have to worry about
saving ammo quite as much as a result.
* Plasma upgrades' cost is now calculated differently, and the result
is slightly lower prices than before.
* Easy mode now grants the player more max ammo than other difficulties.
* Increasing max plasma ammo now costs less at the start, and increases
in cost faster.
* You increase max plasma ammo by 25 at a time, not 10. (10 was just too
small of a number.)
* Destroying enemy ships no longer gives you money. I found that, even
in hard mode, I had *way* too much money coming in, and this cuts it
down substantially. It also makes the shield bonus at the end of missions
much more significant. To compensate for the loss of massive bonuses
bosses used to give, these bosses now drop a lot more stuff.
* Kline has decreased health in his first encounter, and increased health
in his last two encounters (the numbers have been reversed).
It was previously just ineffective. Now it's impossible.
The reason I'm doing this is when you *can* grind (in this case, by
constantly getting free plasma and selling it), it kind of feels
like an obligation to do so.
It's still possible to grind within missions whose progress depends
on your pace, which aren't timed and keep generating more enemies
until you win. Namely: the missile boat mission, the miner mission,
and the third boss. (There might be others.) However, grinding in
these situations is quite dangerous and likely to take away the much
larger shield bonus at the end, and plus if you mess up when trying
to do this you're set back quite a bit, so I think these are sufficiently
worthless activities that no one will do them. (I never did.)
A supercharge at this point can suddenly make bosses much easier
(especially the case with the Star Killer). This kind of takes away
the tension, so it's undesired. (It's fine for Easy difficulty,
because it's possible to take in a Supercharge from an earlier level
anyway.)
onpon4
Guus Sliepen