Starfighter uses an absurdly crude method for wrapping text which
basically fails very frequently when large words are chosen. The only
reason it got away with it is because text strings don't vary. Well,
I've been quite annoyed by having to test for this and rework my
text so much, so I've added in a secondary system: if it's really
close to the edge, and the next three characters are going to be
letters, it adds a hyphen and moves on to the next line. This still
isn't 100% fool-proof, but it should catch most problems.
Also removed the "temp fix" which shifted the letters by a pixel in
code, and just shifted them in the actual image. I don't understand
why the "temp fix" was there in the first place, to be honest.
The idea is clearly supposed to be breaking the boss in two and then
destroying the halves, so it makes no sense for the wings you break
off to also act as shields, which they did. Pretty much all this did
was cause a lot of shots to be wasted.
I don't really understand why this code was implemented only for the
boss and not for anyone else. My only guess is it was designed to make
the level harder by letting enemies fire backwards while you can't,
but mine-droppers can already effectively do that.
The primary reason I decided to make sure they all face forward is I
was finding it to be nearly impossible to get through this level in
Nightmare difficulty; those ships being able to shoot backwards is
a HUGE advantage, because it's almost impossible to position yourself
in an area that's safe.
It may be that the unfair previous behavior was put in to compensate
for the AI's frankly asinine movement pattern. The random movement is
fine most places, but here, it's blatantly obvious that it's random,
and the enemy ships pay a steep price for it. What the ships should
be doing is positioning themselves so that they end up shooting or
dropping mines at the player. But the boss itself also has such a
positioning problem anyway; that should be properly fixed in the
future, so I might as well do the same for the smaller ships when
that time comes.
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).
This feature is just annoying if for some reason you want to leave
the game to do something else while you wait for something. That
would normally be a defect, but I can't count the number of times
I've been rushing through to get to a particular area, using cheats,
and had to wait for some mission condition, and this is only made
worse by not being able to do some other work while I wait for it.
This long-standing bug was caused by using blending when trying to
copy an image, though for some reason it was inconsistent. Thanks to
everyone on the SDL mailing list for helping me solve this one!
The way it was previously, you always knew exactly where the WEAPCO
scientist was. I don't remember if this was the case in the original
game (I don't think it was), but regardless, this makes the mission
seem incredibly short and easy, and it ends up centering on the
secondary objective rather than the primary objective. Now, you have
to search through all the asteroids until you find the right one,
and you have to pay close attention to explosions. Collecting ore is
just something you do along the way.
It may be fake difficulty, but after all, tropes are not bad.
The bug in question caused the super charge to be stripped away when
you collected powerups; each powerup would limit that aspect of your
weapon to its maximum. This put a limit on how long you could keep the
super charge, so I've added it back in for "original" difficulty.
I don't know why it was changed, but the changed version caused
full spread rather than partial spread with the triple shot, and it
also caused the quaduple shot to be arguably worse than the triple
shot.
The plain int type is only guaranteed to be at least 16 bits, and
yet the flags variable was expecting at least 22 bits. This turns
out to be true for x86 and x86-64 systems, but to ensure compatibility,
the variable has been changed to an unsigned long int. Also added
the "L" suffix to flags that were more than 16 bits.
There. Together with spreading out the asteroids, this has the effect
of getting rid of the sort of boxed-in feel this mission originally
had, and preventing the mission from being beaten simply by going
up or down forever.
I noticed that in "original" difficulty, plasma upgrades are basically
prohibitively expensive, which is not at all like the original. To
fix this, I've given that difficulty the original prices for those.
I've also slightly reduced the normal cost of permanent upgrades.
In particular:
* The charge cannon in that difficulty now behaves as originally.
* Cash is now rare, not nonexistent, on interceptions in that difficulty.
Most of these were defining various integers as char types, probably
in the naive belief that this is necessarily good because it uses less
RAM. There were also several unnecessary unsigned ints, though.
These have all been changed to just "int", so the compiler can decide
exactly what type to use.
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.
It previosly spawned half of the time. Now it spawns 4/5 of the time.
This makes waiting for it to show up so you can fight it a lot less
painful, even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
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.
This change in behavior has some very significant effects:
1. Damaging a child alien isn't rendered meaningless if you are
primarily attacking the owner. This could be especially annoying
with the miner bosses, which have tiny parts that are completely
impractical to aim at.
2. Again, for the miner boss: previously, you couldn't see how much
total health the ship had; the health bar only uselessly showed
whether or not you defeated half of the ship (which you could
already tell by looking at it). Now, the health bar tells you
how much more damage you have to do in total.
As a result, you're not stuck with the weakest weapon in the game
anymore. You have to choose between the double rockets, plasma
permanently upgraded in one area, plasma temporarily upgraded in
some areas, or some combination.
This is silly. The libraries used have absolutely nothing to do with
"Linux". They're POSIX standard libraries, and will work just as
well on Mac OS X and BSD. The actual code might need to be replaced,
but in any case, this isn't something to limit to "Linux" systems.
The previous method was inconsistent between the left and right
directions; it placed the left edge of the bullet on the left edge of
the ship when going to the right, and in the center of the ship when
going left. This was barely noticeable with small ships, but more
noticeable with large ships. The method also sometimes made the backs
of bullets visible behind the smaller ships, which looked kind of
ugly.
Now, the back edge of the bullet is consistently placed in the center
of the ship.
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).
Previously, when you bought something that took the place of something
you already had, such as buying a new secondary weapon, the old one
was just discarded. Now, it is sold, so you get money back for it
(the same as if you had manually sold everything).
* Modified the upgrade limits, to both be uniform and allow upgrades for
every factor. (In fact, each one can be upgraded exactly once now.)
* Gave triple-spread weapon double damage.
* Micro rocket damage down from 7 to 6. Total damage is now equal to
double rockets.
I've tested this a lot, and I think these are good numbers to go by.
Plasma damage has been limited the most, because it is the upgrade
that quickly breaks the balance of the weapons, making the plasma
cannon the obviously most powerful weapon. I don't want this; the
powerful weapon should be the secondary weapon, while the plasma
cannon is the fast-firing weapon with much more ammo.
Basically, I want to make a tactic I found myself using, which was
to carefully keep my plasma power at maximum and take out most
enemies in one plasma shot, obsolete. As a result, missiles should
now be much more cost-effective (because even a single missile's
power of 15 greatly exceeds plasma's maximum power of 3*2=6).
None of these reductions in limits apply to easy mode; that mode
still has the old limits of 3 for min and 5 for max.
onpon4