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.
onpon4