This was just really weird-looking and had no particular benefit.
I guess theoretically you can use the couple of seconds to grab stuff
you missed, but in practice, there usually isn't much stuff there.
Sure, the escort is what you're supposedly after, but it's
invincible, and your real priority is to protect Sid. It helps that
it now says "Sid" when Sid is the target; that should prevent
any possible confusion. :)
There were two problems:
1. Some areas did not have any code to protect against this.
2. In one area that did have such code, it was malformed, and actually
caused the "no damage" cheat to be negated after the mission was
completed.
Both have been fixed.
This serves two purposes: One, it helps colorblind and color
deficient people to distinguish the arrows. Two, it prevents friend
arrows from hiding enemy arrows; you can see when an enemy arrow
is behind a friend arrow now.
There are two adjustments here:
First, Classic difficulty now gives these items the same price as
the original (50), which is important because the original made it
very easy to grind by filling up on plasma at interceptions and then
selling it. $25 is a lot more than $5.
Second, for every other difficulty, the price has been dropped down
from 10 to 1. The reason I'm doing this is unlike in the original,
you now pretty much have to routinely fill up on rockets and/or
plasma ammo to use these weapons, and it puts the weapons which
don't need ammo (laser and charger) at an unfair advantage, basically
turning use of rockets into a mistake. By making the prices very low,
you still want to conserve plasma and rockets, but the effect is more
to deprive you of their use later on in the mission than to drain
your money.
I think this might partly be because of my dialog changes, but this
causes a minor continuity error, since the mission clearly states
that you're rescuing "Phoebe Lexx", and there's also the fact that
the indicator now says "Phoebe" instead of "Target". I figure just
make her name known from the start; the explanation can be that the
ship automatically transmits the name.
The previous one positioned the arrows based on the difference between
their X distance and Y distance; objects that were further away
would be closer to the center. However, the code was confusing, and
a major practical effect of this was it was impossible to really know
exactly where an object was.
This new, simpler method makes aiming at targets that are off-screen
feasible, and it also utilizes the diagonal arrows.
It was triggered whenever there was a message being displayed.
Thing is, there's no legitimate reason to do this. It doesn't ever
obscure the radio message, and there wasn't some technical limitation
in place. It just did it... just because.
This was a strange cause, and I wonder why it happened. Quite simply,
there was an assumption in the code that any alien's primary weapon
was a bullet, despite the fact that the secondary weapon code could
handle any weapon, including bullets. I've fixed this by getting rid
of the special primary weapon mechanism; the one for the secondary
weapons is used on primary weapons as well.
There are two aspects to this:
1. They now simply make sure your plasma ammo is at a minimum of
50, rather than adding to your plasma ammo as in the other
difficulties.
2. Added a simulation of a bug in Starfighter 1.1 which caused
each aspect of the Supercharge to be lost when you picked up
a different associated powerup. Even though this was a bug,
without it, the Supercharge becomes extraordinarily more
game-breaking, since it's the only thing that sort of limits
its longevity.
This should add some much-needed depth to the tacticality of the
weapon. It's not much: it takes 5 plasma cells to fully charge the
cannon. But it does eliminate the previous effect where the charger
was always preferable over plasma bullets; it's still preferable in
a lot of circumstances, but for smaller ships, it's now typically
better to use plain old plasma ammo. It also limits the amount of
times the charger can be used.
The only magic numbers left now are related to positioning, image
sizing, and the remaining "data" files (the "planets" and "brief" ones).
At least, I'm pretty sure that's the case.
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.
I found myself confused by the interception chances, because it looked
like the chance of interceptions was decreasing slowly over time.
Turns out, it was the denominator in a fraction; a "chance" of 300
meant that there was a 1 / 300 chance.
These are just there so that you can define these at compile time
without modifying the source code. In the future, I would like this
to only be the *default* screen width and height, because I'll want
to add an option in the menu to change the resolution from 640x480
up to whatever your monitor's resolution is.
This is capable of handling any resolution which is at least 640x360.
Actually, resolutions a bit smaller than that can be handled. No
manual adjustment is necessary. :)
Now, the intermission screen needs to be fixed...
This places the logo at 1/3 of the way down the screen, rather than
half of the way down, and the menu ends up about in the middle of
the screen now. This doesn't really matter as it is, but it should
help some with lower resolutions.
Also, now that the magic numbers are gone, I was able to get rid of
all the hardsetting of numbers for the special ship indexes (which
was only in place to avoid breaking the magic numbers).
This name is better since the difficulty isn't actually *exactly*
like the original; it's just trying to be as similar to the classic
experience as possible.
Like "scripts", these definitions in text files make absolutely no
sense. They are completely unreadable, and Starfighter's engine is
inflexible anyway.
I'm going to do this for all of the stuff in the "data" directory.
It was obviously an attempt to make Starfighter more flexible
somehow, but it fails at that entirely. More importantly, these
things are both unreadable and easy to make mistakes on. Simple
C code is much easier to read.
The only disadvantage is that recompiling is now needed to change
the "scripts", but considering that they had hidden limits and
no one was making custom missions to begin with, I don't consider
this to be a real loss.
onpon4