This was done with "replace all" actions, but I have checked and
the only collatoral damage has been to capitalize some instances
of "objective" in comments.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I found it kind of odd to be able to manually save to the autosave
slot, *and* have no reliable way to even know what the autosave
slot is. I noticed that it's an actual problem when my brothers
played Starfighter; one of them used an autosave slot, and the
other unwittingly ended up erasing the first one's save because of
this. To fix this, I have replaced the behavior of allowing the
player to define a slot as autosave, with a dedicated autosave
slot.
While I was there, I had no choice but to vastly improve on this
game's *atrocious* menu system. Granted, I didn't do much more
than replace the magic numbers with enums, but it makes the code
much more clear and more easy to edit.
This is silly. I can see that someone decided to restrict targeting
to one ship as a difficulty setting, but that's not a very good way
to achieve different levels of difficulty.
Also added more music and slowed down RE.ogg.
onpon4
Guus Sliepen