At some point I replaced the "Target" text with "Sid", "Phoebe", and
"Kline" for those respective characters. Classic difficulty now always
uses the word "Target" once again.
The main problem with this bug was simply that it caused a constant
cycle of resurrection and death, which generated tons and tons of
powerups. It was only realistically achievable with cheats enabled,
but still, this seems undesirable.
It's not exactly the same technically, but in function it is. The
only functional difference is that the original would sometimes show
an unexpected health bar for a small(ish) enemy, whereas the new
implementation never does that.
Also different is that exact location is still shown. Will fix that
next.
So, that segfault? Turns out there's a place where I forgot to check
if something was NULL before accessing it, which turned out to be
important because for some reason, gfx_textSprites[TS_RADIO] got
set to 32 at some point while gfx_messageBox remained NULL.
This may be indicative of a memory leak somewhere, but it's
also possible that maybe it was left-over from a previous mission
or something, which may have been what made it so hard to spot (that
would make the bug time-sensitive as well as context-sensitive). In
any case, at least the segfault is fixed now.
This is something I forgot about before: the executive transport
A.I. was changed by me at some point from "Normal" to "Evasive".
This change re-introduces "Normal" A.I. for this ship in Classic
difficulty.
The file is just an irritant to me. It's outdated HTML, explains
way too much, and it's ugly. I've deleted it and replaced it with
a much shorter blurb in the readme regarding how to play.
There are only a couple changes that I've left in:
1. On normal missions, the edge of the screen still doesn't slow you down.
2. The shop still does not have the old bug where selling was based on the price of the next item.
3. Not sure about this, but some powerups don't spawn if they're of no use to you; I believe this was not in the original, but it's been left in anyway.
4. Not sure about this either, but I believe the original had the 3-way spread much wider. This has not been adjusted for Classic difficulty.
Other than those three, Classic difficulty is now exactly the same,
including a re-implementation of the whole "score" system where destroying
a ship nets you money instantly and the absurd system where you buy only
10 plasma capacity at a time. I might adjust 1, 3, and/or 4 above later
on.
Limited damage prevention to only at the "low" and "critical" levels,
plus added a delay for when damage is first inflicted by rays.
This prevents ships with multiple concentrated shots from having
a disadvantage, and it helps make rays easier to avoid at the same
time (just get out of the ray in time and you don't take damage).
Of course, neither of these apply to Classic difficulty, although
the ray damage delay does apply to Nightmare difficulty (which,
given how unpredictable rays are, I think is quite reasonable).
Limits the damage you take somewhat. Basically, this is intended
to prevent sudden deaths; if it doesn't look like you're dying,
you probably won't suddenly get axed. Of course, this is disabled
in Classic difficulty.
The mistake caused the Classic game to deviate from the original
by not allowing Kline to drop mines in the Elamale mission. For
some reason I accidentally put that check in for Moebo instead.
Whoops!
Julie Marchant