I've made a couple of improvements here:
1. There is now a limit to how much value can be in a single
collectable. This means, most importantly, that there will be
no more 1000 plasma collectables or anything else ridiculous
like that. It also means that bosses now tend to drop a ton of
different collectable objects.
2. Collectables dropped by ships now live longer if a lot of
collectables were dropped. In practice, this only affects bosses;
no normal enemy drops enough to trigger this.
The combined results of these changes are that you're less likely
to get stuck with a useless item when you kill a boss (such as
plasma you don't need) rather than money, and you are more capable
of collecting the huge wads of cash left behind by the bosses that
drop more.
Classic difficulty penalizes you for selling items, so it's best not
to automatically sell anything that doesn't need to be. It could be,
for example, that you want to switch to a laser and then back to
rockets, in which case the auto-selling could make this much more
costly or cripple your missiles when you come back to them.
It looks like I'm finally almost done with this! The only thing left
is gradually replacing "Starfighter.h" imports with imports of what
actually is needed.
I did one structural change to the way ship_fireBullet works. It
previously had two separate places for reducing ammo from the player.
I changed this so that it removes ammo in the same place regardless
of which weapon it is, but then performs the plasma "out of ammo"
action afterwards. It seems to work properly.
Also fixed a flaw in the saving which would in some cases cause
the stationed planet to not get saved properly.
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.
At first I was doing the same thing to them I did to the bragging
messages, but when it came to actually thinking of things these
characters should say, nothing I liked came up. The main problem
is nothing fits the characters' expressions. Add to that the
complexity of making this really work right, and it's just not
worth it.
The Sid death message has also been removed, both for consistency
and because of the mismatch of Chris's face with what he said there.
I considered rewriting it, but I don't think the intro text really
adds anything. Starfighter is an action game, not an adventure game,
so it's just out of place to show a paragraph of backstory before
the game starts.
onpon4
Richard Smith