In particular:
* The charge cannon in that difficulty now behaves as originally.
* Cash is now rare, not nonexistent, on interceptions in that difficulty.
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.
Now, rather than powerups being replaced with ammo, their collection
effect has been changed from "make the plasma ammo at least 50" to
"add the powerup's amount to the plasma ammo" (i.e. powerups are also
treated as plasma ammo). This left the initial ammo of a powerup a
little low, so to compensate, I increased the collectValue of the
transport ship from 30 to 40.
Additionally, transport ships now show up in interceptions again,
but powerups, when collected, do *not* increase ammo. If you have
no ammo at the time, the powerup does nothing. If this happens with
the Super Charge, you get a humorous message.
It previosly spawned half of the time. Now it spawns 4/5 of the time.
This makes waiting for it to show up so you can fight it a lot less
painful, even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
This is mainly because the old "limit" functions were all restricted
to certain types, which is incredibly silly given how simple they are.
Macros are much simpler, and a warning gets raised if they're used
improperly with multiple types, anyway.
In the process, I also found and fixed a bug: it seems the original
author intended for escaping enemies to gradually accelerate to
fleeing speed, but the low value was indicated as the max value, and
the way limitFloat was written, that caused the max value to be used
(it was supposed to reduce the speed to a minimum of -15, but it
instead effectively assigned the speed to -15). It might be a good
idea to re-implement the old buggy behavior intentionally; depends
on whether the acceleration of jumping looks better or worse than
just immediately going to jump speed.
This change in behavior has some very significant effects:
1. Damaging a child alien isn't rendered meaningless if you are
primarily attacking the owner. This could be especially annoying
with the miner bosses, which have tiny parts that are completely
impractical to aim at.
2. Again, for the miner boss: previously, you couldn't see how much
total health the ship had; the health bar only uselessly showed
whether or not you defeated half of the ship (which you could
already tell by looking at it). Now, the health bar tells you
how much more damage you have to do in total.
As a result, you're not stuck with the weakest weapon in the game
anymore. You have to choose between the double rockets, plasma
permanently upgraded in one area, plasma temporarily upgraded in
some areas, or some combination.
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.
The previous method was inconsistent between the left and right
directions; it placed the left edge of the bullet on the left edge of
the ship when going to the right, and in the center of the ship when
going left. This was barely noticeable with small ships, but more
noticeable with large ships. The method also sometimes made the backs
of bullets visible behind the smaller ships, which looked kind of
ugly.
Now, the back edge of the bullet is consistently placed in the center
of the ship.
Kline previously had a maximum of 500 or 750 health, and uses some
hacks to cause it to flee just as it was destroyed, and to advance
to new stages in the final battle.
I've replaced this with a much larger amount of health, and progression
being based on how much health he has.
Also some other stuff.
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).
Previously, when you bought something that took the place of something
you already had, such as buying a new secondary weapon, the old one
was just discarded. Now, it is sold, so you get money back for it
(the same as if you had manually sold everything).
* Modified the upgrade limits, to both be uniform and allow upgrades for
every factor. (In fact, each one can be upgraded exactly once now.)
* Gave triple-spread weapon double damage.
* Micro rocket damage down from 7 to 6. Total damage is now equal to
double rockets.
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.
The way it was previously, it was tactically beneficial to ignore
temporary upgrades, if you were going to do a permanent upgrade to
that level anyway. This is silly. Now, you don't lose anything by
making the temporary upgrade first. You just get lesser access to
the upgrade earlier on.
I don't really understand why the original developer felt that
increased firing rate was so superior to the other upgrades as to
justify a far more inflated cost. Frankly, I find this upgrade to
be *inferior* to the power and output upgrades, for two reasons:
one, it doesn't increase the amount of damage inflicted per second
much; two, it increases plasma ammo usage as well, whereas the output
and power upgrades have no effect on plasma ammo usage. If anything,
firing rate upgrades should be *cheaper*, not more expensive!
onpon4