The original charge cannon is so overpowered it's ridiculous. The
strongest weapon in the game, unlimited ammo, and the only setback
it has is that you need to charge it a bit. The lack of balance
obsoletes the laser weapon, which is fine, but it also obsoletes
homing missile weapons, *including* ones that are newer and more
expensive than the charge cannon!
Now, it's much more balanced. You actually need to shoot the thing
before it hits max (or have your target in sight when it does),
rather than being able to just hold the button at max forever and
release when optimal like you previously could. Basically, the charge
cannon is still the weapon which does the most damage, but it's now
much harder to use. Incidentally, not only should homing missiles
be a sensible option now, even the laser cannon has a place after
the charge cannon becomes available.
In most cases, this has also resulted in limits being lifted. (The
only place I haven't done this is for planets in intermission.cpp,
but I think I'll take away that 10-planet limit as well.)
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.
So now, when currentGame.gamePlay is set to GAMEPLAY_ONPON:
- You start with 50 shield, and never gain any increased capacity.
- You can't charge the charge cannon and shoot at the same time; if
you shoot the plasma gun, the charge cannon shoots as well (as if
you had released the charge key).
I didn't add in the feature to keep the view from slowing you down,
because the method I used was imperfect anyway.
The source code contains routines to initialise all these resources, but also
functions to load from and store to external files. Support for external files
has now been removed; this removes a potential difference between compiling
with or without USEPAK, and makes it easier to change missions in the code.
onpon4
Guus Sliepen