The way it was previously, you always knew exactly where the WEAPCO
scientist was. I don't remember if this was the case in the original
game (I don't think it was), but regardless, this makes the mission
seem incredibly short and easy, and it ends up centering on the
secondary objective rather than the primary objective. Now, you have
to search through all the asteroids until you find the right one,
and you have to pay close attention to explosions. Collecting ore is
just something you do along the way.
It may be fake difficulty, but after all, tropes are not bad.
The bug in question caused the super charge to be stripped away when
you collected powerups; each powerup would limit that aspect of your
weapon to its maximum. This put a limit on how long you could keep the
super charge, so I've added it back in for "original" difficulty.
I don't know why it was changed, but the changed version caused
full spread rather than partial spread with the triple shot, and it
also caused the quaduple shot to be arguably worse than the triple
shot.
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.
There. Together with spreading out the asteroids, this has the effect
of getting rid of the sort of boxed-in feel this mission originally
had, and preventing the mission from being beaten simply by going
up or down forever.
I noticed that in "original" difficulty, plasma upgrades are basically
prohibitively expensive, which is not at all like the original. To
fix this, I've given that difficulty the original prices for those.
I've also slightly reduced the normal cost of permanent upgrades.
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.
onpon4