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 fake "windowed fullscreen" is less invasive, but it sometimes
causes ugly artifacts and as a general rule isn't really all that
useful.
However, I also defined it in defs.h, so that it can be more easily
changed in the future.
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.
This should add some much-needed depth to the tacticality of the
weapon. It's not much: it takes 5 plasma cells to fully charge the
cannon. But it does eliminate the previous effect where the charger
was always preferable over plasma bullets; it's still preferable in
a lot of circumstances, but for smaller ships, it's now typically
better to use plain old plasma ammo. It also limits the amount of
times the charger can be used.
These are just there so that you can define these at compile time
without modifying the source code. In the future, I would like this
to only be the *default* screen width and height, because I'll want
to add an option in the menu to change the resolution from 640x480
up to whatever your monitor's resolution is.
I honestly don't understand why these cheats were here. Preventing
enemies from moving breaks some missions and doesn't do anything
useful, and preventing enemies from firing is basically no better
than the invincibility cheat (and might even be worse, if it applies
to Sid; I didn't check).
This feature is just annoying if for some reason you want to leave
the game to do something else while you wait for something. That
would normally be a defect, but I can't count the number of times
I've been rushing through to get to a particular area, using cheats,
and had to wait for some mission condition, and this is only made
worse by not being able to do some other work while I wait for it.
In particular:
* The charge cannon in that difficulty now behaves as originally.
* Cash is now rare, not nonexistent, on interceptions in that difficulty.
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.
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).
All gamepads I've come across work OK with button 2 or 3 as the primary
button, and button 1 or 4 as the secondary button. For the rest,
basically invariably, buttons 5 and 7 are the left shoulder buttons,
buttons 6 and 8 are the right shoulder buttons, button 9 is "Select"
or "Back", and button 10 is "Start". Based on this, I've changed
the gamepad controls to something that should work for most gamepads.
Also fixed some bad HTML in the documentation, and removed the
build instructions from there (they will soon be obsolete; I'm
working on replacing the hand-made Makefile with GNU Autoconf).
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.
Julie Marchant