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!
This was inconsistent and had no particular benefits. The only minor
benefit I can see is that it prevents smaller enemies from hiding
inside bigger enemies, and in my test run through Spirit, this only
happened once. Not at all significant compared to how incredibly
awkward the aliens look when they're acting as if they can't move
through other ships.
This commit also includes more function name changes and other minor
style fixes.
3 damage? Really?! No wonder this weapon felt so weak compared to
the double rockets!
I've increased the damage to 7, which causes the total damage of the
weapon to be 35 (slightly more than the total damage of the double
rockets, which is 30).
I'm going to completely reorganize this absolute mess of a codebase.
First thing is to fix the names so that it's more obvious what files
they're defined in. Second thing is to move around some functions,
and rename some of the cpp and h files, to organize them better.
I'm doing these both at once.
I don't feel it's really necessary, and besides, it's annoying that
due to the way it's implemented it prevents you from doing anything
while it's shown.
The claim made sense with the original graphics, but with the current
graphics replacements, the Firefly and his ship look nothing alike.
To remedy this, the mercenary's dialog no longer calls it an
"upgrade to the standard Firefly". He just thanks Chris and says that
he made it.
I found it kind of odd to be able to manually save to the autosave
slot, *and* have no reliable way to even know what the autosave
slot is. I noticed that it's an actual problem when my brothers
played Starfighter; one of them used an autosave slot, and the
other unwittingly ended up erasing the first one's save because of
this. To fix this, I have replaced the behavior of allowing the
player to define a slot as autosave, with a dedicated autosave
slot.
While I was there, I had no choice but to vastly improve on this
game's *atrocious* menu system. Granted, I didn't do much more
than replace the magic numbers with enums, but it makes the code
much more clear and more easy to edit.
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).
Using <SDL/SDL.h>, or in this case <SDL2/SDL.h>, and others like this
is not the proper way to include SDL headers. The proper way is to
pass the -lSDL2 flag to the compiler. The place I put it might be
awkward, but I'm planning to replace this hand-written makefile with
Autoconf/Automake scripts, anyway.
It's incredibly silly for it to be 10; what's the advantage of the
double homing missile launcher over the regular homing missile launcher
otherwise? It's just much slower and less versatile. Now it should
be slightly better, because you can effectively shoot 30 missiles
total, instead of just 20.
(Micro homing missiles are different; the advantage of having several
weak missiles instead of a smaller numer of strong missiles is
actually quite significant.)
There was a check that was supposed to prevent completing missions on
death, but it also prevented completing missions after an area was
finished. This was in particular a problem in interceptions, where
rescuing slaves after destroying interceptions didn't have any effect
on the slave rescue mission.
It was previously just ineffective. Now it's impossible.
The reason I'm doing this is when you *can* grind (in this case, by
constantly getting free plasma and selling it), it kind of feels
like an obligation to do so.
It's still possible to grind within missions whose progress depends
on your pace, which aren't timed and keep generating more enemies
until you win. Namely: the missile boat mission, the miner mission,
and the third boss. (There might be others.) However, grinding in
these situations is quite dangerous and likely to take away the much
larger shield bonus at the end, and plus if you mess up when trying
to do this you're set back quite a bit, so I think these are sufficiently
worthless activities that no one will do them. (I never did.)
A supercharge at this point can suddenly make bosses much easier
(especially the case with the Star Killer). This kind of takes away
the tension, so it's undesired. (It's fine for Easy difficulty,
because it's possible to take in a Supercharge from an earlier level
anyway.)
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.
onpon4