899 replies to this topic

[newstarshipsmell]

LOL, I know! But when I got there the first time, I figured the hint was referring to the super-missile block... figured maybe you'd changed a previously nondescript block into an obvious one, and not bothered/forgotten to change the hint about it. That was where I was going next. And I haven't been able to reach the other hinted room yet. I was just worried you actually expected the player to ascend 45 to proceed, or something equally rage-inducing. (Is it possible to get to the top half of that screen without AGD/IJB? It seemed to me that you need at least two vertical tiles below a 1-block outcrop to dash/double-jump around it and latch onto its side, so I assumed this section was physically impossible to pass, as my feeble attempts all failed.) ETA: LOL, man, fuck this route!

 

Super-missiles: The black hole bomb, or whatever, drops out of the initial explosion and falls under gravity. I don't remember it doing this before - is that intentional?

 

Cancer Charge: If you assign it to B, you cannot charge it by holding down B.

Also, sometimes the second shot turns green for some reason. I think maybe if you have it powered up and release it on room transitions, or shoot it and it's onscreen, when you transition rooms, it retains the powered level when you start charging it again, and if it immediately strikes an enemy and disappears when you reuse it, it doesn't reset the charge level, so you can exploit that to repeatedly do large damage to close enemies. I haven't really worked out exactly how it works (or rather, doesn't.)

It also does the buggy direction-of-fire thing when this happens, sometimes, so when you charge it and strike an enemy you're facing, the shot bounces and travels behind you, probably if that was the last direction you fired it, I assume. I've seen it go up or down from the tile to my left/right sometimes.

 

Cancer 3A: The enemy's lower-right tile is blue, instead of red/orange like the other three tiles.

 

LOL! Poor Jenkins' face. The sacrifices we make in the name of Science.

 

Cancer 49: All of these vent things I've found elsewhere had rising dust graphics above them, but this one does not? Intentional, or tile bug?

 

Cancer 27/37: Tile bug: the column to the right of the bombable floor tile is empty, so it looks like you can jump up/right into the open space, but you can't (or I couldn't.)

 

Cancer 46: No gravity in this room.

 

Cancer 33: It looks like you forgot a pipe-corner tile on the left wall. Also, every single room in every area with moving platforms causes the upper-left tile to disappear after scrolling into the room.

 

Missiles: The new missiles will detonate against the top row and left column, but not if you're too close to them when you fire it. Noticed this when I tried to shoot the ceiling in 5A, after spotting the hole with my X-Ray Scope, and my missile went straight through it (so I bombed it open.) In the following screenshots below, on the left, you are standing at the minimum distance from the wall for a fired missile to detonate against the wall, and on the right, one pixel further to the left, your missiles pass through the wall:

 

Also, I found a cave room with a Randar instead of a terminal in it - I didn't report it at the time, as I hadn't realized that you'd used them prior, and replaced them with terminals instead. I forget where it was - I think I found it at some point after first reaching Leo. If you haven't turned it into a terminal room already, and can't find it in ZQ, I'll report it when I play through the game again, after I've finished Sagittarius.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 13 January 2015 - 02:15 PM.

[C-Dawg]

ETA: LOL, man, fuck this route!

 

Would it interest you to know that you get to go back and forth along that route a MINIMUM of two times during the game, and that's assuming you've done everything as efficiently as possible?  I wasn't kidding when I said the entrance back in Pisces is a warm up exercise.

 

To be clear: you need to visit Dr. Mo at least once, and get an item, in order to get to every Zodiac Weapon Project interface. Then you have to go back to her to do *something secret*.  Once that's all done, you will finally have access to the Voltaic Key, which makes the route much, much easier.

[newstarshipsmell]

Would it interest you to know that you get to go back and forth along that route a MINIMUM of two times during the game, and that's assuming you've done everything as efficiently as possible?  I wasn't kidding when I said the entrance back in Pisces is a warm up exercise.

 

To be clear: you need to visit Dr. Mo at least once, and get an item, in order to get to every Zodiac Weapon Project interface. Then you have to go back to her to do *something secret*.  Once that's all done, you will finally have access to the Voltaic Key, which makes the route much, much easier.

LOL, yes. I noted that this is one of the levels that lets you die/quit and continue from the last door you exited. So after falling from 25 to 35, I found the door at 34, and said to myself: "Fuck. I want to go inside and get/read whatever's in there, but then I won't be able to quit/continue from 48 - which means I get to die at least several more times at 29. Fuck."

 

Capricorn 24: This room appears to have slower underwater movement applied, though there is no water.

 

Capricorn 03: I triggered the switch with the Cancer Charge, and it disappeared. Was it supposed to? ETA: And it also disappears when triggered with the Sidearm. It also does not display room coordinates for the switch's target before or after triggering it.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 13 January 2015 - 10:17 PM.

[C-Dawg]

Have you been updating your .qst file with each release?  Both the Zodiac Weapons and the Corridors are tracked in global arrays, so you might find yourself having problems once you get to the point where you need to have completed all of them.  The Corridor thing doesnt matter much, since I havn't coded the end of the game yet, but the Weapon array is critical to you getting past where you are.  There's a whole new Zone and a bunch of new stuff in the existing Zones to explore after that point, so... I hope that changing the quest file doesn't screw up your variables.

 

 If things don't work, that might be why. 

 

EDIT: Another note.  Earlier in this thread, Tiger reported some corridors spawning enemies in the margins instead of normally.  They arrived on the left side and died, apparently.  I'm not able to replicate that problem.  Have you seen this?  

Edited by C-Dawg, 13 January 2015 - 03:30 PM.

[newstarshipsmell]

Have you been updating your .qst file with each release?  Both the Zodiac Weapons and the Corridors are tracked in global arrays, so you might find yourself having problems once you get to the point where you need to have completed all of them.  The Corridor thing doesnt matter much, since I havn't coded the end of the game yet, but the Weapon array is critical to you getting past where you are.  There's a whole new Zone and a bunch of new stuff in the existing Zones to explore after that point, so... I hope that changing the quest file doesn't screw up your variables.

 

 If things don't work, that might be why. 

 

EDIT: Another note.  Earlier in this thread, Tiger reported some corridors spawning enemies in the margins instead of normally.  They arrived on the left side and died, apparently.  I'm not able to replicate that problem.  Have you seen this?  

Heh, I actually hadn't tried to reach Leo 00 yet - guess I know now what's up there!

 

It's been a bit since I fought the Aries 00 corridor, so I don't remember. But I certainly don't recall seeing item drops appearing out of nowhere. There are some stretches on a few of the corridors where I noticed a sudden lack of enemies for an extended period of time, longer than a brief breather/respite from the onslaught, and I wondered if the level was messed up and not generated enemies where you'd expected it to (perhaps I just cleared some larger/stronger enemies quickly with the special weapon that would've "filled" those sections otherwise - I don't know. I'm not on the lookout for bugs unless they're blatantly obvious in the corridors, as I'm too focused on simply not dying.)

 

But I did not see enemies dying on the edges of the screens at any of these points, and no item drops appeared. I'll let you know what happens when I visit the Leo 00 corridor. That room at 01 is lined with spikes, am I able to reach the corridor entrance simply by eating the damage and jumping up the walls? Or do I need any further items/upgrades to reach it?

 

I've been updating the .qst files with each update, and resuming my previous save with them. It was my intention to finish Sagittarius and then start over from the beginning with the newest demo on a new game, so I can play through and look for/uncover any bugs I missed the first time through (or find new ones) while avoiding any potential bugs caused by swapping different copies of the demo. Once I've finished playing the game all the way through, and made my maps, it should take a considerably shorter period of time to play through it all again. And I can focus solely on looking for bugs.

 

Speaking of which, how long does it take you now to play from beginning to end? Excepting the final sequence which you haven't linked up to the main game yet, I mean. Just curious.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 13 January 2015 - 03:57 PM.

[C-Dawg]

Cool, good plan.  Your dedication to rooting out problems with this test is incredibly helpful!

 

And, actually, Leo 00 is not what I was referring to earlier.  You can't get into that corridor, even if you climb up there, until you have another late game item.  As far as item-progression goes, you're still three plot points away from being able to get in there.  The Anti-Gravity Device will let you reach the room, if you're careful, and then you will have ... another issue.

[ShadowTiger]

Is the Anti-Gravity device designed to not allow us to leave the screen while using it, by the way? Its nature perturbs me ever so slightly.

[C-Dawg]

Yep, yep.  You can pull yourself up in a single screen, but you can't float between screens.  What you can do is hop up above the top of the screen once you get there, and resume floating on the next screen.

[ShadowTiger]

Okay, yes, I see, that does work. Odd that it didn't seem to work for me until I asked about it. Luck of the draw, it seems. It's just one jump button, after all. It's really finnicky in terms of horizontal movement though. You can be caught on a ledge by a single pixel. I tried so many times to float up between two blocks when I thought I was perfectly aligned. Just one pixel difference.

[C-Dawg]

it is finicky, but I'm inclined not to make the AGD more useful than it is.  It's good for a very particular kind of ascent, but I want the Grapple 2 and Infinity Jump boots to matter.

[newstarshipsmell]

Capricorn 18: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave.

 

Do you, as quest designer, have any access to/control over the saved game's death counter? A funny joke would be adding another random enemy item drop, that only drops rarely from the tougher, later enemies: a Blue Lander, which turns into a "1UP" when you touch it, then disappears... and all it does is subtract 1 from your death counter.

 

Hahaha, motherfucker! I got tired of trying to make that shitty jump from 0B to 0C, so I simply fucked around until I discovered that you can not only exploit a jump bug from the bottom screen, but also from left/right room transitions - so I jumped up from the upper-right platform in 1B and worked my way up along the waterfall on the room border, until I was high enough to hop up onto the platform below the door. Much easier than that nonsense you set the player up for! ETA: And thank God it's an actual room this time - I need a goddamn continue point already.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 13 January 2015 - 09:41 PM.

[C-Dawg]

Oh shit!

We can't have people avoiding the hard bits, can we? I'll take a look at that.

[newstarshipsmell]

Oh shit!

We can't have people avoiding the hard bits, can we? I'll take a look at that.

I managed it by holding Up while reversing Left/Right against the room border I just scrolled into, while spamming L, and on every third/fourth transition, I'd hear the Jump sound effect, letting me know to release Left/Right and go straight up a couple tiles after the next room transition, then hold against the border and repeat until I'm high enough to move into the space next to the platform and latch onto it and jump up on top. It gets really easy to master after a little practice. *looks at the maps to see where else this might prove profitable* *laughs maniacally*

 

By the way, I've already worn out one cheapo Logitech gamepad playtesting this thing. To be honest, it saw plenty of button mashing before I began it, but Zodiac was definitely its death sentence. The A button is sticking, and the L button was beginning to die - and I took the entire thing apart to clean it out in case it was just my gamer's hands gumming it up, but it was the pad underneath the buttons wearing out.

 

Capricorn 0E: If you quit/continue inside the cave room, you resume inside the cave room at Libra 46. I reported another room like this, so I'm guessing that many of them set the continue/save point inside the room to that cave - I haven't been deliberately looking for continue bugs inside the rooms, so I've only noticed the two so far.

 

Capricorn 3B: This room is underwater, but lacks a water layer.

 

Capricorn 3C: This room has spinning blades, but no suction. Did you remove the suction because it was screwing up entering the secret tunnel?

 

Capricorn 2D: The coordinates for the switch target (presumably 4B?) are difficult to read again, as they are displayed flashing, but underneath the unflashing 4E coordinates.

 

Capricorn 4C: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave.

 

Capricorn 4D/4E: After defeating Iron, and Dr. Mo's entrance/dialog, you still take contact damage from touching Iron, in room 4D, as well as in 4E after finishing the cutscene/dialog in the lab. Also, the light fixture in the middle, with 2x2 cabling tiles above it, has a 1x2 empty space immediately to the left of the cabling which is unwalkable.

 

Capricorn 0F: lolwhut? The background scrolls like a corridor, too:

I gather I cannot access this corridor entrance yet, but... also, the miniboss in the room isn't taking damage from either my Sidearm or my Cancer Charge, neither the scripted shot nor the close-in sword-strike.

 

Capricorn 7F: The Zodiac Weapon platform lacks a field like the others have. Unlike the other rooms where you approach from the right, this one does not trigger the script until you reach the center of the screen, though.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 14 January 2015 - 12:32 AM.

[C-Dawg]

Capricorn 4D/4E: After defeating Iron, and Dr. Mo's entrance/dialog, you still take contact damage from touching Iron, in room 4D, as well as in 4E after finishing the cutscene/dialog in the lab. Also, the light fixture in the middle, with 2x2 cabling tiles above it, has a 1x2 empty space immediately to the left of the cabling which is unwalkable.

 

Well, then don't touch him.

 

I kid, I'll take care of that.

 

Also, I finished the last mode: Virgo.  Sort of.  One more bug to iron out, and do the dramatic death animation, and the final boss is complete!  Hooray!

[newstarshipsmell]

But I want to touch him!

 

Gemini 5F: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave.

 

LOL, I think I asked, earlier in the thread, whether or not the warp maze in Libra's lower-left area required the Dash Boots 2 to solve. Sadly, the answer was staring me directly in the face, and I didn't even need the X-Ray Scope to figure it out... and yet, apparently, I did.

 

Libra 70: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave. But, the first time I entered it, the screen changed colors, like it always does when entering one of the bugged doors like these, but instead of ending up in the typical empty cave room, it spat me back out into room 70. I then entered the door a second time, and ended up in the typical empty cave room.

 

Libra 1B: I fell from the room above and landed in the corner of the spiked pit on the top row. I kept taking damage but could not move nor jump. I guess I'll avoid falling into that totally unfair deathtrap in the future.

 

Libra: All of the blocks with icy sliding applied to them completely disappear under the X-Ray Scope.

 

Libra 1A: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave.

 

Leo 33: I figured if I looked hard enough, I'd eventually find a game-ruining bug. Woohoo! Found.

The blocks next to the door do not bomb permanently, and are reformed when you return. Since they're on the bottom row, jumping up from below causes you to immediately bounce off them and scroll back down, before you can use any items. The energy booster at the end of this short path is inside a cave room. Leo is one of the areas that sets a continue/save point at every door, so... if you enter this area, you must quit/die and continue/save to escape it, but if you enter the door to get the item, you will resume from the door inside this area, where you're stuck. I scoured the entire section with the X-Ray Scope looking for another way out, and didn't find one, so.... poor Guardian. Taunted by the item she can't keep, unless she wants to spend the rest of her short existence trapped within a few screens while the asteroid hurtles towards Earth's doom.

 

Leo 47/48:

When you pass back through here, you see the version of room 48 with Dr. Mo and Iron above, but without dialog as you walk across the screen. Walking off the left edge puts you in the next room, which immediately scrolls left into the version of 48 with them gone, and no coordinates displayed. You can then go back to the right, and re-enter room 49; turning back around and re-entering 48 will put you on the empty version. Regardless, if you go left from this screen, after the autoscrolling bit, you'll end up in room 47, which also won't display its coordinates, unless you go up into 37 and come back down (and then going right into 48 and back into 47 will cause them to not display again.) (ETA: I wonder if this may be due to me playing with the game save that's spanned several demo updates. I have no idea how that stuff works, and how doing that might break stuff.)

 

Leo 2A: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave.

 

Leo 1B: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave. There's a 4x Life Tank in the ? Block in the room outside - this item also appears in the upper-left corner of the cave.

 

Taurus 7D: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave.

 

Gemini 37/27: Didn't notice this before, but it seems like the bottom row of 27 is unwalkable/you bounce off it when jumping up from 37. I fell right through it from above fine.

 

Leo Laser: Like many of the other Zodiac Weapons/Items, this is buggy on the left column or top row of rooms. It dies immediately if fired up or down along the left row, or left or right along the top row. It works normally when fired into the room, perpendicular to those edges.

 

Libra Crystal: This Zodiac Weapon is particularly obnoxious with the persistent relative location across room transitions, since it does not stop bouncing around until you fire it again. The shit just follows you around everywhere. JUST MAKE IT GO AWAY ALREADY.

 

Zodiac Weapon dialogs: Lately I've had trouble getting the dialogs to confirm the weapon switch - I don't remember the earlier dialogs causing me trouble, except that I learned to hold A instead of B on the message before the prompt, since pressing B again at the end of the message closed it and canceled or something, whereas holding A and pressing it one last time transferred control to the YES/NO prompt. On the more recent dialogs I've encountered, pressing A at the end of the message, expecting to get the prompt, closes it and selects NO at the same time, so I've learned I have to hold Left while pressing A and that will close the dialog, while moving the cursor to YES and selecting it.

 

Virgo 73: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave. Exiting the cave pops you out on the top row instead of next to the door.

 

Virgo 75: I was able to jump up along this column from below, but it looks like I can't get back down, and now I'm stuck in here:

 

Virgo 66: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave. Exiting the cave drops you onto the spikeball in the middle.

 

Missiles: As previously reported, while they now detonate against top row ceilings and left column walls from a distance, but not at close range, they also immediately disappear, without exploding, when fired left/right along the top row, or up/down along the left column.

 

Virgo 36: Another door to a no-grav/4-bat empty cave.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 15 January 2015 - 01:46 AM.