899 replies to this topic

[ShadowTiger]

Would it be an easier solution to have all items on the sides of the screen shuttled a tile or two toward the center, or vanish entirely?

[C-Dawg]

Been working on cutscene stuff.  I think I have a script that strikes a good compromise between shifting screens in ZClassic and allowing me to control better what's happening on screen.  It's implemented up until the third battle with Iron.  As I get into the cutscene-heavy first visit to Leo, things get a little thornier.

 

Any new bugs in the meantime?

 

Would it be an easier solution to have all items on the sides of the screen shuttled a tile or two toward the center, or vanish entirely?

 

It's "a" solution, but it's not easier.  Anyway, in playing the first few levels myself, I can't see how you can hide from bullets anywhere except the top of the screen sometimes.  I might just make THAT area blocked off.  Shouldn't bother anyone.

[Solairflaire]

When I said weird things I didn't mean the stuff in the corridor of Taurus 7,9. That's separate (or not, maybe it's a cause, but I doubt it.) The Taurus 7,9 stuff is just enemy sprites randomly appearing around the screen and sticking around for a while (usually the blue flaming rocks). Sometimes there is a damage tile underneath them as well that does 16 damage with the Supernova Armor. They seem to appear most often when there are a bunch of enemies spawning at the same time. Both bosses in Taurus also leave behind numbers when they die, but I don't think that's too important right now.

 

The weird stuff is like what I said. I walk into Aquarius 0,2 to go passed the Zodiac Boss room to the corridor there and the boss appears while I'm standing in the doorway. As soon as I move, it takes the boss away and puts me in the empty boss room as if I had just beaten it (which I assume is the code for boss check working).

 

The corridor enemy that spawned on me was in Taurus on the way to checking Taurus 7,9. There are no corridor enemies that appear from the warp point and that corridor. The enemy was one of those green eyeball brain things that spawn homing bombs.

 

Coming out of the wrong corridor exit was when I beat Cancer 6,E. I came out of Libra 7,6. Neither one completed when that happened.

 

All told, I think these are symptoms more than any actual causes. But that's just my non expert limited knowledge opinion.

 

I haven't had a chance to play again since my last set of test runs. Just for completeness. I'm testing on the 429 build and I am using a save that is at the story point where I need to close the corridors. The only 2 corridors that are complete are Pisces 3,D (stunner required) and Leo 5,F (Super Missiles required). I am not saving while testing this. I've tried varying the order I do the corridors in. It doesn't seem to matter. Mostly, I'm just going through them and trying to note any oddities that occur. Unfortunately, doing 20 corridors isn't a fast process since each of them take several minutes to beat and that doesn't include traveling between them. I've been avoiding using F1 since I know that can cause weird things with scripts sometimes.

 

The only thing I haven't tried is going through the entire game without dying, continue warping, and saving. That would not be easy or fast.

[C-Dawg]

Fixed the potion bug, thanks for reminding me.

Also fixed cutscenes up through Leo and redesigned the way the scenes are handled to avoid some hijinks I was using before with scrolling warps.  Safer now.

Fixed Energy Dynamos and Repair Modules.  Level 3 is no longer crappy, level 1 Repair is now better.

I believe I finally caught and fixed the corridor bug.  One of the Libra corridors was running "Corridor_Clear" instead of "Corridor_Check" which means it was resetting all of the corridors.  Finally!  It should all work now.  I hope.

Updated Pheagon and Big_Tank animations and deaths a bit.

 

Updated to-do list:

 

1. Continue updating bosses to fix graphic glitches, avoid bugs, and improve quality of:

a. Shield Armor - Fix the way the bullets work, tweak damage and death animation and script.

b. Remaining 10 Zodiac Bosses - Tweak damage and death animation and script.  Scorpio needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, the rest can work as-is with some minor tweaks.

h. Super secret mystery stuff - A few graphical issues with these guys need to be worked out. 

 

2. Overhaul cutscene code, from destruction of the computer in Leo up through the end of the game.  \

3. Now that the corridor spawner is working perfectly, use it in more places.  This will mix up the enemies you see.

4. Finish bibliography and credits.

5. Fix ceiling-cling bug.

6. Consider bomb upgrade and possibly an additional tool.  The Enemy Eraser from TGL, perhaps?  A way to clear bullet hell that you have to pick-up consumables?  That could work...

7. Make custom enemies to replace the more annoying LOZ default ones used at the moment.

8. Implement new music.   
 

EDIT - new build uploaded.  

Edited by C-Dawg, 16 February 2015 - 12:16 AM.

[newstarshipsmell]

Fixed the potion bug, thanks for reminding me.

So what was bugging it up? Just curious. ETA: Actually...
Life Tanks: Something's horribly wrong with the math now. I noticed upon reaching Aries that I only had 2 tanks - but I should've picked up 3 since beginning of game. So I warped around a bit - not sure what's gone wrong, but I picked up a single tank in Libra, and 2+1=2. Picked up a 3xTank, 2+3=3. Headed over to Leo, and picked up another single tank, 3+1=3. Bought another 3xTank, and 3+3=4. Using them up, they decrement normally. Oh well.
 

I believe I finally caught and fixed the corridor bug.  One of the Libra corridors was running "Corridor_Clear" instead of "Corridor_Check" which means it was resetting all of the corridors.  Finally!  It should all work now.  I hope.

Woohoo! I hope this resolves it; I never had all the corridors reset on me, just a specific set of them. Hopefully that's the result of some arcane interference caused by your now-fixed bug and my version-spanning-gamesaves that is not easily intuited by myself.

I managed to dick off all weekend without touching the last demo. So I'll try to play this new one through and verify the corridors aren't bugged anymore.

RE: solaireflaire's last post - his description of the Taurus corridor enemies frozen in place and the Aquarius boss appearing/disappearing near the right room edge are exactly the same as what I saw weeks ago when I played through those points on previous games. The Grapple Beam 2 boss did something similar, except he didn't disappear as I walked to the edge, so his blocks remained barring passage and I had to noclip around to reach the other side. Haven't made it that far since, so I wasn't sure if you'd fixed it.

Also, I didn't even consider F1 might mess up scripting. Should I avoid using F1 at all? I frequently pressed F1 during the corridor intro/victory scenes just to speed through them, as well as the obvious energy/health bar refilling cheap trick on empty screens. Oh, and the intro corridor - I've gotten quite good at playing through most of that with F1, heh.

ETA: Cosmetic/polish idea. Those doors that are hidden inside walls - can you draw new tiles for them, basically just plopping the original door tiles on top of the tiles that cover them, and using the resultant tiles as the hidden/revealed tiles instead? Then when you blow them open, they won't look shitty with the squared-off gap above them. I'm not really sure about how secrets work and whatnot, but it seems like you could extend this to pretty much all the hidden paths you can blow open - extend the block of secret tiles to cover the adjacent wall-middle tiles, and have the revealed tiles along the wall be the appropriate wall-edge tiles. Alternatively, draw custom blown-apart-wall-edge tiles that are walkable and line the passage with them, so you don't have to change the size of the secrets block. Naturally, this wouldn't require a revision for every passage, since many of them are already bordered by proper wall-edge tiles. My friend did the same thing with her sequel, and it looks way better than squared off holes.
I also might suggest placing background tiles around all the existing out-in-the-open doors - like the ones in the simulation already have - so they don't look like weird freestanding door frames.

/bug reports (on demo 434)

Aquarius 7A: Boss's neck still does not explode during death explosion

Scorpio 17: Can't enter the door - flashes a weird graphic behind me when I hold up - conflict with sandfall?

Scorpio 56/46: This is a particularly dickish random enemy spawn. Proceeding upwards, you must scroll the screen up to land on the platform in the upper-right corner of 56, and when you scroll back down, the giant skull frequently spawns on top of you for lots of damage, and maybe knocks you off the platform. The best you can do is learn to hold up/down when scrolling back down so you don't get knocked off it, but still take the damage.

Aquarius 54: Not sure if you tweaked Crabbor since last post about him. Seems like you did, as he wasn't getting stuck in the upper corners. But you can still trap him in the lower corners.

Corridor 0 Boss: No bugs - just wanted to say he's nifty, and much better than the old boss. He was very easy, for me, to beat - I did not die on my first fight, and only lost about half my health bar (I had a full bar going in, and was very lazy about dodging.) I learned quickly that you can stay on the bottom row and slide between his diagonal fire while still near the screen center to hit him, and then when he shoots vertically, dash up between shots right underneath him and pummel him. Then when he fires the orbs, he's stationary, so you can stay lined up with him and simply move up/down, and if timed correctly, you'll slide between the orbs without a hit. Helpfully, ZC crashed after I reached Scorpio with no saves, so I got to play him again - impatiently, I ended up taking him on with maybe 2/5ths of my life, certain I'd die. I took no damage on the second fight. Not saying he should be harder - he's the first boss after all. Just giving feedback. ETA: Okay, I lied. He has one "bug" - his death explosion is tiny compared to his sprite. Not sure if that's just how you've coded the new death animation and how it looks applied uniformly to every boss.

Aries 00: The needle-nosed enemies with the six-way spreads in the corridor - they are no longer bouncing off the left- (and maybe right- as well?) screen edge - instead, they just move off the left side and disappear. I wasn't even able to kill any of the bastards before they skipped out on me.

Also, now that I've compared corridors, I've noticed that the starfield/metal canyon in the initial corridor scrolls very jerkily - it looks like they're skipping a pixel or two fairly frequently. The Aries corridor doesn't do that, though it still scrolls a bit less than smoothly - but it also scrolls at a slower speed, so maybe all the faster corridors do that?

Cancer 3D: The door frames disappear/turn black when Iron walks in and talks, and during his defeat dialog. Also, after his defeat, he runs left through the wall, instead of jumping up and exiting by the door.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 16 February 2015 - 11:24 AM.

[C-Dawg]

So what was bugging it up? Just curious. ETA: Actually...
Life Tanks: Something's horribly wrong with the math now. I noticed upon reaching Aries that I only had 2 tanks - but I should've picked up 3 since beginning of game. So I warped around a bit - not sure what's gone wrong, but I picked up a single tank in Libra, and 2+1=2. Picked up a 3xTank, 2+3=3. Headed over to Leo, and picked up another single tank, 3+1=3. Bought another 3xTank, and 3+3=4. Using them up, they decrement normally. Oh well.

 

What?

 

That's... odd.  The original problem was the Zclassic automatically increments your potion count from 1 to 2 if you pick up a potion-type item and you already have one.  So, when you had 1 Life Tank and pick up a second one, what was happening was that both ZClassic AND my script were both trying to increment the count by 1, leaving you with 1+1=3.  I fixed the problem by adding a "Waitframe()" function between the script calculating what your Life Tank count SHOULD be, and actually setting it.  The idea being that the Waitframe will allow the engine to increment itself, and then the script comes in and over-writes the value so it's correct.  I tested the 1+1=2 case and it worked fine.

 

Why this is causing the higher level stuff to malfunction... I don't understand.  Nothing should be happening that wasn't happening before except the engine gets priority between calculating the number of tanks and actually setting it.  Hrrrmpph.  I'll fix it tonight.

 

Worse case scenario, I just dump reliance on Potion-type items entirely and (like so much else with this game) just script an entirely custom item that refills life.  Heck, if I do it that way, I can also display the bar filling instead of blanking it out.

 

 RE: solaireflaire's last post - his description of the Taurus corridor enemies frozen in place and the Aquarius boss appearing/disappearing near the right room edge are exactly the same as what I saw weeks ago when I played through those points on previous games. The Grapple Beam 2 boss did something similar, except he didn't disappear as I walked to the edge, so his blocks remained barring passage and I had to noclip around to reach the other side. Haven't made it that far since, so I wasn't sure if you'd fixed it.

 

I did, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem elsewhere.  Hopefully these are all simply a secret flag missing somewhere.  I love those bugs, since they take 10 seconds to correct!

 

Also, I didn't even consider F1 might mess up scripting. Should I avoid using F1 at all? I frequently pressed F1 during the corridor intro/victory scenes just to speed through them, as well as the obvious energy/health bar refilling cheap trick on empty screens. Oh, and the intro corridor - I've gotten quite good at playing through most of that with F1, heh.

 

I have no idea.  I don’t know how using F1 affects the game clock.

 

ETA: Cosmetic/polish idea. Those doors that are hidden inside walls - can you draw new tiles for them, basically just plopping the original door tiles on top of the tiles that cover them, and using the resultant tiles as the hidden/revealed tiles instead? 

 

Yes.  Or, better yet, have little crumbling block animation that shows a different kind of door that looks like a hole blasted in the wall.

 

Aquarius 54: Not sure if you tweaked Crabbor since last post about him. Seems like you did, as he wasn't getting stuck in the upper corners. But you can still trap him in the lower corners.

 

At this point, consider it a feature.  Also, Crabbor is supposed to respawn in Virgio.  He’s more like a normal enemy at that point.  This is something I want to do more of, incidentally: use earlier bosses as normal enemies in the late game.  The new structure of the boss code I’m using makes that pretty easy to do.

 

 

Corridor 0 Boss: No bugs - just wanted to say he's nifty, and much better than the old boss.

 

Thanks, I think so, too.  At least he’s visually more like the normal bosses in the game, now.  I’ve got the MS Paint sprite into Zquest down to a pretty quick procedure now.  Here’s a tip for other quest makers – space in your tile sheet is pretty cheap, so just plop your sprites there and use DrawTile for your bosses.  This is SOOOO much easier than messing around with enemy sizes or (shudder) assigning large bosses to combos.  So much easier.

 

 

Aries 00: The needle-nosed enemies with the six-way spreads in the corridor - they are no longer bouncing off the left- (and maybe right- as well?) screen edge - instead, they just move off the left side and disappear. I wasn't even able to kill any of the bastards before they skipped out on me.

 

Ah.  A casualty of allowing enemies to spawn off on the sides.   I will address this.

Edited by C-Dawg, 16 February 2015 - 01:43 PM.

[newstarshipsmell]

Scorpio 51: Sandblocks aren't destructible with Disintegrator Beam.

Scorpio 60: Upper door tile is revealed by Sidearm (presumably the Disintegrator Beam also reveals it.) Lower tile requires Disintegrator Beam.

Pisces 79: The little shell platforms in the labyrinth room do not match the ones in the Crabbor room. Should they? Looks weird when you warp back/forth. Also, he got stuck as soon as he switched to mode 2. I guess I can live with this "feature."
|

Pisces 3D: Corridor exit music loops. Also, the six-way shooters in here also wander off the screen.

Pisces 6B: Recommend making this block destructible as well:

For some reason, when I try to jump up out of the hole from below, from the little ledge on the second row from top in 7B, nearly every jump I only ascend 3.5 tiles, and fall back down. Occasionally I'll get some sort of boost to my jump from hitting the corner above me and land on the floor of 6B. Only way to reliably ascend here is to exploit the 2nd wall-jump bug.

Gemini 75: This corridor boss still abruptly appears before the end of the level/while enemies are onscreen, and I think there was no siren either.

Gemini 64: As the boss died, he moved left while exploding, but left the lower corner of his shield stationary in the middle of the screen.

Scorpio 0F: This boss also appeared abruptly at level end, clearing onscreen enemies, and with no siren.

With many of these bosses it warps me to the corridor exit/victory screen before they've finished exploding. This time, I was still firing, so when it warped me, my shots continued to fire off on the right side from where I was, while I did my transform thing center-screen. Not sure if that was specific to this level, or just because I happened to still be firing while it warped me; usually I stop firing once the boss starts exploding. I suppose this is probably related to the "bug" with the Zodiac Weapons maintaining their relative positions across room scrolls.

I can also "fire" my weapons during the intro/exit screens, though it hides the sprites when I fire them from the locked position - all you can hear are the sounds. Polish: either prevent the weapons from firing at all on those screens, or if all you can do is hide/suppress the sprites, can you mute the weapons' sound effects as well?

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 17 February 2015 - 04:31 AM.

[C-Dawg]

I didn't get much time to work on this last night, but I did fix the Life Tanks, I think.  I tested picking up a bunch of tanks and it appeared to increment correctly.  So... I think we're done with that?  I also fixed the Tribeam's movement pattern.  

[newstarshipsmell]

So um... the boss guarding the Leo entrance... Is it actually possible to beat it without burning through a bunch of Life Tanks? I gave up and made myself invincible after about ten failed attempts, since I wanted to move on and continue playtesting rather than beating it "fairly."

Leo 55: The moving electric beam - its top tile is still offset a half-tile to the right.

Leo 05: Not sure, but I would swear the computer died well before its life bar ran out.

Gemini 31: I returned here after getting the Advanced Comsat and triggering the 1A switch. The top half of the switch is now missing. I don't remember it disappearing when I triggered it earlier in the game.

Pisces ??: Forget where this was:
"THROUGH PISCES. THE CREW COULDN'T HELP BUT
SPEND SOME TIME EXPLORING THE BIZARRE PLACE
AND WE NOTICED A CONCEALED PASSSAGE" (leading space before AND as well)

Taurus 15: I only saw one enemy sprite frozen in place in this corridor, and it was one of these two guys:

The other one, as well as all the rest of this type of enemy, just moved back and forth along the row above the top row, eventually disappearing. I could not damage them with my ship cannon, but my ship bomb seemed to kill them.
Also, the ships that scroll down the sides firing across - some of them appeared to disappear off the side of the screen before reaching the bottom. I haven't seen any of them do that in any other levels, but then - I shoot most of them. So perhaps they would've, too, if left alone.
Lastly, this boss still has numbers/letters for an explosion.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 17 February 2015 - 11:17 PM.

[C-Dawg]

Are you using the grapple to avoid getting shoved into the spikes?

[newstarshipsmell]

Well, I was trying to. I had the Aries Saber equipped with my Grapple Beam; maybe I should've tried missiles or sidearm, but it seemed pretty hopeless. Just wondering if he was accidentally overpowered, like the boss guarding the High Jump. Already killed him, so I can't go back and try again.

/bugs

Taurus 77: Fireball enemy is stationary.

Taurus 68: Fireball enemy is stationary.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 18 February 2015 - 12:00 AM.

[C-Dawg]

Real life obligations have obliterated my ability to work on this quest for the last few days, and I probably won't get back to it in earnest until Friday afternoon.  Sorry about that, but I'll be back up and running this weekend.

 

In the interim:

 

Fanbot - I'm game for balancing enemies, but if you decided to attack an enemy that actively pushes you away with a short-range weapon... well uh.... good luck?  Also, bear in mind that the new damage script I'm using for my bosses -- the one that shows a little star on them when they're damaged -- makes weapons like the Saber and Laser FAR LESS EFFECTIVE.  Previously they would hit numerous times.  Now, they hit once, and the enemy's period of invulnerability takes over for awhile.  Part of my point here was to make Missiles far more critical at all stages of the game.

 

The rest of your bugs are noted and I'll fix em soon.

 

EDIT: Since I clearly won't have my laundry list done by Feb 21 anyway, perhaps I should take a closer look at the Zodiac Weapons.  The increase in Missile utility has made them less important, and I'm re-doing the bosses anyway.  Perhaps what I should do is change the Cancer Charge to be some other kind of weapon, and allow all of the Zodiac weapons to charge and have alternative modes.  This might let me give certain bosses certain vulnerabilities.

 

So, like:

 

Aquarius Bubble - Perhaps it charges up to create a bubble around you, ala Sonic, that will take a hit for you or allow you to float in water.  Could redesign Scorpio boss so that the bubble stops his scorpion tail and stuns him, making this an effective choice for that battle?

 

Scorpio Sting - Charge up to fire two bullets that rotate outwards from player's position across the whole screen in a complete circle?  Maybe make the Pieces boss' little protective octopuses vulnerable to this attack?

 

Pieces Spread - Charge up to pull enemies towards your position while draining life?  Could be used to yank Gemini's boss out from the bottom of the mirror when he descends.

 

Gemini Beam - Charge up to create a clone of yourself, ala Copy Image from MM&Z?  Perhaps make the Aries boss' seeker missiles more deadly so that this tactic overcomes it?

 

And so on?  I think that would be a cool improvement.

Edited by C-Dawg, 19 February 2015 - 02:00 PM.

[Solairflaire]

Can you check the Leo Laser's damage formula? It seems to be doing too much damage for what your formula suggests a couple pages ago. Iron 5 loses half a bar each time I hit him with it. I've only got 24 power too. It is doing more than supers.

 

I've hit another game breaking bug. This time it's with killing the zodiac bosses. I've killed them all and Dr. Mo is telling me I need to kill more. The only possibilities I can think of are that the Leo Laser bypassed a script on one of them (which I doubt since none of them appear again except the Aquarius one) or it's the Aquarius one. There's a single tile warp at the left entrance of the Aquarius boss (Aquarius 0,2) in the middle of the door that warps you to the boss encounter. I'm not sure if this maybe reset that one or something. You can go below it if you don't jump through the door. I've triple checked and all of them are dead but it won't let me move on.

 

Some other bugs:

 

Shooting down with the sidearm when it has multiple bullets has it do the upward shot so that all the weak shots always hit first.

 

Pisces 4,4: Right waterfall pulls you toward it while on the ground. The left one pulls you when you're on the right side of it. There is no flowing water that should move you on that screen.

 

Aries 2,C Boss: The pillars in the boss encounter come down further than in the normal room.

 

Leo 6,0: There is no way through this room from the top without taking damage from that spike by the corner  wall at the top. Also, there is no grapple point on the left side to get out without damage boosting off the spikes if you go that way without double jump boots.

 

Leo 5,8: After you blow up the computer, wasn't there a cutscene here that had the commander and Iron going to the Engine?

 

Taurus 5,8 Boss: Can fall through right side of lava in the large right pit.

 

Engine Core Boss: Door is open during fight...

 

Capricorn 3,2: Invisible ceiling above magnet. Appears to be 4 tiles wide starting from the left buzzsaws.

 

Typo: After acquiring high jump boots. 2nd override with general.

"Base without being seen. If you can get

access to the processor and destroy it.

I will try to contact you again, Guardian."

 

The underlined part isn't a sentence. It would be better to say, "Contact me again when you destroy the central processor." and eliminate the last line too. It also sounds like what a commanding officer would say.

[C-Dawg]

Got your reports.  With respect to the Zodiac bosses, are you ABSOLUTELY SURE you hit all of them?  People have reported this bug in the past only to realize they missed one.  Libra is particularly easy to overlook since it's sort of out there in no-man's land.

 

I spent tonight tinkering with a general purpose charging script for the Zodiac weapons, and I've got it all working fine.  I think this is a MASSIVE improvement in gameplay, potentially.  The Aquarius Bubble shield is working great now, but I haven't implemented its ability to float in the water just yet.

[Solairflaire]

Yes, I had beaten all of them. Though I had a backup save from before I entered Capricorn and went through it again and this time it let me continue like normal after killing the Capricorn one (that was the last I needed on that save). Maybe ZC just copied the file wrong. I don't know.

 

Edit: These doors have a solid top to them.

 

Libra

5,5

3,D

3,7

5,9

1,D

0,C

2,7

 

Capricorn

3,0

1,8

4,C

 

Virgo

6,A

3,4

2,A

2,3

4,1

7,3

6,6

3,6

 

Edit 2: Capricorn 6,D Inside Room: No gravity

Edited by Solairflaire, 20 February 2015 - 05:07 AM.