Interesting. I wonder if this varies from system to system? I had things balanced pretty decently on my side, I thought. I can crank up the amplitude, however, if you think its necessary.
Audio "engineering," if you can call this that, is so foregin to me. Coding, drawing, animation, sure, I have some sense of what I'm doing. Audio? Absolutely no idea!
Do not edit the audio files to increase the volume. They are not "too quiet" (I opened several in Audacity and looked at the waveforms) and if you increase their volume
inside the audio files, you will either a) clip the audio or b) compress it, both of which sound terrible.
https://en.wikipedia...ki/Loudness_warIf they sound balanced on your system, then I suspect there is some variability in audio playback on different machines? So the "problem" for me is not really a problem, but I just need to use the built-in menu to adjust playback to correct it on my end/machine?
When I suggested boosting the volume, I assumed there was some option in ZQ to set the relative volume for each track. I looked in ZQ, and I see that is indeed the case
for the MIDIs (under Quest > Audio > MIDIs) but it looks like the enhanced music is all handled through scripting?
// Boss Music Function (if available)
int boss_music[] = "Boss - Normal.ogg";
Game->PlayEnhancedMusic(boss_music, 1);
if (!Game->PlayEnhancedMusic(boss_music, 1)){
Game->PlayMIDI(6);
}
Does the scripting support boosting the volume on a per-song basis for non-MIDIs?
More importantly, can anyone else confirm that it's playing the music too quietly / the SFX are drowning them out, and not just for me?
I used the default ZC audio settings when I complained: Master MIDI Volume 255, Master Digi Volume 248, Enhanced Music Volume 248, SFX Volume 248. I dropped SFX Volume down to 128 afterwards, and it sounds well-balanced to me at that setting.
If this is just something each player has to adjust for themselves (if the audio is problematic for them in the first place) then forget I complained.
/Bug reports
Demo 525
Pulse Hammer boss - his head's entrance loads/plays the enhanced boss music - the music then ends when his head freezes on the right side, and when his body appears, it loads the MIDI instead.
Not a big deal, maybe intentional... you can fire the ship cannon faster than the autofire by repeatedly hitting the button. You can exploit this to kill the boss a bit quicker, since he takes damage more frequently than your autofire shoots.
Suggestions:
You could make all the earlier shooter levels uniformly more difficult by implementing a momentum script for the ship, too. The speed upgrades could reduce its effect.
Say, starting off, when you move, you accelerate to full speed rather than instantly moving at full speed. If you release the direction controls, you slow down and stop about a combo's distance from where you released, and if you immediately reverse controls, you slow down/stop/reverse/accelerate and move maybe a half-combo's distance in the original direction before reversing? This would make dodging and weaving between enemies/shots much more challenging...
Once you're fully powered up on speed upgrades, it should handle mostly like it does now - you nearly-instantaneously accelerate to full speed and nearly-instantaneously reverse/change directions.
The labyrinth momentum is mostly good, but I'll just reiterate that the hole-skipping is super-annoying. It's counter-intuitive to train yourself to
keep moving to fall down in order to avoid accidentally skipping over a hole. Not to mention you could probably train to exploit this and make it over every hole simply by timing your release/depress of left/right and avoid having to jump at all (and possibly miss.) I dunno - I'm deliberately refraining from learning to use it in the hopes you'll make it go away and don't want to have to unlearn it later.
Some of the tight-space precision jumps I used to make 95% of the time I'm missing like maybe half the time now, so I don't know if I'm just playing poorly or if it's introducing random elements that make response semi-unpredicable? I dunno. I need to play more to make up my mind. Like I said, I mostly like it, though it still plays a little slippery-feeling at time.
However, I'd strongly suggest making the lava continuous-damage without knockback. I'm pretty much just F6ing when I fall into that shit because with the knockback and momentum combined it makes escaping from some of those spots a waste of time compared to restarting from the Aries entrance...
Also, these two rooms seem impossible to backtrack through; maybe tone them down/rearrange them?
M13 S63: Too many enemies/projectiles here to deal with the phase blocks; I keep getting knocked back down until I die or give up and F6. It's so close to the entrance it makes more sense to restart than waste my time trying to reascend here.
M13 S68: Coming up from below, the way the destructible blocks are positioned makes it near-impossible (for me, at least) to get back up. The statues keep shooting you and you have no room to dodge, and must quickly shoot the three blocks on the left to jump up there and work your way around. I keep getting hit and falling down into the hole, over and over again... until I die or give up and F6. Maybe rearrange it a little so it isn't so frustrating to backtrack out of? Making some of the blocks on the right destrucible (making changes beside them to keep the path closed there) so you have a little more room to move around would probably fix it. So that you still can get knocked back down if you go for the straight backtrack but can learn to shoot on the right first and give yourself room?
Would you consider speeding up the rate of descent in the sandfalls? To maybe twice the present speed? It's kind of tedious as is.
The Advanced Comsat - instead of just having it fall out of the sky, you could put a simple cutscene in that room - a busted up Viking/Valkyrie in robot mode lying there, that is barely hanging on/nearly defunct, who gives it to you and briefly explains what it does. And maybe add a hint somewhere in Gemini about Allied forces spotting a guardian there, but ignoring it because it was "dead" or something? I dunno.
And you can still stand on the very corners of cactii/spikes/etc., without taking damage, though this is a bit trickier now with momentum.
Otherwise... I'm loving the new tunes. The only one I dislike is the cave room song. It takes a bit to start, and you usually don't spend much time in these rooms, so you mostly just hear the boring drum intro. I'd recommend something that jumps into the tune immediately and is fairly short/repetitive? Though that might get annoying on extended caves... If you found a longer song, with a beginning section you could loop for single-room caves, you could use the full version for extended caves. The music would provide a clue there's more to the room - but wouldn't be immediately obvious when you enter if they start off the same, and would avoid looping the short section over and over if you spend more time exploring it?
Aries 00: Holy shit this is a lot harder now. I can't manage it without eating a tank. So, the way the autofire on ship cannon seems to work - when you press/hold the button, the first shot isn't "synced" with the subsequent shots or something. Like, you'll often see a pair of close shots when you resume firing after releasing the button. Consequence of this is that if you rapidly press/release,
while hitting something, your rate of fire skyrockets, since the shots are limited to three onscreen simultaneously (I think?) so if you're close to something you're shooting, you can pump it full of bullets. Of course, if you missing, you have all three shots bunched together (rather than spread out) so if they make it to the top of the screen you end up momentarily unable to fire. I found those spinning coin enemies the easiest to exploit this with since they take a lot of damage but move slowly - clearing them this way is trivial. The pyramids' homing shots are also good targets for this, since they take a couple shots and move fast - if you're faster, you can pump a couple shots into them before they can hit. The corridor boss, like the first one, is also susceptible to this and you can drop his life a lot faster, though when he's doing his six-way you can't be as close and thus can't fire as rapidly, but still, you can shoot him faster than on autofire.
Shit you can tell how badly I need sleep from how I mangled that last paragraph. Anyways, actual bug: upon beating Aries 00, either F6/Continue or F6/Save/resume begins you at Aries 77 instead of Aries 00.
I F6/Continued inside Cancer and resumed from the door at Cancer 12 instead of level entrance.
M11 S19: Okay, this hidden side hole on the left? Getting inside it can be a pain. I'm not sure if this is due to new momentum or last block collision revision. But I'm sure this applies everywhere similar.
If you walk off the right ledge above, holding left, you will fall past the side hole, though I
think you might move a pixel or two left into the wall as you fall past it. If you face up or down and move left off the right ledge, you will fall past the side hole. If you make a small jump off the right ledge and fall (without jumping so high you hit the left wall's upper corner and slightly enter it) you have a seemingly 50/50 chance of entering the side hole or sliding past it. But if you move left
and hold up or down (so that you are still facing left as you move left) as you run off the edge, you will
always enter the hole. Walking off the ledge directly above it (to the left of the vertical hole) and holding left almost always lets you enter it - presumably because most of the time you're slightly inside the wall and thus landing on the very edge of the floor in the side hole. It doesn't matter if you press just left, or left angled up/down, so long as you don't face up/down and move left - if you do that, you slide past it as well.
And of course, you can just walk off the right ledge and hold L as you fall - you'll autojump off the screen bottom and up into the side hole. Fun times.
Oh, and these half-tile wide platforms in Cancer are a huge pain in the ass with momentum. I'm probably going to have to turn room scrolling back on because I can't seem to ever land on some of them after transitions with it turned off.
Edited by newstarshipsmell, 14 June 2015 - 09:18 AM.
