I had that problem with stuttered-scrolling too. Going into ag.cfg and changing frame_rest_suggest to = 0 fixed it for me, though I can’t recreate the issue now…
I tried changing that and it made gameplay much worse for me (stuff frequently got really laggy) without having any apparent effect on the quickscrolls, so I changed it back. As predicted, the quickscroll now looks fine to me, after playing for a while. No complaints, except...
Excessive room scrolling:
Using the quickscroll build (instead of 2.50 with No Room Scrolling enabled) brought an old bug back to my attention - the screen sometimes scrolls up/down an extra time due to holding the jump button down.
I typically don't release the Jump/L button after reaching the top of my jump, and continue holding it down while falling, and sometimes don't even release it after landing until I want to press it again to jump. In most other games I play, this never affects gameplay, or at least, not adversely so. I do this so I never cut a jump height short, and am just lazy about releasing it while falling.
So the extra scrolls are happening to me in two differen situations:
a) In Zodiac, when you jump up on top of a platform, you'll oftentimes do a little halftile hop when you land, if you're still holding the jump button down, due to how the jump code works, I guess. So when I land on a 2nd row platform and do a little hop, that scrolls the screen up and down. I found this really annoying with normal room scrolling and gleefully eliminated it with the No Room Scrolling setting when I found out about it, and then forgot about it.
b) The other situation this is occuring with is not so clearcut to me. I can reproduce this bug in Aquarius 5D every time I try it. If I jump and fall off the bottom of the screen while holding Jump/L, the screen will scroll down, then up, then down again. I can also do this in Aquarius 6E/7E, but only if I jump against/fall along the left wall - jumping into the middle of the bottom row and holding jump does not produce it. And I'm having no luck reproducing it in most other vertical room transitions, so I'm not sure what's triggering it exactly, just that holding down Jump and hitting the bottom sometimes enables it to happen.
So maybe not a big deal - I dunno how many other players hold their jump buttons down long after topping their jumps like I do. And with quickscroll, at least it happens lightning-fast so while it's visually displeasing, it doesn't become near the nuisance it does with regular scrolling speed. I have to learn to stop doing it when I reach the WCBs anyways, since holding L down interferes with using them.
Bug reports:Pick Three Cave Rooms:
When you grab a sidearm upgrade from a pick-three room, while you're holding it up, a piece of energy/money appears at Pos 115 and disappears when you finish holding it up. This has happened in every single pick-3 room I've visited so far (about 10 of them?)
The platforms the upgrades sit on absorb bullets fired just above them. If you stand on them and fire sideways, your bullets are immediately absorbed.
Scorpio 17: This cave room still exits on the left side of the screen rather than on top of or near the door - is this intentional? Think I asked before but forget.
Is there a reason you stuck with having the player exit next to doors instead of directly on top of them? At first I thought it was because ZC somehow couldn't handle the latter, but obviously you've set some of them that way (after I bitched about them, like Aquarius 71.) Just seems like it would be more uniform to set them all directly on top of their respective doors, though I know on some of them (e.g. Aries 42) you offset them deliberately. And some of them, like Cancer 1D, don't have visible doors when you re-enter the room anyways...
Scorpio 65: When I enter the room from the right (66) I quickly zip left to just left of the door, partially inside the sandfall - even if I let go of the left button while scrolling into the room. I guess this is a result of your fix for dropping midair when you exit the cave room - since when I exit it, I still appear above and right of the door, then disappear/reappear to the left of it - so I'm guessing entering from the right is triggering the same fix.
Aires 00: The corridor entrance music cuts off abruptly at the end of the entry sequence. It then begins playing again for a second during the warp wipe at the beginning of the corridor; the corridor music begins playing at the end of the wipe. It does this for Cancer 6E and Scorpio 74, so presumably it does this on every corridor.
Scorpio 74: Corridor boss's bones drop fairy hearts.
Aquarius 02: Missiles disappeared again during the boss fight. Not nearly as frequently though.
Aquarius 03: With the quickscroll copy of ZC, it is impossible (I believe) to select Yes for the initial "do you want to interface?" prompt. Since pressing B only completes strings but doesn't advance the message... pressing A to advance immediately selects No. I saved and returned with the regular build and was able to acquire it. (And holy crap those room scrolls are annoying... thanks again Gleeok!
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Obviously this won't be a problem once quickscrolling is built into the official client and it doesn't carry this B-advance bug (or any other bugs I have yet to uncover.) In the meantime, should I stick to the official 2.50.1 client rather than using the custom build, so as to avoid discovering/reporting more bugs that are limited to using this test client? I believe we've established that quickscroll is awesome; I can go back to No Screen Scrolling until a new build is released.
But it makes me wonder... if you wouldn't be better off simply avoiding these prompts altogether. It wouldn't take much work to stick a message terminal in each ZW room that displays similar strings ("do you want to interface?" and "do you want to exchange?") and build them into the base of the interface, and make it so stepping into the field obtains the ZW without any prompt.
Then again, the shop prompts are working just fine for me in the quickscroll build, so maybe this is something you can easily resolve without waiting for another version of ZC.
ETA: I was able to grab the Scorpio ZW (2nd one I got) with no problem in the quickscroll build, so presumably the rest will work fine. So it's just the first ZW that is problematic in the custom build.
Pisces 79: The vertical halftile platform at position 67+83 vanishes when I warp back after beating the boss. In ZQ on M17 S79, when I hit X,S for preview,triggersecrets, it disappears too.
Continue Points: In Pisces, if I exit a cave room and F6/Continue
during the entrance wipe into the Labyrinth room, it will resume from the Labyrinth entrance instead of the door I just exited from. This happened for every room I tried it on (Pisces 45, 56, 66 and 78) so I assume it happens with all of them. Doing the reverse - F6/Continue during the entrance wipe
inside the cave room - resumes inside the correct cave room (tested on three of them) so I don't think it can be exploited to continue-warp around the Inside Pisces map(s). I don't think you can actually die during a wipe like this, so this can only affect users deliberately F6'ing. I haven't tried this on any other maps, but this might explain a couple similar bugs (resuming from the labyrinth entrance when I expected to resume somewhere else) that I'd experienced before but couldn't reproduce and forgot about. If nothing else... it's a convenient trick to save-warp back to the level entrance without having to exit to the main menu.
Pisces: The squids that fire at you... their horizontal shots will now damage you when you're standing on the row above them. They didn't before. They don't touch you at all as they're traveling along the row below you.
Actually, it seems like either my hitbox is shifted downwards a bit, or a bunch of things that deal damage have their hitboxes shifted upwards a bit. I'm taking damage from spikes/spikeballs/etc when I'm standing on the row above them and inching slightly over them. Like in Gemini 40 - if I stand on the right end of the 1x4 block near the center, and move a bit to the right, the spikeball below will deal damage to me.
Pisces 3D: One of the Sixway-shooters stopped and remained stationary on 2nd-to-bottom row. When I beat the first Cancer corridor, one of these enemies once again either continued generating firing sounds after dying, or spawned offscreen and fired away in limbo for 10 seconds or so before going silent.
Corridors: Ship Cannon shots are drawn underneath the pyramids that shoot those homing shots.
Intro corridor: Saw lots of CSet mismatches again. Haven't seen any in any of the Zodaic corridors yet.
Gemini 43: The clear-enemies-item-prize sound plays when entering this room - but there are no enemies here, so the sound is out of place.
Momentum: Can you zero the momentum when warping through doors and resuming the game? It looks odd when you move a little and make a skid puff upon resuming your game or exiting a door.
Stun Beam: It can destroy combos above fish eggs, when fired between them from the right.
In Gemini 61, if I shoot the stun beam to the right from the left side of the room, and hit just above or below the fish egg in the center, so my shot hits directly between it and the Armos above or below, it generates an explosion left and above where the shot strikes, without hatching the egg. No biggie. If I do the same from the right side, shooting left, striking between the egg and Armos below will hatch the egg - but striking between the egg and Armos
above it will replace the Armos above with an explosion which turns into an empty walkable combo. I did the same thing in 62 from the door, and removed the solid bubble combo at pos 58 by shooting between it and the egg.
Guessing this is probably related to the spikes and squid shots damaging me on the row above them - seems like some stuff is shifted up a bit somewhere in the code.
Suggestions (old and new):Recharge rooms: Add some sort of continuous energy sound (perhaps high-pitched for life, low-pitched for energy?) and maybe some sort of short concussive sound for missiles, for recharging. Have them play back while the meters are refilling and go silent when the respective meter is full. It seems weird to recharge silently.
Pulse Hammer: Revamp its graphics. It looks weird because it seems to randomly pick which frames to display or skip when you use it, so a lot of the time you only see short bursts rather than the full length graphic.
Item Drops: If you're going to stick with the sword-strike-doesn't-grab-itemdrops setting, please consider extending the distance you pick up drops within, so if an item drops in the middle of a wall combo, you can walk up against the wall combo and acquire it. That would be more uniform, I think, with the corridors, as I believe you made it easier to grab items by doing the same thing there. It's frustrating since your sidearm bullets travel through solid combos, so it's nigh-impossible to avoid constantly killing enemies inside walls where you can't grab their drops. (Alternatively, if not a huge pain in the ass, maybe you could script the drops to pop out of the walls: check their position when they drop, if inside a solid combo, then have them quickly move in the cardinal direction closest towards the player, and stop when they move into a walkable combo/position. They'd still end up popping into inaccessible locations or falling off the screen sometimes, but at least wouldn't end up uselessly stuck inside walls where you can't grab them.)
Money/Energy: The money/energy is kind of frustrating. It seems like I'm always out when I need a lot, and always come upon the huge 200 rupees when I'm already maxed out, so I have to skip them and backtrack later after using up my money. I've backtracked to Cancer and that ?-block room above the entrance a few times last playthrough/demo just to max my money out so I could resume buying upgrades, as the rate at which you acquire money simply playing through and killing enemies doesn't seem near fast enough to keep up with upgrade purchases you come across. This could be tweaked by a) increasing the chance that enemies drop money instead of relatively useless drops like Star energy and Missiles, or boosting the value of their money/energy drops, or b) add a lot more hidden money/energy items scattered across the labyrinths in breakable blocks and kill-all-enemies screens (will this work with scripted enemies?) 20-rupees spread around for players to find seems like a reasonable amount. Also, I'm playing through knowing where to go next, so first-time players might not experience this problem as much, if they're wandering around and grinding more. I dunno. Not a huge issue, just throwing it out there.
Subscreen Cursor: The cursor position relative to inventory items on the subscreen is still not standard. It appears behind the Pulse Hammer and Sidearm, but in front of the Missile Launcher and Life Tank. If you don't care, say so and I'll drop it. Otherwise, I can make a list of whether it appears on top of or behind each item, if you want to make them all standard later.
Level Entrance Room Music: might deserve the axe. It sounds jarring when you're in or near one and scroll back and forth (like when you're trying to jump up/right from Aquarius 70 to 60 and miss the jump, or jumping up into Aquarius 0F from 1F and scrolling back down to land on the platform.) The repeated restarts of the entrance music and level music just sounds bad, so I might recommend removing it and extending the level music to cover the entrance rooms. Cosmetic - your call of course.
Alternatively, you could make a cosmetic change to the Labyrinth transitions - reuse the corridor entrance/exit cutscene, but modified so when you enter a Labyrinth door, you cut to the inside of a giant moving conduit (or just reuse the corridor transition graphics, if you prefer it) at the bottom of the screen, move up to the center while spinning/transforming into spacecraft, then speed up the scrolling and stay in spacecraft for a few seconds, then slow the scrolling back down and spin/transform into guardian mode while moving up off the screen top. This would give the impression of distance traveled between Zodiac areas, if that is desirable. And you could have your entrance music play during the transition, rather than inside the entrance labyrinth rooms, avoiding the jarring music restarts with frequent back-and-forth room scrolls.
Boss Lifemeters: Instead of having them all on the same scale, set each one with a custom HP/width so that each boss's max HP exactly fills the entire lifemeter. This would avoid the early bosses having meters that are mostly empty to begin with. I like the different colors for the long fights with high-HP bosses; to retain those, you'd just figure out the number of colors you want the meter to go through, and multiply the HP/width by that number, rolling them over like they do now.
Edited by newstarshipsmell, 15 July 2015 - 01:47 PM.
