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I gained the ability to shoot out blue stuff (I think maybe I bought it?), and I can increase my bar of shooty stuff by collecting cubes. But there doesn’t seem to be any limit to how far the bar can extend, it can extend right off the screen
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if you have a bar full of shooty stuff and you need to pick up a key, you have to just sit around for a while waiting for the bar to run out
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I get the distinct feeling I’ve collected about 5 heart container pieces in a row, and each time it has said either “collect 1 more to get a new heart” or “collect 2 more to get a new heart”. Maybe it’s my imagination, or maybe it’s not counting them properly, or maybe I am losing them when I get killed. Is there anywhere on the screen where it shows how many heart container pieces you have collected so far?
Maybe some bugs
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The problem regarding the tongue: It seems very touchy atm on any of the diagonals. I managed to get it to shoot both diagonals, so I assume the problem is fixed now… but it certainly should be much, much more forgiving than it is.
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Jetrel’s worked out a wonderful new powerup system about an hour ago, and it uses a better bar.
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So, now you can switch abilities.
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Hm. :-\
Thanks for letting us know. Hope you enjoyed the game nonetheless. 
With regard to (3), can you work out if it is a bug from the savegame file? The save game file presumably contains information on which container pieces have already been collected, how many full containers I currently have, and how many partial pieces I currently have. If “current full” * “number of partial in a full” + “current partial” - “partial collected so far” does not equal the same value as it does at the beginning of a new game, there is a bug.
Also, a feature request, some sort of log of progress and quests would be good, e.g.:
- which quests are still outstanding? (e.g. I think I’m supposed to be getting a golden ant to someone near the beginning, somehow)
- which areas still have uncollected heart containers?
- which areas still have uncollected coins?
I think it is generally a good game, but it still seems pretty rough around the edges.
also, if you die, then it seems you lose the coins you collected since you last saved. Though they then reappear in the world, this is kind of annoying if you spent a while chasing some coin in some far off corner, but then didn’t bother saving afterwards. Also, unless you remember when you last saved, you can’t remember which coins you need to recollect. Maybe you should just keep your coins when you die?
You know, it’s really cool to see this post because it affirms that other people care about stuff that also bothers me. You’re in luck because at the very moment you posted about this, I myself just happen to be fixing most of this exact stuff in game right now. Right now, my primary goal is totally redoing how our powerups work.
We’re switching to a system where only two powerups are “acquirable items that fade away after a brief period of time” - those will be the reflex and invincibility powerups. What we’re adding is a bunch of new permanent abilities (gotten probably as a reward for quests) which require mana to use instead of being timed. The blue energyshot is now one of them.
This is a halfassed job on our part, because - prior to our adding our “fixed point” arithmetic, it was awkward as all hell to do proportional progress bars. Still haven’t fixed this, though; I want to change it, but I want to entirely redo how timed powerups are displayed on the HUD, rather than just fixing the current display.
Fixed. 8)
Nothing persists if you die and you haven’t tagged an (invisible) checkpoint since then. The way to tell is, if you respawn at a point on your path before something, it didn’t happen.
I would actually like to rework our checkpoints and saves later, and unify the two systems; I think they’re slightly confusing atm. More on this in a second post.
Nope, that’s designed as intended. Most, possibly almost all games work under a model where, if you lose/die at some point after you save, everything since that save is gone. We work exactly the same way.
As for logging, trivial stuff like coins isn’t going to be tracked, especially since later on, coins won’t be finite. However…
[quote=“junichiro, post:1, topic:247”]Also, a feature request, some sort of log of progress and quests would be good, e.g.:
- which quests are still outstanding? (e.g. I think I’m supposed to be getting a golden ant to someone near the beginning, somehow)
- which areas still have uncollected heart containers?
- which areas still have uncollected coins?[/quote]
This is something I’m in favor of, and this would solve the problem you’d just described. What you’re looking for is an answer to the question “Have I found all the secrets on this level?”
Nope, that’s designed as intended. Most, possibly almost all games work under a model where, if you lose/die at some point after you save, everything since that save is gone. We work exactly the same way.[/quote]
For stuff which isn’t infinite and randomly placed, I think most games save your collected items automatically. Didn’t both coins and stars in Super Mario 64 only ever need collecting once? Maybe I misremember. It’s really demotivating to lose heart containers and large coins I have collected and to have no idea where they are now. Though even if I knew, I doubt I’d bother going all the way back to find them again. I’ve literally given up trying to find such things now.
Elaboration of some stuff mentioned in my previous post:
1] we’re probably gonna move to having coins also get dropped by monsters. Coins will be used to purchase everything, but (like a game I’ve played recently, called Shantae: Risky’s Revenge) we’re probably going to introduce a very finite “second currency” for major upgrades you want to buy. There are two rationales for this: first, it prevents grinding - if you want a cool new item, you must explore, but it at the same time retains the freedom to choose which upgrades you buy. You have to explore some new dungeon to get the item, but it doesn’t matter which one. The other rationale is that this will allow us to have “consumable purchases” - the ability to buy stuff that you, the player, can use up. Like potions.
If money (or anything) is finite, this should never be done - I’ve seen some games that do it, and it’s a total disaster because if guys like me ever play such a game, they will never use those items ever. Except maybe in the absolute final bossfight, and that’s just dumb because it could be useful in the rest of the game, and basically doesn’t exist there. Other people are less discriminating, but guys like me tend to never use “absolutely limited” items (except in incredibly short games that last mere minutes), because we’re always afraid there might be some moment around the corner when we might need that thing we just used up even more.
A classic case of a game that botched this was the otherwise excellent “terranigma”, which had this bizarre thing where mana (yes, mana, of all the crazy things) was finite over the course of the game. Magic spells were done by collecting “magirocks” and turning them into an object that could cast the spell (and was permanently consumed when you did so). Magirocks were picked up once at a given spot and never regenerated. There were something like 50 over the course of the game, and when they were gone, they were gone.
2] we currently have two save things, and they’re kinda confusing. We have explicit saves, done via “save toilets”, where you have to enter the toilet, and manually affirm that you want to save the game. These were the first one we made. A number of months later, near 1.0, we added these invisible things called checkpoints, which automatically made you respawn there even if you hadn’t saved. If you quit the program, though, this progress didn’t get written to disk.
I’m considering consolidating these, and making saving non-optional. The idea is that we’d have some sort of recognizable “save thing” you’d walk by, and it would visibly activate when you did, but like our checkpoints, you’d have no choice in the matter, and you would have your game saved. The rationale for manual saving is “what if I do something I might regret later”. At the moment, we actually don’t have a single destructive choice like that; nothing you do prevents you from doing other stuff. Even if we add some level of restrictional non-linearity, because we’re not diablo, and you’re not going to be coasting with a given instance of a game for several months, I really don’t think this is a big deal.
It’d be worth it to make it non-optional to remove the annoyance.
I can’t repro this. For me, diagonal tongue shots work perfectly - perhaps you misunderstand how they’re intended to work. You hold down the up and side arrow keys, and then press the attack key whilst they’re held down. You don’t try and tap them all simultaneously - that might work if you get lucky, but it’s meant to be “hold one, and then tap the other”. We work the same way cave story works for directional shots (albeit they don’t have diagonals), and the same way contra works (and it does have diagonals). Likewise, you do not “press the direction key”, let go of that direction key, and then press the attack key. That might only work if you did it so fast that it was accidentally simultaneous.
This is, again, a standard best practice I refuse to contradict. If you did understand this correctly, and there’s still a problem, something’s very strange.
[quote=“Jetrel, post:8, topic:247”]Elaboration of some stuff mentioned in my previous post:
1] we’re probably gonna move to having coins also get dropped by monsters. Coins will be used to purchase everything, but (like a game I’ve played recently, called Shantae: Risky’s Revenge) we’re probably going to introduce a very finite “second currency” for major upgrades you want to buy. There are two rationales for this: first, it prevents grinding - if you want a cool new item, you must explore, but it at the same time retains the freedom to choose which upgrades you buy. You have to explore some new dungeon to get the item, but it doesn’t matter which one. The other rationale is that this will allow us to have “consumable purchases” - the ability to buy stuff that you, the player, can use up. Like potions.
If money (or anything) is finite, this should never be done - I’ve seen some games that do it, and it’s a total disaster because if guys like me ever play such a game, they will never use those items ever. Except maybe in the absolute final bossfight, and that’s just dumb because it could be useful in the rest of the game, and basically doesn’t exist there. Other people are less discriminating, but guys like me tend to never use “absolutely limited” items (except in incredibly short games that last mere minutes), because we’re always afraid there might be some moment around the corner when we might need that thing we just used up even more.
A classic case of a game that botched this was the otherwise excellent “terranigma”, which had this bizarre thing where mana (yes, mana, of all the crazy things) was finite over the course of the game. Magic spells were done by collecting “magirocks” and turning them into an object that could cast the spell (and was permanently consumed when you did so). Magirocks were picked up once at a given spot and never regenerated. There were something like 50 over the course of the game, and when they were gone, they were gone.[/quote]
I have no opinion on infinite coins vs limited coins, my point is only that if things are limited and difficult to track down, I don’t want them to disappear after I’ve already collected them. Currently in the game this refers particularly to partial heart containers and the ultra-big coins. I even went back to 3 of the partial heart places to see if they had respawned, but there weren’t any pieces there. Maybe the partial heart containers with respawned hearts from where I died are ones further back in the game, or maybe I just miscounted how many I picked up, or maybe there even really is a bug with them not respawning after death (though I admit this last one now strikes me as unlikely).
[quote=“Jetrel, post:8, topic:247”]2] we currently have two save things, and they’re kinda confusing. We have explicit saves, done via “save toilets”, where you have to enter the toilet, and manually affirm that you want to save the game. These were the first one we made. A number of months later, near 1.0, we added these invisible things called checkpoints, which automatically made you respawn there even if you hadn’t saved. If you quit the program, though, this progress didn’t get written to disk.
I’m considering consolidating these, and making saving non-optional. The idea is that we’d have some sort of recognizable “save thing” you’d walk by, and it would visibly activate when you did, but like our checkpoints, you’d have no choice in the matter, and you would have your game saved. The rationale for manual saving is “what if I do something I might regret later”. At the moment, we actually don’t have a single destructive choice like that; nothing you do prevents you from doing other stuff. Even if we add some level of restrictional non-linearity, because we’re not diablo, and you’re not going to be coasting with a given instance of a game for several months, I really don’t think this is a big deal.
It’d be worth it to make it non-optional to remove the annoyance.[/quote]
I agree with all the above, having to manual save a cartoony platform game doesn’t really flow. Incidentally, I found another very minor bug, which isn’t a big deal (unlike the hearts things which is really annoying): I started the game, loaded my save game, died before reaching a restart point, and it threw me back to the main menu. This happened twice.
[quote=“DDR, post:3, topic:247”]4.I can’t repro this. For me, diagonal tongue shots work perfectly - perhaps you misunderstand how they’re intended to work. You hold down the up and side arrow keys, and then press the attack key whilst they’re held down. You don’t try and tap them all simultaneously - that might work if you get lucky, but it’s meant to be “hold one, and then tap the other”. We work the same way cave story works for directional shots (albeit they don’t have diagonals), and the same way contra works (and it does have diagonals). Likewise, you do not “press the direction key”, let go of that direction key, and then press the attack key. That might only work if you did it so fast that it was accidentally simultaneous.
This is, again, a standard best practice I refuse to contradict. If you did understand this correctly, and there’s still a problem, something’s very strange.[/quote]
Keyboards don’t allow certain key combination presses, due to some technical reason about certain keys sharing some electronics. I just realised I could test this theory by changing the controls from the menu, and sure enough by changing tongue to the q key it now works. So it seems my keyboard doesn’t support up+right+s simultaneously.
Might be true for mario 64, but otherwise that’s patently false.
I’m kind of essaying here, because this is a complex subject, but…
On dying, and videogames:
Some games involve a concept of losing and winning, others don’t. I think a pain point in game design is that people frequently try to put “winning” and separately “losing” into games that don’t really use those concepts. It mostly seems to boil down to what the point of playing is - specifically, the concept of winning or losing is only merited when it actually affects player behavior. Winning and losing aren’t something you have for their own sake - you only put winning and losing in the game if they cause your players to act differently; specifically, if they cause your players to act in a way that makes the game more fun, usually by making it more challenging and engaging.
This behavior modification comes out of what your goal is in playing the game - and typically, games have some goal structure hard-wired into them. You only put a goal structure into a game if it needs one artificially injected.
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the scant few games that don’t have a strict goal structure are sandbox games. Even in sandbox games, you generally have “a goal” of some kind, and it’s usually to build something cool. Some nominally sandbox games like GTA really aren’t - GTA is really a very drawn-out “finite unlock” game where the goal is to unlock all of the possible things in the game. GTA has a very finite combinatorial set of things you can do in the game*, whereas games like SimCity and Minecraft have this enormous space of how you can put all the different ingredients in the game together.
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simpler games tend to need a goal structure to motivate the player to do something besides play around with the basic game ingredients. The game ingredients themselves get boring in mere minutes - for example, in solitaire, for a tiny window of time, it’s actually kinda surprising and cool how the different cards go together - you’re able to look around and go “oh wow, cool, I can put this on that, and then I can do X”. But that burns out really fast, and if it wasn’t for this additional “goal” that’s imposed on the game, of winning by stacking up all the cards in suits, it’d become boring in mere minutes.**
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competitive games actually wouldn’t need to be competitive, except solitaire play is often hard to judge. Your goal is to play the game as well as you can, and for these specific kinds of games, it’s really hard to tell. For example, for most of human history prior to clocks, racing other people was a pastime because you couldn’t race against yourself - there was no way to measure if you did worse or better. Even in a lot of modern videogames, solo play is hard to judge - dave recently wrote a card game where your goal is to reach 30 points. His entire game design would function for solitaire, but it’d be almost impossible to tell if you’d “done better” between games without taking meticulous stats. Cut-and-dry winning and losing isn’t statistically better at measure performance (your opponents performance varies wildly), but it feels like it’s effective at measuring performance.
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completionist games tend to have finishing the whole experience as a goal. Completionist games range from story-driven adventure games (action, rpg, etc), to simpler puzzles like sudoku and crosswords. These games share a lack of an innate permanent loss - unless you or the game is actually physically destroyed, there’s no way to lose that fails your goal. Your goal isn’t to finish the game on this try, your goal is to finish the game at all. If you have an individual crossword, you can just keep poking at it until you find a solution - the crossword doesn’t self-destruct if you can’t think of a word to fit a slot at the moment. Many puzzle games are obviously completionist - you can’t lose at rubik’s cube. The problem with slapping an artificial lose-condition on a completionist game is that it’s just a delay - you can always keep trying until you win, and “losing” is just an artificial annoyance that doesn’t make the game more fun, but just makes it take longer to play. Often so much that the game can cease to be worth playing.
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performance games, are puzzles where the puzzle involves time and action. The easiest (not the only***) way to force the action to be done constrained to time is to invoke failure if the person doesn’t do it in that time - the only way to make it engaging rather than trivial and boring, is to force the player to do it under steep constraints. Pong is a good example - mentally, the game is trivial: you put your paddle centered under the ball. It’s only by requiring it to be done within a small window of time that makes it tough and fun. Imagine a game of pong where you could take as long as you wanted to move the paddle to the necessary location.
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the place where it seems to get messy is hybrids. Hybrids are frequently long, completionist games which are made up of a whole bunch of miniature puzzle games, or performance games, or mixed performance/puzzle games like trying to figure out a boss’ vulnerability pattern whilst fighting it. Hybrids tend to be the sore point where losing is incorrectly bolted onto a game. In a hybrid, the individual performance-games often strictly need to be losable, and need to force you to do them all over again if you don’t get them right, or they’re no fun. But the overarching completionist game of finishing all the little performance-games that make it up doesn’t need to be loseable - it often inherits that from its components, but it itself doesn’t need it, and is only hurt by it.
So that’s why frogatto doesn’t have permadeath, but does punish you by forcing you to keep trying to complete a puzzle until you’re done with it.
- There aren’t a lot of basic game ingredients in GTA. There’s you, there’s a few types of non-player people with different reaction behaviors, and there are cars. You can combine these things, but there aren’t a lot of combinations (like, you can take a car, and use the car on someone (for example, running someone over), but there aren’t many combinations of what can be put together with what. There are a ton of different objects in the game, but many of them are the same category, and don’t combine with stuff differently than anything else in their category - for example, no matter what the gun is, the only thing you can do with it in GTA is shoot something with it.
** I’m not sure why. I -think- the fun comes from not having memorized the entire possibility space - it comes from constantly being introduced to new possible ways of putting things together that do cool new things. After you play solitaire a few times, you’ve literally memorized every possible way you can lay one card on top of another.
*** It occurs to me that one could make a time-based game that instead of allowing the player to do anything, but failing them if they don’t do the right things at the right times, instead bases itself on only allowing the player to do certain things at certain times. Only cyclical things where various combinations lined up would allow certain combinations.
Regarding having to re-acquire stuff after you die, when you respawn, the most you lose is like 1/5 of the current level, if that. You just have to man up and replay that tiny bit, sorry. 
You will not lose something from a previous level. We have way more checkpoints than that - that just won’t happen.
I can sympathize with why you want use to store stuff you do after a checkpoint, but from a checkpoint’s perspective, we can’t store state in the future from where you respawn, because this state could render that inaccessible. Like, crossing some collapsing platforms, and then respawning before them would leave you stranded. Checkpoints aren’t just a position - they’re a position, and the assurance that the rest of the level after that is still in its default, passable state.
Mario 64 was able to do what it did because IIRC, getting the big stars ended that shot at the level, and reset the rest of the level’s state. You got the star, and you’d fly out of the painting back into the castle again
I’m pretty sure you’ve miscounted; I’ve never seen one whit of misbehavior from the game on this point, nor has anyone else I’ve spoken with.
Ouch.
I’ve heard of this problem, but … that’s … like, a problem from the 80s; at least on mac keyboards, that hasn’t existed since they switched to USB over a decade ago. I can’t imagine any serious gamer being able to deal with that - proper gaming keyboards should support all keypresses simultaneously. I can’t imagine pro-gamers tolerating anything less. Are you using a USB keyboard, or (egad) a PS-2 keyboard plugged in with an adapter? Is it old?
We really can’t do anything in software to fix that, even if we wanted to.
In classic internet forum style, I think you are misreading my position. You make it sound like I have argued against ever losing progress. To the extent that a game level is linear of course I expect to be moved back when I die, and of course the player loses collectable items when you die in all manner of different games. But much of the level design in frogatto is non-linear, both in that you have to take non-obvious detours to go hunt things down, and also that you sometimes end up moving backwards through level, so it’s extremely non-obvious what progress has been lost. This is why Mario 64 seems like a reasonable comparison, because it also is non-linear.
Thinking back to SNES platformers I don’t remember any of them having this sort of issue. Super Mario World levels were linear, then you used the non-linear world map to go between the linear levels, so it was always obvious that when you died you had lost the progress in the current level and no more. I seem to remember Aladdin was just totally linear. I can’t remember how Another World and Flashback worked - I seem to remember Flashback at least was partially non-linear, and maybe had manual saving - but I definitely don’t remember there being any confusion at all about what progress had been lost. Maybe it only had collectables at key moments in the plot? I can’t remember now.
Anyway, it’s not my game, so you can do what you like, I just thought I’d take the time to point out that it is confusing and not at all normal.
Also in classic internet forum style, you seem to be aiming for making as many points as possible to try to wear me down. It may be that I am mistaken and actually the current system isn’t that confusing, but talk of falling blocks is totally irrelevant to special collectable items, they don’t alter the playability of the level.
[quote=“Jetrel, post:11, topic:247”]Ouch.
I’ve heard of this problem, but … that’s … like, a problem from the 80s; at least on mac keyboards, that hasn’t existed since they switched to USB over a decade ago. I can’t imagine any serious gamer being able to deal with that - proper gaming keyboards should support all keypresses simultaneously. I can’t imagine pro-gamers tolerating anything less. Are you using a USB keyboard, or (egad) a PS-2 keyboard plugged in with an adapter? Is it old?
We really can’t do anything in software to fix that, even if we wanted to.[/quote]
It’s a standard Acer notebook, maybe 3 years old. It has nothing to do with USB or PS-2, it is to do with the wiring within the keyboard. What have “pro-gamers” got to do with anything? The usual meaning of the phrase is people who play games for money, which I really can’t imagine isn’t what you mean. If English isn’t your first language, then I apologise for the previous comment. Anyway, perhaps you mean it in the sense of “really serious about games”, in which case no, I’m not really serious about games, I just play the odd game now and again.
As regards to “not a problem on Macs for over a decade”, I should probably just ignore the comment rather than trying to start a pointless and petty argument, knowing how intent people are on believing on the superiority of their Apple gadgets, but I guessed the assumption was almost certainly mistaken, and indeed, it was. See e.g. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1297279 for someone having problems with Stepmania on a Mac in 2011.
[quote=“junichiro, post:12, topic:247”][quote author=Jetrel link=topic=417.msg1979#msg1979 date=1327535525]
I can sympathize with why you want use to store stuff you do after a checkpoint, but from a checkpoint’s perspective, we can’t store state in the future from where you respawn, because this state could render that inaccessible. Like, crossing some collapsing platforms, and then respawning before them would leave you stranded. Checkpoints aren’t just a position - they’re a position, and the assurance that the rest of the level after that is still in its default, passable state.
[/quote]
Also in classic internet forum style, you seem to be aiming for making as many points as possible to try to wear me down. It may be that I am mistaken and actually the current system isn’t that confusing, but talk of falling blocks is totally irrelevant to special collectable items, they don’t alter the playability of the level.[/quote]
I believe the point of this response to be that destructible platforms, enemies, and items are all part of “default level state”. It’s easier to restore entire level than restore the level and then check what was picked up and what was not. I think.
Pro as in “plays games for money”. They buy special keyboards, because their job depends on their keyboard not betraying them during tournaments. They also buy specialized “gamer mice” with enhanced precision for the same reason.
There’s a trickledown market where tons of “serious amateurs” buy similar kit. If you’re serious enough to blow $600 on a new GPU, you usually are serious enough to get good peripherals. It’s how alienware and saitek and such are able to do business. Also: Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic headphones. (I’m actually lusting over a Sennheiser HD 380 Pro atm and wondering if I can afford it.)
Ugh. A lot of apple-haters can’t seem to wrap their head around how, even excluding apple, there’s a huge variance in build quality for kit. It’s like they assume all hardware is the same quality, period, and some is just overpriced and sold to suckers. Apple isn’t even at the top of the heap, it’s just better than average. You go out and buy some serious gaming rig, and I guarantee many parts in it will be way better than parts in a comparable mac. However… you go out and buy some bulk business OEM box, and I guarantee most of the parts in it will be marginally worse than the average mac. Just being on the fair side of the bell curve makes you “better than most”.
Apple keyboards are a good example. They’re better enough to be like basic “anti-ghosting” keyboards, and by eliminating the usual problems, lots of people like me have not had a problem with the USB ones, ever. They do ghost, but I can press at least 6 or seven keys simultaneously, including all arrow key combos except “up and down at the same time” (in which case up registers, and not down - hence the stepmania/DDR thing, which is very rare since almost nothing uses up and down simultaneously). Last time I had a problem with this was back on their ancient ADB keyboards, which only did 2 simultaneous keys, and one modifier. That was over a decade ago.
You can choose to dismiss this “supposed” superiority as a massive public delusion, but your keyboard has a problem that mine doesn’t. I’m not being smug, I’m not deriding your choice of what you bought. I’m just … honestly kinda sad, because commodity vendors of anything treat their customers like shit. Not even out of malice, so much as desperation caused by brutal profit margins. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone.
[quote=“Jetrel, post:14, topic:247”]Ugh. A lot of apple-haters can’t seem to wrap their head around how, even excluding apple, there’s a huge variance in build quality for kit. It’s like they assume all hardware is the same quality, period, and some is just overpriced and sold to suckers. Apple isn’t even at the top of the heap, it’s just better than average. You go out and buy some serious gaming rig, and I guarantee many parts in it will be way better than parts in a comparable mac. However… you go out and buy some bulk business OEM box, and I guarantee most of the parts in it will be marginally worse than the average mac. Just being on the fair side of the bell curve makes you “better than most”.
Apple keyboards are a good example. They’re better enough to be like basic “anti-ghosting” keyboards, and by eliminating the usual problems, lots of people like me have not had a problem with the USB ones, ever. They do ghost, but I can press at least 6 or seven keys simultaneously, including all arrow key combos except “up and down at the same time” (in which case up registers, and not down - hence the stepmania/DDR thing, which is very rare since almost nothing uses up and down simultaneously). Last time I had a problem with this was back on their ancient ADB keyboards, which only did 2 simultaneous keys, and one modifier. That was over a decade ago.
You can choose to dismiss this “supposed” superiority as a massive public delusion, but your keyboard has a problem that mine doesn’t. I’m not being smug, I’m not deriding your choice of what you bought. I’m just … honestly kinda sad, because commodity vendors of anything treat their customers like shit. Not even out of malice, so much as desperation caused by brutal profit margins. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone.[/quote]
Again, I think you are arguing against a position I don’t hold. I don’t hate Macs. I agree that very generally, Macs tend to have slightly better components than OEM PCs, and that certain other brands tend to have slightly better components again than Macs. Also, maybe I should make it clear I clearly cannot expect frogatto to be able to deal with differences between different keyboards, I am not holding the game responsible. But:
a) You originally said “This has not affected Macs for the last decade”, which is simply not true. I do not believe pressing up+left+s simultaneously is significantly more common than pressing up and down simultaneously
b) I chose to buy a cheap notebook PC on the basis of factors like not having not much money to spend, not being especially lacking in free time, and not having any desire to play the latest games. As a result, though I have occasionally had some minor hassles with my PC that would not have affected a more expensive system (as an example, having to remove all the bloatware that came preinstalled), as far as I’m concerned I made a good money vs time trade off.
c) Macs are superior to the average PC in that they have marginally better components, they don’t come with preinstalled bloatware, and are more aesthetically pleasing to look at. But in the vast majority of Mac vs PC arguments (which I don’t partake in) people ascribe all sorts of special powers to Macs, such as being faster, or being immune to viruses, or not suffering from hardware failure.
The easiest thing to do would be to put a checkpoint next to each hard-to-get item, but even writing code to seperately record which special items have been collected seperate to the state of the level wouldn’t be especially difficult. It is a question of game design rather than technical feasibility.
[quote=“junichiro, post:16, topic:247”][quote author=em3 link=topic=417.msg1981#msg1981 date=1327540083]
I believe the point of this response to be that destructible platforms, enemies, and items are all part of “default level state”. It’s easier to restore entire level than restore the level and then check what was picked up and what was not. I think.
[/quote]
The easiest thing to do would be to put a checkpoint next to each hard-to-get item, but even writing code to seperately record which special items have been collected seperate to the state of the level wouldn’t be especially difficult. It is a question of game design rather than technical feasibility.[/quote]
Actually, right now check points don’t save what items you have collected, but assuming that checkpoints were merged with save points then this would apply. As it is right now, the difference between check points and save points adds further to the confusion from non-linear levels, as if you reappear at a check point after dying then any items between the last save point and the check point are lost, yet are behind you.
also, another minor bug (presumably): at one point a puzzle requires you to get a key to open a door with another key behind the door, but you tongue is able to grab the 2nd key from behind the locked door.
Save points restore a level to “the state it was in when you saved”, whereas checkpoints restore a level to “the default state”. I believe checkpoints record the entire state of the player, but revert the level, whereas saves record the entire state of both.
One point of confusion is that coins and treasure-chests use entirely different subsystems to record their being collected. Coins use an old, simple system where they set a variable “respawns=“no”” and the game engine tracks them having been acquired. I’ve never looked into where that gets stored (dave wrote it during the brief alpha period before I was part of the team). Everything else that saves state uses a newer system, called “events”, where if a named event occurs, its stored in the player.
I have just tested, and acquired coins correctly do not respawn, and remain stored in the player, after respawning from a checkpoint. I separately tested stored events, and they, too, remain stored after a checkpoint respawn.
I can’t reproduce this bug.
As a responsible programmer, I’m not gonna deny the existence of this problem, but I’m gonna need a test-case where I can do a reliable reproduction of it. In your case, this would be a level where you can guarantee this happens.
To try this, you can either open up a level in the editor, and leaving it will start the game on that level, or start the game with the commandline option --level levelname.cfg
[quote=“Jetrel, post:19, topic:247”][quote author=junichiro link=topic=417.msg1985#msg1985 date=1327578637]
Actually, right now check points don’t save what items you have collected, but assuming that checkpoints were merged with save points then this would apply. [/quote]
I have just tested, and acquired coins correctly do not respawn, and remain stored in the player, after respawning from a checkpoint. I separately tested stored events, and they, too, remain stored after a checkpoint respawn.
I can’t reproduce this bug.
As a responsible programmer, I’m not gonna deny the existence of this problem, but I’m gonna need a test-case where I can do a reliable reproduction of it. In your case, this would be a level where you can guarantee this happens.
To try this, you can either open up a level in the editor, and leaving it will start the game on that level, or start the game with the commandline option --level levelname.cfg[/quote]
I am perhaps 90% certain I am not mistaken and coins respawned when I fell down a pit in some caves near Milgram’s castle. If I thought I could reproduce it with perhaps 10 minutes work I would do, but as it is the level editor doesn’t work in my build of the game, which when combined with actually finding the same pit again would make it rather a large undertaking. Perhaps when the level editor works in Windows I will try again.