May Update

Feel kinda silly calling this an update, because I haven't touched the game since my last post. But, my list of 'busy' is getting shorter by the day. With luck, I'll be back in the saddle again by the middle of this month. On the upside, one of the fun results from all this work is I should have a new(er) computer to work with, so it's definitely not a total wash. haha

There were 2 big bugs y'all found, and wanted to talk about them a bit. (Yay for sorta - code theory!) The first is that the game will lock if you mash buttons during a scene change. That has to do with how commands are sent & executed. If you can imagine, once you press the A button to attack, I have to tell the program to stop accepting further inputs of the A button, or it will keep sending you the the first frame of the attack animation until you let go of the A button. Conversely, the final frame of the attack routine tells the program that the attack has ended, which resets the hero back to the default state. The problem here is that a scene change interrupts the attack routine. The last frame never plays, which means it can never reset the hero. So, the program thinks you're still in the middle of an attack & won't accept new inputs, but it will never get that reset signal because the animation was stopped. This one should actually be a pretty easy fix. Simply tell the end of the scene loader to reset any attacks. Or I could lock the keyboard from inputs during scene changes.

The second is that if you die & continue while double teamed, one of the monsters will become invisible/invulnerable. There were no double team animations until about two weeks before the release. This was the last feature I added, and no real surprise, I missed something. In this case, I simply forgot to tell the continue code to check for a second monster in a grapple. So when you continue, it never properly loads the second monster back. He's still there, but his sprite is 'lost'. Actually, it's off-screen, which is where I 'hide' sprites I know I need but don't want to show at that time. What I find interesting is that some of the hit attacks from this off-screen monster still seem to work normally. In my mind, they shouldn't. (And that is neat, imo.) Anyway, this should be a simple fix of telling the continue button to check for a 2nd grappler & reload them if necessary. Hell, I may not have to even run the check, I may simply tell it to reload two grapplers every time, and if the 2nd grappler isn't there it shouldn't do anything.

And since I like to end with at least one picture, here's one from the ULMF forums that made me lol. One of the guys there hacked the game's variables so that they can be set to anything - note the 859 continues. ;)

Til next time
-DirtyC101