Saturday 26 March 2016

Alpha 2.0.46 Released

The last update turned out to be a bit unstable — so, bonus update. Hopefully this will fix all the issues.

Changes

  • Removed instancing support.
    • I discovered Blackshift was doing things with instancing that you aren't really supposed to do. This was causing crashes and general weirdness. I need to rethink this, so instancing is gone while I do that. Hopefully the performance hit isn't too great.
  • Fix a bug where the game would sometimes crash after you die.
  • New levels & some level tweaks
  • Renamed "debug.log" to "GUI Log.txt", and it now goes in the Logs folder with the other logs.
  • Minor graphical improvements
  • Minor sound tweaks

26 comments:

  1. Well, I haven't crashed doing playbacks - will try again to defeat your game - Ha ha ha ha!

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  2. Just want to let you know that I've been following this game ever since the old browser version Netshift. I have many a fond memory playing that game and beating my brother's fastest times on user-made levels. I also remember making levels that were crazy mazes in a room full of lava. I hope to learn more of the mechanics, do a bunch of experimenting, and pick up right where I left off.
    Thank you for all the old memories, and here's to some new ones!

    ~Werty

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    1. Werty, what was your game name in Netshift?

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    3. *I think it was wert or something similar

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    4. I am looking for Ren, Sabik and Ernie, never saw werty on the level pit. I got a free ticket for the above names if they can survive 13 updates! Ha ha ha

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    5. Those names (and yours) sound familiar!
      I must have been going by something different at the time :/

      Showed my brother the game the other day and I said that there were user-made levels. The first thing he asked was "has Obie made any?" This started us on a bit of a nostalgia trip.

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  3. Hey, first off thanks for revisiting this wonderful maze game and bringing back all the great stuff. I spent so many hours on Netshift! I can't wait until I have some time to try building some more puzzles! Anyway, a few comments/bugs (if it matters, I'm playing on a Win10 system). One thing that seems randomly broken is the game saving in the level pit. About half the time that I play levels in the level pit, the save game works fine if I use the 'R' button to restart, but if I die, when the game resets to the start screen with the play button, it loses the save state and restarts at the very beginning. As I say this seems kind of random (it worked normally yesterday, but this morning isn't working). Also, there seems to be some glitches in recording wins. I've defeated a few levels that don't seem to be recorded in the pit after winning (e.g. I've won Impossible City twice, but it doesn't show up). For one of these, I tried watching the video of one of the other winners, but since it was a ~20 min video, it was taking forever on my slow internet and I had to force quit Blackshift (since I couldn't find a way to cancel the video loading), and it then lost the record of me winning. Not sure what the glitch was on the second time.
    Anyway, I'm super excited about this game, love the challenges and levels up so far, and hope to be able to contribute some of my own again soon!
    Drerio

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    1. Hey Drerio, couple of quick answers:

      - Pit saving: Not seen this, will look into it

      - Recording wins: I checked your Impossible City win, it submitted OK but was marked as invalid because it thinks you crashed into the random orb enemy in the left part of the level. There used to be bugs with saving & random enemies, but I thought I'd fixed them. I've made a few smaller test levels with this stuff and we'll see what happens.

      Thanks for playing

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    2. So far for me, Boring test 3 is the only one which doesn't record my wins...

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    3. OK, I've found the bug now. Kinda subtle, the order of enemies in memory changes when you save/load, which affects which enemies get which random numbers, so they take a different path on the replay and crash into you.

      I'll get a fix out in the next update. The lost replays are unfortunately not recoverable.

      Thanks to you and everyone who played the Boring Test levels.

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  4. Right, the complete restart when not using R thing happens to me, too.
    Other than the known problem with too large areas I haven't really noticed more bugs lately. I have some thoughts about the editor though:
    The auto-saving of changed levels seems quite convenient, but that way I can't really try something out and then if I don't like it discard the changes and quit without saving. That option might come in handy when creating actual levels (I'm not there yet btw. Since this is alpha, I try keeping my stuff compact and focusing on mechanics or ideas one at a time)
    Also, one thing I really miss are other ways to get your blocks moving, especially at the start of a level. Having arrow blocks for each direction is great, but that's about the only way I can think of at the moment and it can be difficult to use in some situations. For example, I would love to place blocks on conveyor belts so they start moving right away without a seperate pushing arrow block. The way Netshift-teleporters used to work also was really nice (the teleported block/object sliding off the teleporter field in the direction it went in).

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    1. - Restart: Will check it out

      - Problem with too large areas: What is this? If it's a graphical glitch it may be fixed now.

      - Autosave: This is good feedback, thanks. You should be able to hit undo a bunch of times but something more convenient might be nice. Maybe a 'duplicate level' button? Don't want to encourage flooding with lots of similar levels though. I don't want to go back to explicit save because I just know people will forget to save.

      - Putting blocks on conveyor belts: Good idea, don't see why not. I've added this and it'll be in the next release.

      - Slippery teleporters: I can see why you'd want this. I'll think about it.

      Love your levels BTW, always very clever.

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    2. - Graphical glitch:
      Yes I just tried again and it didn't happen anymore. Last time I got that one was when working with that big slider checkerboard area.

      Also, it's great to see more people join the crew :D

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  5. Testing your new levels Rob and I get this since I die so much. After a few deaths, my ship only wants to go up! Waddup? I have to exit and re-boot

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    1. Ha ha, I am your worst nightmare. Glad to see Bibbythedard finally beat my level albeit weirdly Buahaahaha. Methinks I need to build another.

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    2. Upon watching your replay of obie-10 I see I did it funky. good level though. had me stumped for a little bit.

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  6. Finally figured out your level Wunk, nice touch! Unlike the old Netshift and Blackshift, you could die on the stinger tile if you carried thru and as well with explosions as you had to wait until they died down. I think I like this better.

    In the meantime, am I the only one getting a Bad Allocation Error? And the game crashes? Happened at least 9 times today on two separate computers and one is a graphics computer with tons of ram!

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  8. It seems like there's a problem in the level pit score order. They don't always appear in ascending order.
    For example in "suicide mission" by Obie, Bibbythedark appear in the 4th position and have the best score and in "Fixed Version" by Wunk, drerio should be in the 5th position and he's the last one.

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    1. Yes, this is the new score ordering coming in. From now on, wins where you stay alive will be counted as better than wins where you die.

      The new update (tonight hopefully) will make this clearer.

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  9. A friend of mine seems to have problems launching the game:
    http://i.imgur.com/eWetwir.png

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    1. Looks like your friend has an old version, OGRE was removed about a month ago. Your friend should uninstall, download and install again.

      Also Lichess is awesome.

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    2. Nosily reading your conversation, I see it needed to apply 12 updates. My updater code is pretty bad and needs replacing. One more thing I need to do at some point!

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    3. Actually, thinking about it now, OGRE might have been part of the reason why the updater was a bit unstable.

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