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DroidFreak36
[?] Karma: +4 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 1:27 am EST
HATPC Reborn Dev

Age: 30
Karma: 200
Posts: 491
Gender: Male
Location: droidfreak36.com
pm | email
Stairs! Now you can try them out. IDK if I'll keep this mechanic in, but it seemed like a fun little trick that required only a slight modification of platform behavior.

Stairs work by checking if the position of Hannah's feet before she falls is inside a platform for warping rather than the position of Hannah's feet after she falls. Thus if you would fall out of a platform, you instead get warped up on top of it.

Play HATPC Reborn Alpha 0.2.7: http://droidfreak36.com/HATPC/0_2_7/

Make levels to try out the new mechanics: https://cavegen.com

Changelog:
* Changed platform physics to allow stairs (as explained above)
* Added a mute function. Press M to toggle mute. As of now, there's no way to adjust volume or to see whether the game is muted or not (without listening for it) but if HATPC sounds offend you, you can turn them off.
* Also tweaked the horizontal size of platforms for warping - you should find it easier to fall into gaps between platforms or to fall past the edges of platforms now.
* The life counter is now replaced with a death counter in user levels. Complete with a pixel art skull and crossbones.
* Added support for series of user levels. Simply add a line reading "$next(URL)" to your cave file where URL is the (encoded) URL of the level you wish to add to the series, and the level will be added to a queue of levels to be loaded up after this one. That means that you can either create the series by adding a link to each level from the previous one, or adding links to all the levels in the first one (or any combination thereof). The death counter will keep a running tally of all deaths in the level series, only resetting when the series is completed.
* Fixed a bug that caused Hannah to warp into the ceiling when crawling onto a ladder - now Hannah grabs onto the ladder in a "duck climbing" state that looks derpy but avoids violating the laws of HATPCR physics. As soon as you climb low enough that your head can fit, you revert to your regular height.
* Text popups are now more exciting! (and say Collected Gem instead of Gem Collected)
* Reverted the change that made it impossible to jump between arrows. It is now possible to jump between arrows in flight, but not to survive standing between arrow hits (which still have the same hitbox size as spikes).
* May or may not have fixed the freezing bug I ran into in my Steel City walkthrough. I was unable to reproduce the bug running the game on Windows so I'm not certain what caused it, so let me know if you still run into checkpoints not reloading.

Upcoming changes:
* Options screen, with volume control and a list of controls for reference (pending possible graphic design help)
* Background 2 (pending definite graphic design help)
* Enemies (have been moved up above water in the priority list)
* Water (static and flowing)

Expect to see enemies and possibly the options & background (depending on whether I can get design help) within a week or two, water will probably end up coming out around the end of February/beginning of March.




Quote:
Rictory for Ralkyon!

HATPC Reborn home page
DroidFreak36
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 2:07 am EST
HATPC Reborn Dev

Age: 30
Karma: 200
Posts: 491
Gender: Male
Location: droidfreak36.com
pm | email
Consider these known issues that will be fixed in the next version since I just noticed them:
* The death counter is replaced with the life counter when the game is paused (or when tutorial messages are displayed)
* The "replay level" function only allows you to replay the last level of a series, not the entire series. I will add a "replay series" function that will display if the user just completed a multi-level series.




Quote:
Rictory for Ralkyon!

HATPC Reborn home page
Sefro
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 7:14 am EST

Karma: 313
Posts: 1136
Gender: Male
Location: Canada
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Death counters!

I really like the idea of stairs but I don't know about this change. What would you think about keeping platforms as is and adding a special platform that looks slightly different and automatically sucks you up if you walk into it? That would also have lots of other cool uses in addition to stairs.
krotomo
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 7:45 am EST
The Shepherd

Age: 23
Karma: 249
Posts: 4066
Gender: Male
Location: My chair
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I agree with Sefro. Stairs seem like one of the things that would add new options for traps but also take many away.
DroidFreak36
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 12:27 pm EST
HATPC Reborn Dev

Age: 30
Karma: 200
Posts: 491
Gender: Male
Location: droidfreak36.com
pm | email
I don't think stairs physics really takes many options away. It doesn't actually take away the option for the player to walk through platforms (as seen is the staircase on the right in Simple Stairs Examples), only the option for the player to walk into a platform and then fall down out of it. That's a non-zero number of options taken away, but that's a very edgy edge case. IDK if any Interguild levels even use that. I don't know of any.

I could make a new tile with this behavior instead of platforms, but that seems inelegant to me. The elegance of HATPC is the combination of simple mechanics to make complex contraptions, and implementing stairs using platforms seems like an obvious way to do that. This change doesn't really add any complexity to platform behavior (they're already quite complex) but it adds a lot of options for how to use them. Adding a new tile that behaves nearly identically to platforms seems like adding a lot of complexity in mechanics for the edge benefit of allowing map makers to have players fall out of platforms (I don't know of any levels that actually use that).

And not only would I have to add a new tile, I'd have to add a whole new collision type, which means a lot more backend complexity. For reference, the current collision types are:

Code:
-2 - Kills Hannah on collision (spike)
-1 - Destroyed by collision, no knockback (treasure)
 0 - No collision (air, secret area, ladder)
 1 - Collision from above only (platform)
 2 - Standard solid collision (terrain, steel crate)
 3 - Solid collision, pushable (boulder)
 4 - Destroyed by collision, knockback (wooden crate)

To make a separate stairs tile, I'd need to add a collision type which is nearly identical to type 1 but with extra warping behavior. Either that or make a hard-coded check for that tile type, which I prefer to avoid.

Using platform left & right as stairs as atvelonis suggested in the discord has the same issue even though I wouldn't be technically adding any tiles, because as-is platform left and right use collision type 1 and thus use exactly the same code as regular platforms. Although it would finally give a purpose to platform left and right, which makes it a tempting option. I'd probably want to retexture them to make it obvious which was which and change the stairs warping to use half-tiles, but that would probably break a lot more existing levels than stairs as-is do, if only visually. I know that a significant number of levels use plaftorm left and right as slightly different looking platforms and repurposing them as stairs would ruin that aesthetic.




Quote:
Rictory for Ralkyon!

HATPC Reborn home page
DroidFreak36
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 12:56 pm EST
HATPC Reborn Dev

Age: 30
Karma: 200
Posts: 491
Gender: Male
Location: droidfreak36.com
pm | email
If I were to create dedicated stairs tiles, they'd probably look like this:




Quote:
Rictory for Ralkyon!

HATPC Reborn home page
DroidFreak36
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 1:01 pm EST
HATPC Reborn Dev

Age: 30
Karma: 200
Posts: 491
Gender: Male
Location: droidfreak36.com
pm | email
(That's just a retexture of plaform left)




Quote:
Rictory for Ralkyon!

HATPC Reborn home page
krotomo
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 1:03 pm EST
The Shepherd

Age: 23
Karma: 249
Posts: 4066
Gender: Male
Location: My chair
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The stairs feature definitely breaks trap concepts.

Take a look at JourneyV:

http://www.interguild.org/levels/index.php?id=4173

The trap at (34,57) involves being on a platform and having to drop down and activate a trap before being able to jump back up to the correct height. This trap is a clever use of jump height combined with platforms to force the player to drop down in order to jump back up and land at the correct height. But with the stairs feature, after falling off the first platform the player would be teleported up.

The trap at (46,79) involves duck-jumping into a crate in order to get onto the lower platform without landing on the upper platform and being unable to continue. Once again, with the stairs feature, this trap doesn't work.

Sure, these trap concepts could probably be done some other way, but having to work around the stairs feature would be quite annoying and potentially more confusing to newer players.

So if this is going to be added, it should be added as a separate tile rather than adding more to the already complicated platform.
DroidFreak36
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 1:49 pm EST
HATPC Reborn Dev

Age: 30
Karma: 200
Posts: 491
Gender: Male
Location: droidfreak36.com
pm | email
Ok, so there is at least one Interguild level broken by the change.

The first trap you pointed out is definitely broken by the change, but it seems like the upper of the two platforms has absolutely nothing to do with the trap. That could just be me not understanding the trap, but it seems like if anything the only thing that does is make it more compact.

The second trap isn't actually broken in HATPC Reborn. Well, you can make up for botching that one jump by walking around and mounting the platform again, but simply replacing the two spikes under the platform with terrain should stop that. I have a fixed version uploaded on droidfreak36 which can be tried in HATPC Reborn here.




Quote:
Rictory for Ralkyon!

HATPC Reborn home page
DroidFreak36
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 1:53 pm EST
HATPC Reborn Dev

Age: 30
Karma: 200
Posts: 491
Gender: Male
Location: droidfreak36.com
pm | email
Also, new known issue: In HATPCR 0.2.7 you can't enter any username containing the letter K. That was an oversight on my part. Also, any username containing the letter M will cause you to mute or unmute the audio.

Both already fixed for the next version.




Quote:
Rictory for Ralkyon!

HATPC Reborn home page
krotomo
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 2:21 pm EST
The Shepherd

Age: 23
Karma: 249
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Location: My chair
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Dunno if this has been pointed out, but jumping between two platforms that are both 4 tiles high will cause you to warp up an additional tile.
DroidFreak36
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 2:36 pm EST
HATPC Reborn Dev

Age: 30
Karma: 200
Posts: 491
Gender: Male
Location: droidfreak36.com
pm | email
@krotomo - Yep. That's a bug.

Well, considering that pretty much everyone but me dislikes the stairs physics, I think I'll scrap it, at least in its current form.

Although I'll keep the idea of a dedicated stairs block in mind, especially since CSD pointed out in the discord that slopes (or stairs more likely) could have the added feature of making falling blocks slide off of them, creating a way for non-boulder falling blocks to be redirected.

In the meantime, feel free to play around with the existing stairs physics. Maybe you'll grow to like it better.




Quote:
Rictory for Ralkyon!

HATPC Reborn home page
Rocketguy2
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 5:13 pm EST
God wishes he was me

Age: 21
Karma: 38
Posts: 850
Location: Clinging to the last whispers of life in my decaying body
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I have an extra bug! If multiple hannahs die, it counts as losing multiple lives.


Can you feel your heart burning?
Can you feel the struggle within?
The fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make, you cannot kill me in a way that matters
DroidFreak36
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Tuesday, January 31 2017, 10:46 pm EST
HATPC Reborn Dev

Age: 30
Karma: 200
Posts: 491
Gender: Male
Location: droidfreak36.com
pm | email
Good catch, I'll fix that.




Quote:
Rictory for Ralkyon!

HATPC Reborn home page

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