Everything's coming up explodey!

The fastest HATPC Reborn update ever, just for contrast with the slowest update ever from 3 days ago.

Play it here: http://droidfreak36.com/HATPC/0_2_1

Changes:
* Added wooden dynamite crates.
* Added tutorial level 4.
* Added level 15ish (It's pretty much the same as vanilla 15, it just has a ladder instead of water).
* Added terrain types 3 and 4 (although not the door textures yet)
* Arrows are now 33% faster (now 2x as fast as Hannah's walk speed). This will probably break the timing of existing HATPC Reborn level designs (Sorry Kro) but it's closer to the vanilla HATPC arrow speed, at least in relation to how fast Hannah moves. I tweaked it to get the traps in level 15 to be pretty close to the proper timing, then moved a few arrows to make the timing just right (the trap timing was slightly faster than in vanilla before I moved the arrows).
* Added particle effects for...
   * Explosions
   * Arrow hits
   * Metal crate destruction
* Particle effects for wooden and metal crate destruction have a 50% chance to be mirrored.
* Treasure chests are now 50% metal.
* The menus are no longer silent. Neither are tutorial messages, but IDK if I'm gonna keep that.
* You can now play with ESDF instead of arrow keys or QAOP. If you don't know how to ESDF, pretend you're using WASD but move your hand over by one key.
* The life meter no longer freaks out on game over.
* Fixed a bug which caused wooden crates to be destroyed at the wrong location when you platform-warped into them.
* Fixed a bug which caused you to jump off of a ladder immediately after jumping onto it.
* Fixed a bug which caused the door to stay open on checkpoint load
* Fixed a bug which caused explosions to destroy falling blocks
* Fixed a bug which caused user levels with ladders to load incorrectly (since my code was ignoring any newlines between quotes... oops)

and...

* Added support for levels not stored on Neopets (including levels stored on the Interguild).

To load one, grab the URL of its text file (http://www.interguild.org/levels/levels/####.txt where #### is the ID for IG levels), pop it into a URL encoder like this one, then go to http://droidfreak36.com/HATPC/reborn.php?cave=
with your encoded URL pasted at the end. For instance, to play HATPC tutorial level 1 (ID = 2346) from the Interguild, go to http://droidfreak36.com/HATPC/0_2_1/index.html?cave=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.interguild.org%2Flevels%2Flevels%2F2346.txt

This lets you get around the Neopets uploader for now, which is necessary to make a level which uses my event syntax, I discovered. It's a bit tedious to manually encode the URL, but eventually there should be ways to do it without manually encoding the URL.

I don't think either of these issues were introduced by this update, and you might know about them already, but I haven't seen anyone else mention them, so whatever

1. You can't start climbing ladders that are two tiles above the ground by holding up. In the modified gem room for the level 15ish, I approached the line of ladders while holding the up and left keys, and walked right off the ledge. Here's a regular HATPC example if you need one.


2. I know tutorial messages say click to continue, but I've always done it by hitting space. And it seems to be possible to close a tutorial message and make Hannah jump with a single press of the space bar. This is best exemplified in Reborn Tutorial 4, where a message comes up as soon as you start the level. I wasn't sure about the specifics of this, so I played around with it a little, and noticed quicker/lighter space bar hits were less likely to make both the message close and Hannah jump. It definitely seems to be tied to how long you hold the space bar. If you just hold down the space bar upon starting the level, you can close the first message, make Hannah jump, and close the 2nd tutorial message that comes up. So in theory if there was a level that was just a straight hallway with 30 tutorial messages, you could beat the level by holding down right and the space bar.

1) Yep, looks like I made attaching onto ladders always use the crouch hitbox for some reason. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Fixed it for the next version.

2) Yeah, at the moment, holding down the space bar prior to the tutorial message reaching full fade-in will cause it to immediately fade out, and as soon as it fades out, you'll jump if the spacebar is still held down. I don't have any trouble avoiding accidental jumps with that myself, since you have a full 1/6th of a second to let off the spacebar after the message starts fading out, which is pretty long in the scheme of HATPC timings. I don't want to entirely remove this behavior since it would lead to some situations being more clunky (where you press the spacebar one tick before the fading animation ends and nothing happens) but I can code in a check to make sure that the spacebar has been released and re-pressed since the last time it was used to trigger some action to avoid one spacebar press triggering multiple actions.

i think exploding away spikes doesnt actually remove their properties from the game, just the sprite

you can try it on level 15. when you return to the starting area there's an area beneath the platform with spikes. one gets blown up by a wooden dynamite crate, but i still die when i go there

edit: also falling boulders pushed me slightly aside, again on level 15. inch slightly closer to the first falling boulders after crossing the minigap, youll get pushed to the right. this does not happen in hatpc.
editedit: they even act as a solid wall for hannah? in hatpc you can run into the boulders and die while theyre falling. guess this is related to the sideways motion

Stalagmites didn't properly inherit the properties of other blocks, so they weren't getting destroyed properly. Good catch.

And yes, rolling boulders do push you. That's actually not directly coded behavior but a result of the way that you are pushed out of situations where you're clipping with blocks. Rolling boulders are considered to be solid blocks, so you are pushed out of clipping with them. I might remove that behavior specifically for boulders though.

an audio-related thing: if a sfx plays, a second instance of the same sfx wont play at the same time. this makes dynamite chains sound a bit weird, but at least picking up a lot of treasure chests is more humane to the ears

but i prefer to play without the audio anyway. can you add that as an option please

I don't know why, but this seems to be very laggy on chrome. It's not a problem with my computer, bang_jan's had it too. Nor is it a windows 7 problem as bang_jan has windows 10. It wasn't like this on earlier updates, just this one and 2.0.


btw good job releasing 2.1 before rubrub.

I get some (very occasional) slight framerate stutters on Chrome as well. For a tenth of a second or something the framerate will drop a little, and then return to normal. I noticed this on Level 15 in the gem section, for example, so it's probably not due to excessive dynamite explosions or anything like that. Windows 10, i5-4460, and 16GB of RAM on my main rig, so I imagine it's due to the game itself.

Update is looking nice, though. Only thing I can think of is what Isa said, chains of dynamite sound a little strange. I think it's because the sound of the later explosions isn't overlapping with the previous ones; the second soundbyte starts once the first one is finished. Same thing with collecting treasure chests, such as in the bottom section of Tutorial 4, and I think arrows too. Might be for every block actually, but it's a little hard to tell.

Oh snap, I'm getting those bugs on Chrome too. The performance on Chrome is awful and the sounds aren't playing until the previous one is done.

The sound issue is probably due to the change I made in 0.2.0 to the legacy GameMaker Studio sound system to improve the reliability of sounds. I think in order to fix that issue, I'll set it so that before every sound plays, the game will remove all previous instances of that sound. That will avoid those super loud audio spikes and also fix the issue with Chrome audio.

As for Chrome performance, I don't really know why Chrome is handling the game so poorly or how to fix it. I have been saying for years that Chrome has been buggy and with worse performance than Firefox. So try using Firefox I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think I'm gonna focus on CPU optimization in the next version, which might help, but the fact that it's performing so badly on high end PCs like mine and atvelonis's while Firefox runs fine likely means it's just Chrome doing something wrong.

I did some testing on other browsers. Edge performs fine but has the sound issue (which I can and will fix). Same goes for IE. It doesn't run very well my old version of Safari, but that's not really a surprise, since that version is old enough to run the original HATPC. And it actually runs better on that than on the current version of Chrome.

@Rocket Guy2

つ ◕_◕ ༽つ GIFF FINGERBANG

That's a song for you non-Geometry Dashers. It's by MDK and I actually found out that it was going to be in GD from the comment section on the video since I follow MDK.

Also, @Isa, yes I can make an option to disable sound, or even set the volume with a slider. I'll just need to figure out how to implement the interface for it. And also the setting won't remember what you set it to in previous sessions since I don't use cookies, so it'll have to be set every time you launch the game.

I think the dynamite kill range is too large. In the first trap in the top right section of four fragments, you can run against the stack of steel crates in the original HATPC but you die in reborn.

Really? I had no idea the original explosion radius was so small. I could've sworn it was at least larger than the size of one block, but I guess not.

Things I've encountered are practically all the things mentioned above, mainly the large explosion hitbox, destroyed spikes still hurting Hannah and the sound issue, but this one disappears in Firefox. One very significant thing I can say from myself is too large spike hitbox, because it makes plenty of jumps and areas more difficult or impossible. There are more mini-issues regarding hitboxes and sprites behaviour, but this newly released version is already impressive, so I'll mention them later.

Bug encountered the new dynamite level:
* Died around top-left of map.
* Tiles regenerated, but I did not respawn at a checkpoint.
* The camera remained at the point of death.
* When I tried clicking Restart, I heard a death sound, the life counter decremented, but the camera remained where it was. Still no respawn.

I took a screencapture of some of the stuttering issues on Chrome. Note how Hannah starts slowing down on the left platform. Could be related to loading parts of levels for checkpoints.
http://www.giphy.com/gifs/3oriOgZA2sdqgoVCjm

  

I tried testing some level codes, and one glitch is that the dynamite explodes when the left arrow is hit by the up arrow.  

And screencap of checkpoint bug (Giphy chops some off at the end, but you can see the lack of respawn right at the end): http://giphy.com/gifs/3oz8xV67grzh3FHh4I

I've seen that checkpoint bug myself, Jebby. Not sure of the exact cause, but it seems to be some interaction between explosions and checkpoints. I'll look into it further. Somehow the hannah object is either not being saved or not loading.

As for the stuttering trouble in Chrome, I think I have an idea about why it's location dependent. In the left part of that gif, you have more tiles on the screen, which means that the camera movement code is manipulating more tiles. I'll look into reducing those operations in particular. I had to change them in 0.2.0 to support faster camera panning (when the camera rapidly pans from your death location to your respawn location) but they could still be optimized since as-is the camera is setting all the tiles invisible and then visible again during every tick it moves in, rather than just the ones entering or leaving the screen.

@soccerboy13542 It turns out that was an issue with falling dynamite crates being off-center. I forgot to center the sprite for dynamite crates, so they're half a tile down and to the right of where they're supposed to be. I fixed that for the next version.

These cases are no longer possible:

  

Wait, if the explosion kill radius is small enough that you can survive being right next to a steel dyna crate that blows up, then how come you die to the steel dyna crates next to ladders in level 15?

If you are right up against a dynamite that blows up at body level it kills you but at head level it doesn't. In Reborn you die in both situations.

wooden dynamite travels much too quickly compared to hannahs running speed

in the original tut4 i can run across the metal crates i need to blow up before the dynamite i launched destroys them, in this im not even close and die from the explosion on the right side

I'm aware that wooden dynamite travels faster than in the original. I could slow it down, but I'd have to reduce the gravity on it even more. It already uses half the gravity that everything else does.

"If you are right up against a dynamite that blows up at body level it kills you but at head level it doesn't. In Reborn you die in both situations. "

Ok, that makes more sense. I mean, except for the fact that your head should be just as easily blown up as your body. So rather than making the dynamite kill radius detect collision with Hannah's hitbox, I can make it detect collision with Hannah's centerpoint (which is at the center of her lower half, where you place the # in the level code).