I'm thinking that difficulties would also be contained within a module?

That sounds like an excellent idea. Those who would complain of the games lack of difficulty/excess difficulty would both be satisfied.

Sounds good to me, players could really fine tune the difficulty that way.

Ok. Sounds good.

Most of this is done now.
Still needed: a method of deciding which difficulty to use (hopefully you can do this, steve? The stage drawing stuff is very much not my forté.) It would just need to set gGameDifficulty to either gGameDifficultyEasy, gGameDifficultyMedium, or gGameDifficultyHard.
It could also maybe be done on a per map basis?

The other thing that needs to be done is implementing difficulties for wizards needing rest... but that won't be done yet anyways.
(I'm not even sure that wizards needing rest is particularly necessary; each wizard has his own benefits and drawbacks, as far as I can tell(other than Garonlin, who isn't finished, of course!) It might just make things too complicated)

Didn't we plan on making an insane mode?

It wouldn't be hard to add, though it might not be all that different from hard.

Something like Insane - 3.
I think having only a third of the speed would be quite tough!

I came to the realization that it would be easier to do multiplications than divides. Thus, it would be .3333 rather than 3!

Another thing to add to the difficulty settings: in normal and above, merlin and monster summons have reels.

.... now where did gGameDifficulty go?

It seems to have completely disappeared from the engine.


I'm getting this unfortunate feeling that I've been working on a version that's missing some of my other work.

That can't be good.

......

well, the one I'm using now is better than whichever one I was using then, due to some tweaks and changes I've been making, so it's not all that bad. Re-adding all the difficulty stuff won't be very hard either, though I'm working on making the button to control it right now.

I had a thought regarding difficulty and the gameplay overall - lag.

Lag is a thing that map makers will have to take into account, as having more than about 15-20 active objects on one screen will start slowing the game down. Lag makes games easier if it slows things down. In addition, it's fairly annoying.

Now, what options do we have to fix it? I mean, I think that since lag is directly related to the amount of objects and there's not much to give pain for the modern graphics cards, it has to be either Shockwave with some odd behind-the-scenes mechanics, or the AI.

Now, I think that Note can confirm what's the cause of lag, but I'd like to point out that whatever it is, it needs optimisation. I want those 116 goblin screens back, personally.

I've been spotting things that are causing lags, like bullets that check for collisions every frame, and reducing it to checking every couple frames.

I also got rid of lags created when spells such as army summon are used(still more work to be done on actual summoning) and in the rollover health bars(also checked for collisions every frame)

One of the main lags, is of course, the shockwave plugin/lingo language, and high memory use that it results in, along with image transformations(I should see how much faster it runs without any image transforms... probably a bunch). The drawing could probably also be sped up by selectively redrawing parts, rather than refreshing the whole screen every frame.

On the whole, the game runs pretty nicely and smoothly until the frate drops below 10fps, with the highest possible frame rate being 30fps(when its just you on screen, and the rollover is not targeting anything, or in the start screen).

There are also a large number of times when lists are copied. Just about every place this happens, it makes things incredibly slow.

I just thought of another place where a counter delay could improve game speed: the spell caster ai. It doesn't need to check whether it needs to run away every frame.

A lot of things can't really be optimized out though, and having more enemies on the screen will make it slower because of them, not even counting the additional drawing time.

I'm doing my best for spotting things like that. More eyes on it would be fantastic though! I'm thinking I'll release what I've got next saturday, to go along with reddit.com/r/gamedev 's saturday screen shots.

I think the biggest place to currently gain speed improvements is to change up the bullet creation code. As it stands, spawning is built as a system to be used at the beginning of screens(does aaaaAAAAAAALLLLL kinds of initialization stuff, every time, when it probably doesn't need to), but used all over the place.

!!!!!!!!!



I just got the button working!!!!!


Now I just need to add all the changes for difficulty back in!


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