Week #45 update 2016

Special thanks to Greyfax for help with monk AI - the monks no longer jam/vibrate on spot when looking for a runner to chase.

Work on LAN gaming is coming along nicely. The ability to play LAN games has been in the builds for a couple of months now and is very fun. There is still a little work to go before we have something that I consider "complete". Most LAN testing is done by myself on the one machine with simulated packet loss and latency thrown in to make testing more accurate but this is no substitute for real-world testing. With the help of LogMeIn's Hamachi we've been able play LAN games over the Internet.

A name in parenthesis and in bold is the finder of the bug/quirk. Thanks to all, I really do appreciate your time and support. Cheers!

Editor

fixed bug when play-testing a puzzle that could restart the puzzle when entering an exit door

Game

fixed monks deciding which runner to eat (Greyfax)
YOG controlled monks can no longer drop gold when falling
when entering the secret puzzles, your score no longer resets to zero before bonus points are awarded
if restarting a 2P+ game and a runner is out of lives, he will spawn again as soon as a life is awarded (transfer or cheat)
tweaked monk animations when stepping off ladders - matches the Original
runners being eaten will now be caught in bomb blasts - matches the Original
dead runners can no longer collect bombs
improvements to monk hump ' bump;
when crossing ladders are involved
when running
when falling
monks now "idle" when hitting a block on the monkey bars - matches the Original

LAN

vastly improved lag compensation for games up to 100ms latency
games transferred from host are now compressed (approx. 75% smaller)
fixed bug that crashed when changing puzzles
fixed colouring on chat message prompt
fixed bug that reset the puzzle preview back to defaults in lobby

Testing over the internet has shown that lag is the real killer. For a good gaming experience, <100ms is ideal but the game is still somewhat playable up to 200ms. If your connection is quite slow (200ms+) then I don't recommend playing MMR over the internet just yet. This may seem very obvious, but don't forget, Lode Runner Online: The Mad Monks' Revenge can be played with two players on the same keyboard.

General

fixed bug that crashed game when saving with more than 255 lives;
like the Original, only the UI is capped at 99
screenshots now saved to a "SCREENSHOTS" folder on your Lode Runner Online directory

Bugs being worked on

runners not entering exit doors (Howie)
some Windows machines not be able to detect LAN games (Steve)

What I'll probably do next week

work on outstanding items on my TODO list
improve network gameplay