Week 29 update

What I've done this week##

Quite a few minor bugs fixed this week and one major bug: monks teleporting to the left side of the screen. If you're using a recent build, you'll just get a crash with the "Uh-oh" message. This has now been fixed which I'm really chuffed with as playing a puzzle with a monk it was like Russian roulette not knowing if it would crash.

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

nothing, yay!

Game

tweaked players being crushed by phase/blastable blocks when they are falling
improved heroes standing on monk heads
the pick-axe tool will no longer work on fall-through blocks - this matches the original (Lavi)
fixed monks stepping off a ladder into a fall-though block (Lavi)
fixed a blasted block acting as a solid block if a monk is standing in a blasted hole below it (Lavi)
fixed hero drilling and monk landing on him that resulted in odd behaviour (Lavi)
fixed bug that allowed players to cross from a ladder into a regenerating blastable block (Lavi)
detonating a bomb at an area with blastable blocks already destroyed will reset them as per the original (Lavi)
you can no longer adjust the game speed when the game is paused
fixed bug that made any key a skeleton key (Rick)
fixed bug that could cause a monk to become stuck in a hole under the actual blasted block (Rick)

This Lode Runner Online: The Mad Monks' Revenge now has full gamepad support. This is not a ground-breaking feature as you'll remember that the original does have joystick support. Gamepads are a lot easier to use and pretty much the same across different manufactures. The only remaining tasks are to add more vibration/feedback and add support for two controllers on the one machine (two-player games).

Monk AI

improved monks eating heroes;
this was a little tricky to work out and it still isn't identical to the original. The original doesn't appear to use any hard rules so I've done it so if the monk intercepts 50% of a hero's bounds, he will eat him. The result is something that looks very close to the original and appears to work well under all scenarios
small performance boost when a monk is determining if he can eat a hero
tweaked AI with regards to positioning of the hero and monk
improved the monk direction when the hero being chased and the monk share the same block
monks are now prevented from moving if the sole hero to chase is standing on top of them
this was a major source of the monks teleporting to the side of the screen
it also now matches the original
the teleport monk error has now been fixed;
you may remember in earlier builds the monks use to randomly disappear off the side of a puzzle. This was a huge pain for me to find the actual source of this, but with thanks to Lavi, I've managed to trace it down and fix it
in a nutshell, the teleporting was caused by the AI instructing a monk to move left or right, then rapidly changing its mind
monks now take into consideration other monks stuck in holes or pick-axe rubble
large portions of AI reworked

The AI still has some ways to go but since the last several builds, the monks are far more stable. One of the main things to work on is pausing monks when they bump into each other. This needs quite a lot of work. At the moment, several puzzles are unsolvable (like puzzle 19) or the monks get stuck. I think the problem is I'm over-complicating this when it could probably done rather simply.

General

updated FNA engine;
fixed crash with certain hardware attached to Mac machines (Robert)
further tweaked the file dialog;
lowered resource usage
if a folder is shown, the 1st result of filtering is no longer covered up
crash file modifications;
renamed from *.errordump to *.lrd
added the OS version to the log
improvements made to the viewer tool to make it easier for me to browse the logs

What I'll probably do next week

play/test for bugs
continue AI improvements
multiple gamepad support