Quark Robot dev blog

Week #9 update

Quark Robot -

What I've done this week##

Week nine has been another bumper week! The AI progressed quite a lot, audio via the streaming of Ogg files was finally completed, tooltips added and a whack of bug fixes and tweaks.

Editor

  • enlarged the size of the tile palette/active tile button. The existing 22x22 pixel area was a little small and slightly annoying when using it frequently so now you can just click anywhere in the tile area.


LEFT = original 22x22 pixel area and the RIGHT = more click room

  • added a prompt before deleting a puzzle from a set. I've accidently saved many puzzles during testing without realizing I had removed puzzles I wanted to keep


No more accidently saving puzzle sets when you've deleted puzzles

Game

  • fixed an alignment issue that crushed players under pick-axe rubble incorrectly

  • AI;

  • added support for players to stand on a monk stuck in a blasted hole to prevent him from climbing out (matches the original)

  • monks climb out of holes to continue the chase when they can

  • monks will now idle when there is no way to reach a hero

  • fixed bug in AI that caused monks to sometimes disappear

  • fixed issue that allowed players to run through phase blocks that are in the process of opening (they need to wait until it is completely phased out first)

  • heroes are now eaten by monks when they run into one standing in a blasted hole (matches original)

  • finished player interaction with fall-through/trapdoor blocks;

  • you can go through them when falling or entering a puzzle from the air (for heroes)

  • you cannot run through a fall-through block

  • you can moved out of a fall-through when fallen into one (and the horizontal move is valid)

  • made blast of the bottom row match the original; the adjacent blocks seam with a non-flat bottom and heal back over with a non-flat bottom

    The bottom row when blasted behaving like the original

  • added the initial pause to monks;

  • the monk plays one frame of his animation then waits until a hero takes a step

  • this matches the original

  • added support for monks in a two-player game to not pause and jam like the original once he's eaten a runner. The monk will now head off and look for the other player if he can

*Odd bug in the original Mad Monks' Revenge*

General

  • finished Ogg Vorbis audio streaming;
  • finally! This was really starting to annoy me and I was wasting far too much time on it
  • the main thing is all the code is native C# and cross-platform compatible
  • blog post coming up this week all about it
  • improved support for ordinary sound instances
  • fixed issue with darkness masking that caused print+screen to capture the screen incorrectly
  • finally finished the textbox control (not as easy as you'd think to get the scrolling to look right)
  • improved most of the helper methods used to determine tile types
  • file dialog;
  • added black shadow to delete button to match the MMR theme
  • replaced the prompt to delete puzzles with message boxes
  • added rename puzzle support


Rename puzzle support added to file dialogs


Recreation of the original tooltips

Originally, I planned to ditch the tooltips because I thought they were too Windows 95. After replacing them with a very basic black box with white outline and white text, they looked pretty poor and I found myself liking the orginal. So, the original tooltips are back!


Abandoned tooltip - too basic, does not match the original or the spirit of the original

The original text won't be staying though, mainly because it is worded for robots & like the image above, contains errors (i.e. there is no "Head-To-Head", just co-op).

  • change title, puzzle viewer (when launched from the editor), world chooser are now all modal windows. This is another diversion from the original. All of these dialogs block input and focus, plus, darkening the background draws focus away from the background - the same background area you can't click on


Dialogs like the change title prompt now darken the background to draw your eye to the foreground

What I'll probably do next week

Progressing with the AI is my main focus this upcoming week. There are several standout bits that match the very original Lode Runner by the late and great Doug Smith but not the Presage version that this Mad Monks' Revenge rewrite replicates.

  • add the remainder of the tooltips to the entire project and re-word some of the original ones
  • continue to analyse the saved game files