View Single Post
Violet CLM Violet CLM's Avatar

JCF Éminence Grise

Joined: Mar 2001

Posts: 10,978

Violet CLM has disabled reputation

Aug 21, 2022, 03:27 PM
Violet CLM is offline
Reply With Quote
First off, thanks for posting! It's great to have this kind of feedback.

Quote:
But if the level ends with a boss fight you are sent back to the beginning of the level and the level state resets entirely
Assuming we're thinking about the same thing, it's actually a lot more complicated than this. Let me know if this makes sense:

When you enter a secret level in the normal way, like Medieval Kineval and Gargoyle's Lair, the game turns on an invisible flag saying "the player is in a secret level right now!" Then when you reach an End Area event, if that flag is still on, the game ignores the level's normal next level setting to take you back to the secret level entrance. If you enter Dungeon Dilemma as a secret level, once you beat it, you get taken back to the secret level entrance, even though Dungeon Dilemma is normally followed by Knight Cap.

If you finish a level by beating a boss, or by shooting a signpost, however, the game doesn't look at the secret level flag. It uses the regular next level setting, whatever it might happen to be. But the flag doesn't get turned off either, so you're still in the secret level. If you enter Knight Cap as a secret level, beat the queen, get sent to Tossed Salad, and beat that, then you go back to the secret level entrance.

Anyway, I'm hesitant to change any of that because, well, that's how the game works, and that's the kind of thing that level designers use for doing cool stuff. What I'd rather have is more options (via angelscript ofc) for controlling exactly when the flag should or shouldn't be on, but right now that's hard because save games and angelscript don't play nicely together right now.

Quote:
I'd like an option to disable the sugar rush music.
Reasonable, doable. Not everyone likes JJ2+'s visual effects for sugar rushes, so I could imagine a fourway setting for turning both those things either on or off. Not likely till 6.0 though.

Quote:
An option to turn off the 99 ammo cap
This has already been implemented for 6.0

Quote:
the Queen would drop multiple cinder blocks on you if you play on hard mode. I'd like to see this feature restored for Hard and/or Turbo
I'd be fine with this. Putting minor changes like this in Hard/Turbo only feels like a good balance between preserving vs. expanding gameplay, by making it still indirectly optional, and of course it would be turned off entirely for speedruns. It'd be hard to get this to feel exactly right without the OEM source code, though.

Quote:
completing a secret level resets your coin count in the original level back to 0
That's weird and I'm not sure why that's happening off the top of my head, thanks.

Quote:
gems as a way to gain extra lives
IIRC the code for this is mostly still in the game, just dummied out. This isn't a technical hurdle so much as it is a design question, do people want gems to work like this or not, even in custom levels with potentially hundreds and hundreds of gems. Given sufficient community support sure, it could be put back; given community opposition or indifference it would just be an option in 6.0 like the ammo cap.
__________________