What I've done this week##
Not a great deal done this week on paper, but still, progress was made.
Editor
- if you have a region selected, then click on the active tile/palette, the region will now paste and switch back to the paint tool
Game
- fixed bug that allowed players to leap from a ladder off the edge of the screen, then snap back again to the ladder
- fixed heroes legs going through the ground when sliding down a ladder
- added in the Easter egg secret puzzles
Secret puzzles all in and playable!
- monks;
- monks now wait the correct amount of time to crawl out of a blasted hole
- AI now makes monks behave as per the original Mad Monks' Revenge when a player cannot be reached
- monks now chase the hero that is the nearest. This is not quite the same as the original; sometimes in that, you'd get a monk stuck going up and down a ladder when the hero at the top can be reached and another hero is literally on the tile next to the monk. I'll do a lot more testing on this.
General
- changed the debug information;
- swapped the original Lode Runner font to Arial, making it far easier to read
- moved debug information around
- removed the background filler/thatching image when debug is shown to make the text easier to read
- the entire UI is getting a major overhaul by my brother;
- a lot less code
- quicker
- easier to use
- should be ready by next week to merge back into my code copy
- tweaked base animation class when loading Presage animation files
- fixed sound bug that stopped some sounds from playing
Both Astro and Aqua worlds and alternate Mad Monks' Revenge ending don't use the custom Presage movie format rather bog standard RIFF AVIs. This unfortunately causes me a couple of problems;
- XNA/MonoGame cannot load videos without using the Content Pipeline
- using DirectShow won't work on Linux and Mac
- I don't want separate code for each platform
- lack of media players from XNA/MonoGame
So, with the above in mind, the only solution I can see is to make my own AVI player. So far it is quite straight-forward. My player is NOT the most advanced and feature packed, it can only play basic files using the original specs made by Microsoft around 1992. You can see the specs for yourself on MSDN.
As you can see in the video above, decompression is a little off. I'm not sure what is wrong with the RLE decoding to be honest. Unfortunately, bitmap RLE decoding is not the same as the Presage RLE decoding which had a similar issue (read up about it here).
What I'll probably do next week
- progress with the AVI player
- continue with monk AI
- continue with UI overhaul
- send out another demo, this one with game-play
- drop me an email if you're interested in taking it for a spin