Week #15 update

This week was focused on improving some accuracy issues against the original Lode Runner Online: The Mad Monks' Revenge, fixing some bugs and adding some extra features to the game. I also found some time to get back into network gameplay which was nice since it has been long overdue. I don't think it will make it into the April build since the month has gotten away from me again.

Jared suggested adding TAB key support to navigate dialogs back in January. It was one of the things I put off fearing it will take a very long time and get very messy. Turns out I was wrong and the whole thing was wrapped up in a matter of hours. You can read up on the new feature in the TAB blog post.

*Tab key for keyboard ninjas*

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!

Game

  • fixed bug that prevented runners from landing on a monk that is climbing a ladder (Leandro)
  • improved accuracy to the Original when runners are landing on monks
  • monks now match the Original when going from idle to climbing down a ladder
  • when a runner creates a rope trap, it will no longer be activated until he is completely away from it - this matches the original (Jared)
  • if a monk is gassed above a blasted hole, players will have immunity from falling in until the block regenerates (Rick)
  • fixed bug that allowed a runner to escape death when being eaten by a monk (Leandro)
  • improved accuracy with runners landing on monks (Leandro)

Thanks to Howie for his help in fixing a bug involving monks that could stop a blasted block from 'healing' or regenerating. To easily replicate the bug, immediately blast to your left after the pre-starting pause.

Monk blast issue

General

  • extra content (default save, puzzles) will now extract on startup with their original name
  • fixed bug that caused the game to crash when removing dialogs actively in use
  • updated the tooltip text
  • made some changes to the file dialog with regards to file I/O;
  • fixed bug that caused the game to crash when deleting, renaming or copying files under OS X
  • the gamepad can now control the mouse cursor via the left thumbstick (including single and double clicking)
  • fixed bug in font class crashing by attempting to measure the width of a line feed

When using the new full-screen, some graphics card drivers don't support a great deal of 4:3 resolutions. This could mean you end up with the game not being as large as you'd like it to be. Howie had this same problem with his 1920x1080 monitor supporting 1280x960.

The config file now has support to manually override the default full-screen behaviour and use the older method. Setting the following to true is all it takes.

<ForcePillarBoxes>true</ForcePillarBoxes>

Bugs being worked on

  • blocks blasted instantly 'healing' and crushing a monk - timing dependent (Jayde)
  • case-sensitive filename support not working correctly on Linux machines
  • error logs not containing much meaningful information on non-Windows machines

What I'll probably do next week

  • project clean-up
  • LAN lobby