Tidalis:0.800 Beta Release

New & Updated Levels

• Adventure levels 63-72 have been added to the game.

• New cutscenes have been added for levels 10, 12, 15, 17, 19, 22, 24, 27, and 30 and a new secret cutscene has also been added.

• All of the existing cutscenes, including the intro, have now been updated to take advantage of the new scene creation abilities.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• The last two art/music themes have been added: Lava Flats and Last Area.
  • Both of these have to be unlocked via being encountered in an adventure before they will be selectable in Quick or Custom games. But, player-created levels can use them at any time. If you want to avoid spoilers with them, don't peek!

• The first ten segments of the adventure map have now been visually polished, along with other maps of the adventure map screen in general.

• The five Line Clear Fanfares have been improved.

• New sound effects: Turnip dying, Pit Monster eating, Can O Beans exploding, Crystal breaking, Water Balloon popping, Lightning Striking, Server Found, General Item use, Message received, Board Clear fanfare for Light-Up mode, Fire hiss when falling in water, noise for fish/sponges absorbing water, splash for blocks falling into water if moving too fast, metal breaking, extend, constrain, quake hammer, wall breaking.

• The Volcano and Tidal Wave Wreckage art has been substantially updated, with added animations and details.

• The Windy Mountaintop, Snowy Lowlands, and Title Menu art has been updated with added animations.

Gameplay Additions

• Added a new Empty Block special block.
  • Only used in the level editor. This block disappears immediately on loading the level, creating a hole where the level designer had placed it.

New Level Editor Features

• Can now pre-populate the item stock in the editor.

Misc

• Basic implementation of High Scores screen. Just Score and Timestamp for now, displays top 10 scores.

• Basic implementation of player "Puzzle Title" in adventure rewards screen.

• Various updates to the cutscene engine:
  • The text now scrolls into view, rather than all appearing at once.
  • There is a new TextSegment node that can be placed inside of TextDisplay nodes, allowing for paginated text within a specific overall segment of the Scene.
    • This also has an optional MaxDisplaySkip (default of 1) attribute that allows the scene creator to make specific text segments come into view faster or slower (0 would be faster, anything higher than 1 would be slower).
    • There is also an optional ShowsImmediatelyAfterPrior attribute (set to true or false, defaults to false) that allows the scene creator to make one segment show immediately after the last, rather than being on a separate page. This is useful for colorizing one specific line versus another.
    • There is also an optional BorderColor attribute (defaults to empty string) that allows the scene creator to set the border color of the text of a specific textsegment.
      • Currently the only valid value is "darkred", aside from leaving it blank.
  • There is a new optional ShowBackground attribute (set to true or false, defaults to true) on the TextDisplay node. When true, the text area will now show background text area panel. When false, it just uses a completely transparent background like it used to.
  • There is a new optional Height attribute (set to a numeric value, defaults to 150) on the TextDisplay node. This is not used at all when the ShowBackground is set to false, but when it is set to true it sets the height of the background text area panel.

• When the adventure cutscene index window is closed and reopened, the cutscenes are now all reloaded from the disk (which is useful for testing if changes have been made to the scenes).

• Added plushy display to adventure map screen.

• The clouds on the adventure map now move twice as fast, so that they move more smoothly.

• Blocks no longer "wiggle up and down" (from being in a column that is too high) if they are actively moving. This prevents blocks that are falling or rising from seeming jerky in their movements when it was really just the wiggle effect. As soon as they are still, they wiggle as they should. To most people, this is likely to be an imperceptible change.

• Blocks that die while under the bottom of the well no longer cause the blocks above them to hard-fall.

• Blocks that clear via evaporation over time (right now, just Ice and Fire blocks) no longer cause the blocks above them to hard-fall when they die.

• The alignment of the visual themes is now always from the top-left when used in scenes, to prevent confusion for people creating cutscenes.

• Removed the "disable extrinsic rewards" checkbox from settings, so those are now always enabled (which is ok now that they're actually implemented).

• UV Animation on sprites, and layer scrolling on layers, is now 10x larger in scale. Old 1 = New 10, etc. This lets theme designers set a 10x slower scroll if they want to. Old theme values are scaled upwards.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug relating to Sun and Moon mode not working quite right in recent version (since 0.415).
  • Thanks to Ixiohm and RCIX for reporting!

• Fixed bug where cutscene update was somewhat related to mouse movement instead of being purely fixed-timing.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting.

• Fixed bug where closing the stats screen would cause an unpleasant flash.

• Fixed a bug with the theme offsets remaining in the actual level after watching a cutscene.

• Added check to solitaire mode so it will not auto-add a drop-X-block win objective if there is already a drop-X-block win objective.

• Fixed bug in level editor where the special block type list contained an uninitialized element.

• Fixed bug in level editor where the embedded item type dropdown contained a blank item.

• Fixed a bug with popup messages sometimes showing behind other windows.

• Fixed bug where an item image was missing.
  • Thanks to Ixiohm for reporting.

• Fixed bug in cutscene index window where its size was changing with each scene added to the list.

• Fixed overlapping display bug with rewards screen display if you had viewed it on the adventure map with achievements, and then it came up after winning a level.

• Fixed bug where Line Clear Reactions in Zen mode could create nearly perpetual clear-reaction-clear-reaction cascade chains.

• Fixed bug where frenzy + solitaire resulted in blocks still falling normally (contrary to solitaire rules).

• Fixed a bug in random theme selection that could result in a game failing to initialize.

• Fixed a bug with uv animation moving to the right for theme sprites, which caused all manner of oddness in a couple of the themes.

• Fixed a bug that was causing slight jitters throughout the application for uv animations that were moving up and/or left, when they wrapped around the full size of the image. This applied to clouds on the adventure map, rain/snow, wind, and so forth.

• Fixed a bug where non-water-modes were acting as if there was water below the bottom of the well.

• Previously special-frequency-defined levels were ignoring normal "don't place block type X during initial well population" logic (i.e. no eaters), fixed to obey the allowed special block list.

• Fixed bug in CenterWindow that would gradually and subtly increase the virtual width and height of the window with each call, causing displacement of some controls.

• De-charring clear method no longer shows up in objective editor, since it doesn't really do anything from the designer's perspective.

• Previously, there was some visual hitching the first time a theme was opened. Fixed.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis