Tidalis:0.411 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer : May 14, 2010

This was another quick-succession release, and this one has a whopping ten new items in it for your use. Lots of exciting stuff there, and finally the items have a lot of variety to them in addition to the block-placing styles that have been there for a while. More to come soon!

--Christopher M. Park

Gameplay Additions

• New Item: Can 'O Beans
  • Explodes and destroys all blocks in a small radius of where it is used.
• New Item: Extend
  • Changes all blocks in a small radius from having single arrows to having double arrows.
• New Item: Constrain
  • Changes all blocks in a midsize radius from having double arrows to having single arrows.
• New Item: Crystal
  • All blocks in a small radius are destroyed and turned into usable items (with a few exceptions, such as walls).
• New Item: Quake Hammer
  • Scrambles the blocks all throughout a well.
• New Item: Lightning
  • Chars an entire column of blocks.
• New Item: Question Mark
  • Causes the effect of another item at random (not color/special block placement, but any of the others).
    • It obeys the list of enabled item types unless there are no valid options, in which case it will choose from the entire list.
• New Item: Huge Boulder
  • Causes a single stone block to fall in every column of the chosen well.
• New Item: Rainbow
  • Causes about 30% of the blocks in the chosen well to be randomly turned into white blocks.
• New Item: Flood
  • Starts a stream on the clicked block, but treats it and all blocks brought into the chain as 4-way directional, thus potentially kicking off a really huge chain.

Misc

• Changed Custom Game "Allowed Embedded Items" selection from specific items to item categories; so currently just place-color-block items and place-special-block items.

• Updated the Custom Game and Settings windows to make a bit more efficient use of space, and to make them be more 800x600 screen-resolution-friendly.

• Added a new Min Mouse Drag slider to the Settings window (valid values are 0 - 12).
  • The number of pixels the mouse must move on the screen before it will register as movement when right-clicking and dragging to change block directions. The default is 3.
  • Very low values tend to make the blocks jumpy as you move around, and very high values tend to make the blocks frustratingly sluggish. Depending on your play style, mouse speed, etc, you may prefer to tweak this up or down slightly.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER and jkefka for suggesting.

• In-game game-style-icons now show tooltip info on mouseover.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that was previously causing embedded items to never spawn in the starting set of blocks in a level.

• In 0.409 and 0.410, the internal "Min Mouse Drag" variable was set 1,000x too low because of the new larger simulation scale. Fixed.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER and jkefka for reporting.

Internal Programming Notes

• The internals of the Usable Item handling have been heavily modified to match the existing enum/enumData pattern, which has superior flexibility for things like the AI handling, UI handling, etc. However, this has been married to the existing superclass patterns that were already there, which have superior flexibility for things like subclassing based on various sub-properies, etc. The result is a mix of both models, with the strengths of both and extensibility that is as simple as it is for the special blocks.

Tidalis