Tidalis:0.409 Beta Release

New & Updated Levels

• Levels 44-49 now exist and are available on the adventure map.

• Level 50 has been added and is available in adventure mode.

• Level 51 is done and in adventure mode.

• Level 85 has been added, but is not in the adventure mode yet.

• Added Puzzle 2 - 7 and Puzzle 5 - 5.

• Rebalanced levels 37 and 39.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• An all-new title music track has replaced the older title music track.

• A new Temple music/visual theme has been added to the game.

• New, better, Dying animation for blocks.

• Charred, Fire, and Ice blocks now have sound effects for when they die (via being triggered, not via time-out in the case of Fire and Ice).

Gameplay Changes & Updates

• The interface for selecting special blocks in the custom game menu is now much more visually pleasing, takes up less room, and now uses icons instead of text.

• There is now an icon-based interface for choosing a game style in both the custom and quick game interfaces.

• The Quick Game window's layout has been redesigned in general to be simpler-looking and more attractive.

• Made keep-one-column-free-of-specials logic more dynamic.

• Game Styles for the current board are now displayed on the HUD (just above special objectives) in-game.

• Added settings options for assigning mouse, keyboard, gamepad 1, and gamepad 2 to the left or right boards for local two-well play (note that gamepad 1 and gamepad 2 input itself is not yet supported).

• Added Embedded Item Frequency slider and Allowed Items Toggle set to custom game menu.

• Added a new "Vs Garbage" player-versus-player (or player-vs-AI) mode.
  • The detailed logic for competitive garbage spawning (which will undoubtedly be revised pretty soon) are here: Tidalis_-_VS_Garbage_Calculations
  • A new interface for specifying "player rules" has been added to the quick game and custom game menus. Right now Garbage Vs is the only option other than Normal, but more will be added soon. This is where all the various special Co-Op and PVP rulesets will be chosen from.
  • When a VS type mode is chosen in single player, there is now a slider for choosing the difficulty of the AI player that will control the second well. So far this slider actually has no effect, but as we refine the AI further it will become more important.
  • Additionally, the AI is not intended to be able to play in all modes, or with all special blocks or items. Those unsupported features are now disabled when an AI is selected.

New Level Editor Features

• Added explicit less-than, equal-to, and greater-than controls to the make-X-combos-of-Y-depth objective type (for the Y variable).

• Added clear-method selection for clear X blocks of Color Y and clear X blocks of Special Type Y objective types.

• Added new objective type: make all columns < | <= | = | >= | > | <> X blocks tall.

• "Clear All (Color|Special) Block" objective types converted to "< | <= | = | => | > | <> X Remaining Blocks (of Color|Special)"

• added < | <= | = | >= | > | <> operator control to "X Chains of Y Blocks", "X Combos of Y Blocks", "X Combos of Y Chains", and "X Clears of Y Simultaneous Lines" objective types (all on the Y variable; no point in doing it on the X variable)

Misc

• A new section has been added to the Tidalis wiki with information and formulas about internal gameplay calculations. This is useful for really hardcore players, or for the developers of the game.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that was causing the animation speed to run at a variable rate depending on mouse movement (thanks dumpsterKEEPER for reporting).

Internal Programming Notes

• FInts have been dropped from coordinates in favor of a system of two scales of int coordinate systems. This allows for easier-on-the-CPU math, the same level of math precision, and sets the stage for future potential changes to the AI system of the game.

• The dragging and hints system logic has been refactored to work better with multiple wells (again paving the way for some future enhancements).

• The coordinates of the mouse cursor are now immediately translated to sim coordinates, which makes it so that there are fewer coordinate system conversions needing to take place. This helps to correct a few offsetting bugs relating to the mouse cursor, as well as helping to prevent future ones.

• The Reset method on GameBoard was becoming unwieldy and was already missing some needed stats tracking resets. The Reset method has thus been scrapped for new Copy, Destroy, SaveToStringBuilder, and LoadFromLines methods on the GameBoard, which makes better reuse of existing logic.

• The GameCycle, ProcessCycle, ProcessingTurn, MustAuthorizeCycleCount, AllowedTurns, and AuthorizedCycles on GameLoop have all been moved to being on individual GameBoards, and thus being ready for multi-computer networking.

• Added a new GameCommand structure for network-readiness, and to support the queue timing of garbage blocks and item drops in local play.

• Added a new set of Configuration.WriteBinarySmallArray methods and Configuration.ReadBinarySmallArray methods, along with general BinaryWriter and BinaryReader parsing logic for GameCommand to allow for hyper-efficient binary serialization of game data across the network, rather than relying on our usual string-based serialization.

• Added a request/response pattern for the dual-host events in upcoming network gameplay.

Tidalis