I really don't know what it is and whether it's because of my PC, but loading resources takes quite some time. So if I start the game, click through the menu and load a level, the game might freeze for another 30s or so. Do you experience something similar?
Yes, but not that long, usually only a few seconds. I'm loading all the sound effects in one thread as soon as the game starts, and I join the thread when the level starts, to make sure they're loaded when needed. The problem is, I don't really know how I can avoid resource loading taking time. Even if I parallelize it further, the hard disk will be the bottleneck. There are the following trade-offs, and neither is optimal:
- Load on-demand, interruption of game flow -> bad
- Load at startup in loading screen -> user has to wait while doing nothing -> bad
- Load in background in menu -> user can navigate in the meantime, but has to wait in the level -> less bad
The only thing I could imagine is to make a smart analysis of the level and determine which sound effects are used, and when. Then I could load further during the level. The "when" part however is close to impossible, as there would be a deep analysis of all possible paths Zloxx can take and the sounds he can trigger on the way. With teleports and remote triggers, the computing time for such an algorithm
itself will explode
What I can do is have another look at the loading with a profiler, and see if there's optimization potential.
While trying out some speed running, I came across a bug (or is it a feature?) that lets you circumvent one of the enemy spawn triggers.
There are a few ones where it's indeed intended, but yours isn't one of them. Thanks!
Not sure if a bug or a feature, but if you die and restart the level the music will start again from where you left off before dying. Shouldn't it fully reset?
I did this to reduce the annoyance, letting the player hear different parts of the theme, not always the beginning. But yes, it may appear strange, I could restart it indeed.
Also when only having VSync active, do you still do some odd calculations? Because on my desktop as well as my notebook I get very sluggish movement with VSync active.
I have to revisit this code. The whole frame time computation is a bit limited because when I started to develop Zloxx half a decade ago, I didn't use separate graphics and logic ticks, and several parts in the code rely on that. I'm not even sure if providing VSync at all is a good idea under these circumstances. I'll see what I can do
When on a rope and you're going up (pressing UP) and then want to jump left or right and press JUMP + LEFT/RIGHT while accidentally still holding the UP key, Zloxx will just jump a bit higher on the rope and not go left or right.
I never encountered this... You don't need to hold the up key to hold on to the rope, so you can release it long before. Since up is needed to cling to a rope, I can't just disable it, because it's very well possible that one jumps even to grab the same rope again.
Holding the JUMP key won't repeat the jumping, as such if you press the JUMP key a few milliseconds before Zloxx really landed, the jump won't register. If instead a jump were to be triggered when in contact with the ground and the JUMP key is pressed, jumping would be less of a millisecond precision act.
Yes, as explained
here, this is intentional
I really think this is part of the challenge, just holding the jump key to jump again would be too easy.
Same goes for jump + holding on enemy for a higher jump.
No, here you
can hold the key before landing on an enemy. There's no other possibility, because the time you actually touch the enemy is just one frame, which is impossible to hit.
I guess with all those things I won't be finished with the next version today
