Previously: the Chunker tracks with chunks were gotten during the
current game tick and the N-1 and N-2 ticks, and chunks not accessed in
two ticks were freed immediately.
Now: they go into a "garbage collection" pool with a minimum number of
game ticks to free. So if they're needed again, they're saved from the
gc pool. F3 overlay data shows the count of the gc pool.
Water pixels finally do something other than turn your character blue!
* When the player character is "wet" (touching water pixels, and so appearing in
a blue mask), water physics apply: gravity is slower, your jump height is
halved, but you get infinite jumps to swim higher in the water.
* Holding the jump key under water will incur a short delay between jumps, so
that you don't just fly straight up to the surface. Tap the jump button to
move up quicker, you can spam it all you want.
Azulians are also able to handle being under water:
* They'll sink to the bottom and keep walking back and forth normally.
* If you are above them and noticed, they'll jump (swim) up towards you,
aware of the water and it jumps like you do.
* The Blue Azulian has the poorest vertical aggro range so it isn't a
very good swimmer. The White Azulian is very good at navigating water
as it can pursue the player from the furthest distance of them all.
Changes to the editor:
* New brush pattern added: bubbles.png
* It's the default pattern now for the "water" color of all
of the built-in palettes instead of ink.png
* A repeating pattern of bubbles carved out showing the
level wallpaper.
* The old "Bubbles (circles.png)" is renamed "Circles"
* The last scroll position is saved with the Level file, so when you reload
the level later it's scrolled at where you left it.
* The blue bird follows the same base AI as the red bird (it has a
target altitude that it tries to maintain, and it will dive at the
player) but the blue bird flies in a sine wave pattern around its
target altitude. It also has a longer scan radius to search for the
player than the red bird.
* The sine wave pattern of the blue bird means you may fly under its
radar depending how high it is on average.
Cheat codes that replace the player character are refactored to make
it easier to extend, and new cheats have been added:
* super azulian: play as the Red Azulian.
* hyper azulian: play as the White Azulian.
* bluebird: play as the new Bird (blue).
Especially to further optimize memory for large levels, Levels and
Doodads can now read and write to a ZIP file format on disk with
chunks in external files within the zip.
Existing doodads and levels can still load as normal, and will be
converted into ZIP files on the next save:
* The Chunker.ChunkMap which used to hold ALL chunks in the main json/gz
file, now becomes the cache of "hot chunks" loaded from ZIP. If there is
a ZIP file, chunks not accessed recently are flushed from the ChunkMap
to save on memory.
* During save, the ChunkMap is flushed to ZIP along with any non-loaded
chunks from a previous zipfile. So legacy levels "just work" when
saving, and levels loaded FROM Zip will manage their ChunkMap hot
memory more carefully.
Memory savings observed on "Azulian Tag - Forest.level":
* Before: 1716 MB was loaded from the old level format into RAM along
with a slow load screen.
* After: only 243 MB memory was used by the game and it loaded with
a VERY FAST load screen.
Updates to the F3 Debug Overlay:
* "Chunks: 20 in 45 out 20 cached" shows the count of chunks inside the
viewport (having bitmaps and textures loaded) vs. chunks outside which
have their textures freed (but data kept), and the number of chunks
currently hot cached in the ChunkMap.
The `doodad` tool has new commands to "touch" your existing levels
and doodads, to upgrade them to the new format (or you can simply
open and re-save them in-game):
doodad edit-level --touch ./example.level
doodad edit-doodad --touch ./example.doodad
The output from that and `doodad show` should say "File format: zipfile"
in the headers section.
To do:
* File attachments should also go in as ZIP files, e.g. wallpapers
Instead of the loadscreen eager-loading ALL level chunks to Go Images, only
load the chunks within the "LoadingViewport" - which is the on-screen
Viewport plus a margin of chunks off the screen edges.
During gameplay, every few ticks, reevaluate which chunks are inside or
outside the LoadingViewport; for chunks outside, free their SDL2 textures
and free their cached bitmaps to keep overall memory usage down. The
AzulianTag-Forest level now stays under 200 Textures at any given time
and the loadscreen goes faster as it doesn't have to load every chunk's
images up front.
The LoadUnloadChunk feature can be turned on/off with feature flags. If
disabled the old behavior is restored: loadscreen loads all images and
the LoadUnloadChunks function is not run.
Other changes:
* loadscreen: do not free textures in the Hide() function as this runs on
a different goroutine and may break. The 4 wallpaper textures are OK
to keep in memory anyway, the loadscreen is reused often!
* Free more leaked textures: on the Inventory frame and when an actor
calls Self.Destroy()
* Stop leaking goroutines in the PubSub feature of the doodad script
engine; scripting.Supervisor.Teardown() sends a stop signal to all
scripts to clean up neatly. Canvas.Destroy() tears down its scripting
supervisor automatically.
* New boolProp to help debug memory issues: eager-render, set it to
false and the loadscreen will not eagerload Go images for all the
level chunks.
* Finally fix the level collision bug where the player could climb walls
to the right.
New features:
* Flood Tool for the editor. It replaces pixels of one color with another,
contiguously. Has limits on how far from the original pixel it will color,
to avoid infinite loops in case the user clicked on wide open void. The
limit when clicking an existing color is 1200px or only a 600px limit if
clicking into the void.
* Cheat code: 'master key' to play locked Story Mode levels.
Level GameRules feature added:
* A new tab in the Level Properties dialog
* Difficulty has been moved to this tab
* Survival Mode: for silver high score, longest time alive is better than
fastest time, for Azulian Tag maps. Gold high score is still based on
fastest time - find the hidden level exit without dying!
Tweaks to the Azulians' jump heights:
* Blue Azulian: 12 -> 14
* Red Azulian: 14 -> 18
* White Azulian: 16 -> 20
Bugs fixed:
* When editing your Palette to rename a color or add a new color, it wasn't
possible to draw with that color until the editor was completely unloaded
and reloaded; this is now fixed.
* Minor bugfix in Difficulty.String() for Peaceful (-1) difficulty to avoid
a negative array index.
* Try and prevent user giving the same name to multiple swatches on their
palette. Replacing the whole palette can let duplication through still.
UI improvements specifically for mobile (running the game with the
`-w mobile` or `-w landscape` options) screen sizes.
* Rework the Settings window to be mobile friendly to landscape
oriented screens (`doodle -w landscape`) and migrate Options tab
to magicform.
* The toolbar in the Editor will be a single column of buttons
on small screens, such as `-w mobile` (375x812) portrait mode
smartphone. On larger screens the toolbar shows in two columns
of buttons.
* Fix tooltips not drawing on top.
* Centralize the hard-coded references to specific font filenames
* Add cheat code: `test load screen` to bring a sample loading screen up
for a few seconds. It needs improvement on `-w landscape`
Two new tools added to the Level Editor:
* Pan Tool: left-click to scroll the level around safely.
* Text Tool: write text onto your level.
Features of the Text Tool:
* Can choose from the game's built-in fonts, size and enter the message
you want to write.
* The mouse cursor previews the text when hovered over the level.
* Click to "stamp" the text onto your level. The currently selected
color swatch will be used to color the text in.
* Adds two new fonts: Azulian.ttf and Rive.ttf that can be selected in
the Text Tool.
Some implementation notes:
* Added package native/engine_sdl.go that handles the lower-level
SDL2_TTF logic to rasterize the text into a black&white image.
* WASM not supported yet (if the game even still built for WASM);
native/engine_wasm.go stubs out the TextToImage() call with a "not
supported" error just in case.
Other changes:
* New Toolbar icons: they are 24x24 instead of 32x32 to make more room
for more tools.
* The toolbar now shows two buttons per row for a more densely packed
layout. For very narrow screen widths (< 600px) the default Vertical
Toolbar layout will use one-button-per-row to not eat too much screen
real estate.
* In the Horizontal Toolbars layout there are 2 buttons per column.
* The title screen now loads the default maps from a LevelPack. The game
no longer ships with the Tutorial levels in the "levels" folder as
default; they are in the LevelPack so the "Edit Drawing" screen begins
as a blank slate for only user levels.
* Add the Zoo level to the Tutorial levelpack
* Bugfixes around changing the player character to work around clipping
issues if the character has changed height drastically.
Adds support for Xbox and Nintendo style game controllers. The gamepad
controls are documented on the README and in the game's Settings window.
The buttons are not customizable yet, except that the player can choose
between two button styles:
* X Style (default): "A" button is on the bottom and "B" on the right.
* N Style: swaps the A/B and the X/Y buttons to use a Nintendo-style
layout instead of an Xbox-style.
* Respawning from a checkpoint grants 3 seconds of immunity in case
enemies are spawn camping.
* Add the white Azulian as an even faster and harder enemy than the red
Azulian: twice as fast, jumps higher, and can detect the player from
further away.
* New doodad: Invisible Warp Door
* All warp doors require the player to be grounded (if affected by
gravity) to open them. No jumping or falling thru and opening
a warp door mid-air!
* Title Screen now randomly selects from a couple of levels.
* Title Screen: if it fails to load a level it sets up a basic
blank level with a wallpaper instead.
* New developer shell command: titlescreen <level>
Opens the MainScene with a custom user level as the background.
* Add Auto-save to the Editor to save your drawing every 5 minutes
* Add a MenuBar to the Play Scene for easier navigation to other
features of the game.
* Doodad JS API: time.Since() now available.
The title screen is now responsive to landscape mode. If the window is
not tall enough to show all the menu buttons (~600px) it will switch to
a horizontal layout with the title on the left and buttons on the right.
WIP "Story Mode" button that brings up a Level Packs selection window.
* Recolor some of the region doodads
* Add command: `doodad edit-level --remove-actor` to remove actors from
your level.
* Tweak the player jump velocity from playtesting levels.
* Tweak max gravity speed to match player max velocity.
* Boy's script watches for his velocity to flip suddenly and stops
animations, limiting the moonwalking a bit.
* JS API: Self.GetVelocity() added.
* The "Giant Screenshot" feature takes a very long time, so it is made
asynchronous. If you try and run a second one while the first is busy,
you get an error flash. You can continue editing the level, even
playtest it, or load a different level, and it will continue crunching
on the Giant Screenshot and flash when it's finished.
* Updated the player physics to use proper Velocity to jump off the
ground rather than the hacky timer-based fixed speed approach.
* FlashError() function to flash "error level" messages to the screen.
They appear in orange text instead of the usual blue, and most error
messages in the game use this now. The dev console "error <msg>"
command can simulate an error message.
* Flashed message fonts are updated. The blue font now uses softer
stroke and shadow colors and the same algorithm applies to the orange
error flashes.
Some other changes to player physics:
* Max velocity, acceleration speed, and gravity have been tweaked.
* Fast turn-around if you are moving right and then need to go left.
Your velocity resets to zero at the transition so you quickly get
going the way you want to go.
Some levels that need a bit of love for the new platforming physics:
* Tutorial 3.level
The game can now be played using only a touch screen! The left
mouse click (Button1) can now move and control the player
character.
* A box in the very middle of the screen is the "Use" button and
a deadzone for directional inputs.
* Anywhere outside the middle and to the left registers a Left
button, to the right a Right button, above the top of the middle
is a Jump button, and below the bottom of the middle is a down
input (for antigravity mode).
* Tight platforming is possible: above and below the middle box,
the left/right split is tight in the middle of the window. You
can get tight jumps if jumping or go below if you don't want to
jump. The left/right deadzone is only over the space of the Use
button.
If the player is idle for a while with no controller inputs, some
hints will fade in about the touch controls.
Note: the ScrollboxOffset to track the player character is changed
to 60,60 from 60,100 so the camera will track tighter to the player
and so the player will mostly be over the Use button on touch
controls as long as he's away from a level boundary.
* New Doodad: Checkpoint Flag. They update the player's spawn point
whenever the player passes one. The most recently activated
checkpoint is rendered brighter than the others.
* End Level Modal: the fake alert box window drawn by the Play Mode
is replaced with a fancy modal widget (similar to Alert and Confirm).
It handles level victory or failure conditions and can show or hide
all the buttons as needed.
* Gameplay: There is a "Retry from Checkpoint" option added, which
appears in the level failure modal. It will teleport you back to
the Start Flag or the last Checkpoint Flag you had touched, without
resetting the level -- your keys, unlocked doors, etc. will be
preserved so you can retry.
* Set a maximum speed on the "Camera Follows Actor" logic of 64
pixels per tick. This results in a smoother scrolling transition
when the player jumps to a new location on the map, such as by
a Warp Door.
* Update the default color palettes:
* All: Add a "hint" magenta color.
* Colored Pencil: Add a "darkstone" solid color.
Updates to the Doodads JavaScript API:
* SetCheckpoint(Point(x, y)): set the player character's spawn
position. Giving it Self.Position() is an easy way to set the
player spawn to your doodad's location.
New feature: link a Start Flag to another doodad in your level
and you will play as that doodad instead of Boy. All Creatures
are designed to be playable. Playing as "other" doodads leads
to interesting effects, like not being able to activate buttons,
switches, or warp doors and not having an inventory to pick up
keys. The Anvil is fun: it can destroy other mobile doodads by
jumping on them.
If the actor does not specify that it has gravity, the gameplay
starts in antigravity mode. This will be the vast majority of
non-mobile doodads and the Bird.
Other changes:
* The Blue and Red Azulians now share a doodad script.
* The Azulians AI is still to walk back and forth, pickup keys and
press buttons. The Blue Azulian walks slower than the red one.
* The Blue Azulian is no longer hidden from the doodads list.
* Actor UUID values in levels are now V1 UUIDs (time-ordered).
This will help to reliably resolve conflicts in draw order
of overlapping doodads (newest added to level wins).
* Link Tool: clicking on a pair of already-linked doodads will
now unlink them, so you don't have to delete one to delete
the link.
* Actor Tool: deleting an actor immediately calls PruneLinks()
to clean up any links that the deleted doodad might have.
* Levels and Doodad files will be written in gzip-compressed JSON format
* `boolProp compress-drawings false` to disable compression and save as
classic JSON format directly
* The game can still read uncompressed JSON files
The file size savings on some built-in assets:
* Tutorial 2.level: 2.2M -> 414K (82% smaller)
* warp-door-orange.doodad: 105K -> 17K (84% smaller)
* The scrollbox by which the game follows the player character has been
revised, it is now an offset away from the window's center instead of
fixed pixel distances from the window's edges.
* Mobile form-factor (Pinephone) now scrolls OK instead of jerking back
and forth rapidly when moving left.
* The Publisher is all hooked up. No native Save File dialogs yet, so
uses the dev shell Prompt() to ask for output filename.
* Custom-only or builtin doodads too can be stored in the level's file
data, at "assets/doodads/*.doodad"
* When loading the embedded level in the Editor: it gets its custom
doodads out of its file, and you can drag and drop them elsehwere,
link them, Play Mode can use them, etc. but they won't appear in the
Doodad Dropper if they are not installed in your local doodads
directory.
* Fleshed out serialization API for the Doodad files:
- LoadFromEmbeddable() looks to load a doodad from embeddable file
data in addition to the usual places.
- Serialize() returns the doodad in bytes, for easy access to embed
into level data.
- Deserialize() to parse and return from bytes.
* When loading a level that references doodads not found in its embedded
data or the filesystem: an Alert modal appears listing the missing
doodads. The rest of the level loads fine, but the actors referenced
by these doodads don't load.
* You can now browse for a custom wallpaper image to use with your
levels. A platform-native file picker dialog is used (no WASM support)
* In the New/Edit Level Properties dialog, the Wallpaper drop-down
includes an option to browse for a custom map.
* When editing an existing level: the wallpaper takes effect immediately
in your level once the file is picked. For NEW levels, the wallpaper
will appear once the "Continue" button is pressed.
* All common image types supported: png, jpeg, gif.
* The wallpaper is embedded in the level using the filepath
"assets/wallpapers/custom.b64img" as a Base64-encoded blob of the
image data.
* The `doodad show` command will list the names and sizes of files
embedded in levels. `doodad show --attachment <name>` will get an
attachment and print it to the console window.
* To extract a wallpaper image from a level:
`doodad show -a assets/wallpapers/custom.b64img | base64 -d > out.png`
* Added initial walking sprites for the player character, "Boy."
* Player doodad filename and title screen level are now configurable in
the balance/numbers.go package.
There was a clipping bug where the player could sometimes clip thru a
left-side wall, if the left wall and floor made a 90 degree bend and the
player was holding the Left key while jumping slightly into the wall.
A band-aid that seems to work involved two steps:
1. When capping their leftward movement, add a "+ 1" to the cap.
2. At the start of the point loop, enforce the left cap like we do the
ceiling cap.
This seems to patch the problem, BUT it breaks the ability to walk up
slopes while moving left. Right-facing slopes can be climbed fine still.
Note: the original bug never was a problem against right walls, only
left ones, but the true root cause was not identified. See TODO comments
in collide_level.go.
* Player character now experiences acceleration and friction when
walking around the map!
* Actor position and movement had to be converted from int's
(render.Point) to float64's to support fine-grained acceleration
steps.
* Added "physics" package and physics.Vector to be a float64 counterpart
for render.Point. Vector is used for uix.Actor.Position() for the sake
of movement math. Vector is flattened back to a render.Point for
collision purposes, since the levels and hitboxes are pixel-bound.
* Refactor the uix.Actor to no longer extend the doodads.Drawing (so it
can have a Position that's a Vector instead of a Point). This broke
some code that expected `.Doodad` to directly reference the
Drawing.Doodad: now you had to refer to it as `a.Drawing.Doodad` which
was ugly. Added convenience method .Doodad() for a shortcut.
* Moved functions like GetBoundingRect() from doodads package to
collision, where it uses its own slimmer Actor interface for just the
relevant methods it needs.
* Revamped the sprites for the four colored locked doors. They now have
a side-view profile perspective rather than a front view.
* Doors open facing the left or the right based on what direction the
colliding actor approached it from.
* Fix the level collision bug that allowed clipping thru a ceiling while
climbing up a wall.
* Fix the scrolling behavior to keep the character on-screen no matter
how fast the character is moving, especially downwards.
* Increase player speed and gravity.
* New cheat: "ghost mode" disables clipping for the player character.
* Mark an actor as "grounded" if they fall and are stopped by the lower
level border, so they may jump again.
* Implement Brush Sizes for drawtool.Stroke and add a UI to the tools panel
to control the brush size.
* Brush sizes: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64
* Add the Eraser Tool to editor mode. It uses a default brush size of 16
and a max size of 32 due to some performance issues.
* The Undo/Redo system now remembers the original color of pixels when
you change them, so that Undo will set them back how they were instead
of deleting the pixel entirely. Due to performance issues, this only
happens when your Brush Size is 0 (drawing single-pixel shapes).
* UI: Add an IntVariable option to ui.Label to bind showing the value of
an int reference.
Aforementioned performance issues:
* When we try to remember whole rects of pixels for drawing thick
shapes, it requires a ton of scanning for each step of the shape. Even
de-duplicating pixel checks, tons of extra reads are constantly
checked.
* The Eraser is the only tool that absolutely needs to be able to
remember wiped pixels AND have large brush sizes. The performance
sucks and lags a bit if you erase a lot all at once, but it's a
trade-off for now.
* So pixels aren't remembered when drawing lines in your level with
thick brushes, so the Undo action will simply delete your pixels and not
reset them. Only the Eraser can bring back pixels.
* Add new pkg/drawtool with utilities to abstract away drawing actions
into Strokes and track undo/redo History for them.
* The freehand Pencil tool in EditorMode has been refactored to create a
Stroke of Shape=Freehand and queue up its world pixels there instead
of directly modifying the level chunker in real time. When the mouse
button is released, the freehand Stroke is committed to the level
chunker and added to the UndoHistory.
* UndoHistory is (temporarily) stored with the level.Level so it can
survive trips to PlayScene and back, but is not stored as JSON on
disk.
* Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y in EditorMode for undo and redo, respectively.
Fixes:
* Move the call to CollidesWithGrid() inside the Canvas instead of
outside in the PlayScene.movePlayer() so it can apply to all Actors
in motion.
* PlayScene.movePlayer() in turn just sets the player's Velocity so the
Canvas.Loop() can move the actor itself.
* When keeping the player inside the level boundaries: previously it was
assuming the player Position was relative to the window, and was
checking the WorldIndexAt and getting wrong results.
* Canvas scrolling (loopFollowActor): check that the actor is getting
close to the screen edge using the Viewport into the world, NOT the
screen-relative coordinates of the Canvas bounding boxes.
* Scenes can insert custom key/value labels to the debug overlay and
track string variables in real time
* Added ability to unthrottle FPS in main loop
