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 gamepad mouse cursor has become THE mouse cursor. It is always visible and your
real cursor is hidden, and this way the game can swap out other cursors for certain
scenarios:
* The Pencil Tool in the editor will use a pencil cursor over the level canvas.
* The Flood Tool has a custom Flood cursor so you don't forget it's selected!
Other improvements:
* The Palette buttons in the editor now render using their swatch's pattern
instead of only using its color.
* If you have an ultra HD monitor and open a Bounded level in the editor which
is too small to fill your screen, the editor canvas limits its size to fit
the level (preferable over showing parts of the level you can't actually play
as it's out of bounds).
* The "brush size" box is only drawn around the cursor when a relevant tool is
selected (Pencil, Line, Rect, Ellipse, Eraser)
* New built-in wallpaper: "Dotted paper (dark)" is a dark-themed wallpaper.
* New built-in palette: "Neon Bright" with bright colors for dark levels.
* New cheat: "warp whistle" to automatically win the level.
* In case the user has a VERY LARGE screen resolution bigger than the full
bounds of a Bounded level, the Play Scene will cap the size and center
the level canvas onto the window. This is preferable to being able to see
beyond the level's boundaries and hitting an invisible wall in-game.
* Make the titlescreen Lazy Scroll work on unbounded levels. It can't bounce
off scroll boundaries but it will reverse course if it reaches the level's
furthest limits.
* Bugfix: characters' white eyes were transparent in-game. Multiple culprits
from the `doodad convert` tool defaulting the chroma key to white, to the
SDL2 textures considering white to be transparent. For the latter, the game
offsets the color by -1 blue.
* Editor: Auto-save on a background goroutine so you don't randomly freeze
the editor up during.
* Fix actor linking issues when you drag and re-place a linked doodad: the
level was too eagerly calling PruneLinks() whenever a doodad was 'destroyed'
(such as the one just picked up) breaking half of the link connection.
* Chunk unloader: do not unload a chunk that has been modified (Set or Delete
called on), keep them in memory until the next ZIP file save to flush them
out to disk.
* Link Tool: if you clicked an actor and don't want to connect a link, click
the first actor again to de-select it.
Updates to the `doodad` tool:
* `doodad edit-level --resize <int>` can re-chunk a level to use a different
chunk size than the default 128. Large chunk sizes 512+ lead to performance
problems.
Adds several new doodads to the game and 5 new wallpapers (parchment
paper in blue, green, red, white and yellow).
New doodads:
* Crusher: A purple block-headed mob wearing an iron helmet. It tries
to crush the player when you get underneath. Its flat helmet can be
ridden on like an elevator back up.
* Snake: A green stationary mob that always faces toward the player.
If the player is nearby and jumps, the Snake will jump too and hope
to catch the player in mid-air.
* Gems and Totems: A new key & lock collectible. Gems have quantity so
you can collect multiple, and place them into matching Totems. A
Totem gives off a power signal when its gem is placed and all other
Totems it is linked to have also been activated. A single Totem may
link to an Electric Door and require only one gem to open it, or it
can link to other Totems and they all require gems before the power
signal is sent out.
* 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).
* The level.FileSystem type has updated to support ZIP files too.
* Legacy levels loaded from gz/json have their old FileSystem as a
simple map[filename]data and this parses from JSON OK.
* On save to zip, the legacy loaded file data gets exported to ZIP.
* Going forward: newly added or deleted files during runtime are kept in
the legacy file map until the next save when the filemap is again
flushed out to ZIP.
* For regular read-access, the FileSystem reads from the ZIP file if the
data is not in the hot map (legacy file or recently modified
attachment).
* Bugfix: be sure to Inflate() the Level/Doodad after loading from
zipfile - it used to be that directly after a save, trying to play the
level failed because the Level.Actors struct was missing their IDs,
and similarly recently written chunks would error out (become black
voids) on levels/doodads so we Inflate() both after save/replacing
their zip handle.
Too restricted by the cheat codes to play as certain characters
on-demand? Use the JS shell in the developer console to set any doodad
you want:
$ d.SetPlayerCharacter("key-blue")
$ d.SetPlayerCharacter("anvil")
$ d.SetPlayerCharacter("box.doodad")
The .doodad suffix is optional.
Interesting behaviors when playing as odd doodads:
* Most non-mobile doodads don't collide with each other, so you can pass
through doors and not activate buttons if you play as a key or a
trapdoor. Non-mobile doodads also generally have antigravity so you
can fly freely around the map.
* Non-mobile doodads can not open Warp Doors or interact with the Exit
Flag. You'll have to change back to a creature such as "boy" or
"azu-blue" to win the level.
* If you are a key, the Thief can collect you! This removes your player
doodad from the level and soft locks the game. No worries, another
call to d.SetPlayerCharacter() will put you back on the map!
* If the doodad name isn't found, you'll play as the built-in fallback
doodad, which is just a red "X" shape. It has anti-gravity and does
not generally interact with any doodad (can not push buttons or
collect keys - but it can pass through doors and other obstacles. Can
not win the level goal flag, though!)
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.
* Added to the F3 Debug Overlay is a "Texture:" label that counts the number
of textures currently loaded by the (SDL2) render engine.
* Added Teardown() functions to Level, Doodad and the Chunker they both use
to free up SDL2 textures for all their cached graphics.
* The Canvas.Destroy() function now cleans up all textures that the Canvas
is responsible for: calling the Teardown() of the Level or Doodad, calling
Destroy() on all level actors, and cleaning up Wallpaper textures.
* The Destroy() method of the game's various Scenes will properly Destroy()
their canvases to clean up when transitioning to another scene. The
MainScene, MenuScene, EditorScene and PlayScene.
* Fix the sprites package to actually cache the ui.Image widgets. The game
has very few sprites so no need to free them just yet.
Some tricky places that were leaking textures have been cleaned up:
* Canvas.InstallActors() destroys the canvases of existing actors before it
reinitializes the list and installs the replacements.
* The DraggableActor when the user is dragging an actor around their level
cleans up the blueprint masked drag/drop actor before nulling it out.
Misc changes:
* The player character cheats during Play Mode will immediately swap out the
player character on the current level.
* Properly call the Close() function instead of Hide() to dismiss popup
windows. The Close() function itself calls Hide() but also triggers
WindowClose event handlers. The Doodad Dropper subscribes to its close
event to free textures for all its doodad canvases.
* Bird is not solid when colliding with other birds.
* If the dev shell is used to run JavaScript during Play Mode, consider
it cheating (so player can't `$ d.Scene.ResetTimer()` for example)
* On Survival Mode levels, DieByFire immediately opens the End Level
(silver score) modal rather than respawn from checkpoint, so levels
don't need checkpoint contraptions to end the level.
* During level loading screens, wait and call doodads' main() function
until the very end.
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.
Added a new level property: Difficulty
* An enum ranging from -1, 0, 1 (Peaceful, Normal, Hard)
* Default difficulty is Normal; pre-existing levels are Normal by
default per the zero value.
Doodad scripts can read the difficulty via the new global variable
`Level.Difficulty` and some doodads have been updated:
* Azulians: on Peaceful they ignore all player characters, and on Hard
they are in "hunt mode": infinite aggro radius and they're aggressive
to all characters.
* Bird: on Peaceful they will not dive and attack any player character.
Other spit and polish:
* New Level/Level Properties UI reworked into a magicform.
* New "PromptPre(question, answer, func)" function for prompting the
user with the developer shell, but pre-filling in an answer for them
to either post or edit.
* magicform has a PromptUser field option for simple Text/Int fields
which present as buttons, so magicform can prompt and update the
variable itself.
* Don't show the _autosave.doodad in the Doodad Dropper window.
* Loadscreen: put the progress bar between the Title and Subtitle so it
looks good even on mobile landscape orientation (narrow height)
* Bugfixes around window OnResize events: the loadscreen handles
resizing correctly now and the Level Editor (or w/e) will also be the
right size if you resized the window during loading.
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.
* When playing as the Bird, the dive attack is able to destroy other
mobile doodads such as Azulians and Thieves.
* The Box has been made invulnerable so it can't be destroyed by Anvils
or player-controlled Birds.
* Bugfixes with pop-up modals:
* The quit game confirm modal doesn't appear if another modal is
already active on screen.
* The Escape key can dismiss Alert and Confirm modals.
* Add "Level" menu items to Play Mode to restart the level or retry from
the last checkpoint (in case of softlocks, etc.)
* 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.
If the Azulians aren't hostile to the player character (e.g. you are
playing as a Thief or Azulian or you are invulnerable because you're the
Anvil), the Azulians won't aggro and pathfind to you either.
* Add methods `Invulnerable() bool` and `SetInvulnerable(bool)` to the
Actor API accessible in JavaScript (e.g. `Self.SetInvulnerable(true)`)
* The Anvil is invulnerable - when played as, it can crush other mobs by
jumping on them but is not defeated by those mobs at the same time.
* Anvils don't destroy invulnerable mobs, such as other Anvils.
* Bugfix: the Electric Door is considered to be opened from the first
frame of animation when the door begins opening, and remains opened
until the final frame of animation when it is closing.
* New cheat code: `megaton weight` to play as the Anvil by default.
* Fix the Doodad Dropper and Registration windows not stealing the focus
when they are opened via menu bars.
* Bugfixes in gamepad support: stop at the first controller found,
Draw() to handle controllers going away and hide the mouse cursor
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.
Link a Doodad to a Checkpoint Flag (like you would a Start Flag) and
crossing the flag will replace the player with that doodad. Multiple
checkpoint flags like this can toggle you between characters.
* Azulians are now friendly to player characters who have the word
"Azulian" in their title.
* Improve Bird as the playable character:
* Dive animation if the player flies diagonally downwards
* Animation loop while hovering in the air instead of pausing
* Checkpoint flags don't spam each other on PubSub so much which could
sometimes lead to deadlocks!
SetPlayerCharacter added to the JavaScript API. The Checkpoint Flag
(not the region) can link to a doodad and replace the player character
with that linked doodad when you activate the checkpoint:
Actors.SetPlayerCharacter(filename string): like "boy.doodad"
Add various panic catchers to make JavaScript safer and log issues
to console.
* 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 functions are available on the JavaScript API for doodads:
* Actors.At(Point) []*Actor: returns actors intersecting a point
* Actors.FindPlayer() *Actor: returns the nearest player character
* Actors.New(filename string): create a new actor (NOT TESTED YET!)
* Self.Grounded() bool: query the grounded status of current actor
With this the game's built-in doodads have been revised:
* Bird: will now scan 240 pixels diagonally searching for the player
character and will dive if seen. The Bird is dangerous while
diving. It will return to its original altitude once it touches
the ground.
* Azulians: the Azulians are now dangerous to player characters but
not to the Thief. Azulians will begin to follow the player when
they are within the aggro range and will hop if the player is
above them to try and overcome obstacles.
* Blue Azulian: aggro is (250, 100) jump speed 12 movement 2
* Red Azulian: aggro is (250, 200) jump speed 14 movement 4
* magicform is a helper package that may eventually be part of the go/ui
library, for easily creating structured form layouts.
* The Level Publisher UI is the first to utilize magicform.
Refactor how level publishing works:
* Level data now stores SaveDoodads and SaveBuiltins (bools) and when
the level editor saves the file, it will attach custom and/or builtin
doodads just before save.
* Move the menu item from the File menu to Level->Publish
* The Publisher UI just shows the checkboxes to toggle the level
settings and a convenient Save button along with descriptive text.
* Free versions get the "Register" window popping up if they click the
Save Now button from within the publisher window.
Note: free versions can still toggle the booleans on/off but their game
will not attach any new doodads on save.
* Free games which open a level w/ embedded doodads will get a pop-up
warning that the doodads aren't available.
* If they DON'T turn off the SaveDoodads option, they can still edit and
save the level and keep the existing doodads attached.
* If they UNCHECK the option and save, all attached doodads are removed
from the level.
* Switch from otto to goja for JavaScript engine.
* goja supports many ES6 syntax features like arrow functions,
const/let, for-of with more coming soon.
* Same great features as otto, more modern environment for doodads!
* Clean up unused msgpack code for levels and doodads
* Fix the cosmetic bug where actors in your level would display wrongly
when scrolling off the top/left edges of the screen: they used to
anchor at their own 0,0 coordinate and crop their width/height leading
to a 'scrolling' effect that didn't happen on the right/bottom edges.
The Default handler of the developer command shell now calls out to
RiveScript to match the user's message to a friendly reply. If
RiveScript returns NoReplyMatched then give the "command not found"
error.
* If the player runs the PlayAsBird cheat they shouldn't be able to win
a high score on a level, so at level startup it detects whether the
DefaultPlayerCharacterDoodad has changed from default on a level that
doesn't use the Start Flag to set a specific doodad - and immediately
marks the session as cheated
