Now it's really, really smooth. Except for like the last frame when it
goes down, which I sometimes didn't notice (but maybe it didn't happen
every time due to being lucky on the delta timesteps or something,
whatevs.)
Otherwise the screen will shake too fast for my liking.
Also I'm planning to add an FPS limiting option later (because right
now, un-capping the FPS is pretty wasteful and eats up lots of
resources, especially since I have only a 60hz monitor), and it'd feel
weird if screen shaking updated every delta timestep.
I've added a function Graphics::lerp() which simply interpolates between
two values given a certain alpha value. It's just like drawing a
straight line between two points.
Also, Graphics now has an `alpha` attribute, and it is set on every
deltatime update to be used in linear interpolation.
The flashy color of the elephant can be hard on people's eyes,
especially if they're the type who want screen effects disabled because
they might have epilepsy. The elephant takes up a good 3/4ths of the
screen, you know. If screen effects are disabled, the elephant will use
color 22, which is a neutral gray.
I'm only adding this because the VVVVVV speedrun mods (@tzann, @mohoc)
invalidate all runs that have the elephant texture removed, even though
many people would be looking at a potentially epilepsy-inducing image
many times a day grinding 100% speedruns. (Imo, their justification for
this is flimsy at best.)
The only class that actually needs its i/j/k kept is scriptclass,
because some custom levels rely on it for creating custom activity
zones. So I haven't touched that.
Other than that, there's no chance that anything important relies on
i/j/k in any other class. For that to be the case, it would have to use
i/j/k without initializing it beforehand, and that can simply be
detected by removing the attribute from the header file and seeing where
the compiler complains. And the compiler complains only about cases
where it's initialized first. (Note that due to this check, I *haven't*
removed Graphics's `m` as it precisely does exactly this, using it
without initializing it first.)
Interestingly enough, otherlevelclass and towerclass have unused i/k
variables for whatever reason.
If you don't have a font.txt, it could happen that a font index is
requested that's out-of-bounds. And that would result in a segfault. So
to fix that I'm adding INBOUNDS checks to all functions that index the
fontmap.
This fixes indexing out-of-bounds in the functions that draw all the
special images such as the elephant and teleporters. Let's make sure the
game doesn't segfault.
I tracked down all the functions that took in an entity's drawframe and
made sure that no matter what value an entity's drawframe was, the game
would never segfault.
This is to respect the fact that the top half of the file is indented
with spaces, while the bottom half is indented with tabs.
Graphics::reloadresources() is on the bottom half.
Main game would retain custom level assets, now fixed. Also, custom fonts load properly. Finally, levels can be stored as a zip and placed in the levels folder, with the .vvvvvv file at the root of the zip and custom asset folders (graphics, sounds etc) also at the root.
Since translucent roomname backgrounds were introduced in
TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV#122, it exposes one glaring flaw with the game that
until now has been kept hidden: in rooms with room names, the game
cheapens out with the tile data and doesn't have a 30th row, because the
room name would hide the missing row. As a result, rooms with room names
have 29 rows instead of 30 to fill up the entire screen. And it looks
really weird when there's nothing but empty space behind the translucent
room name background.
To remedy this, I added one row to each room with a room name in the level.
First, I had to filter out all the rooms with no room names. However, that's
actually all contained in Otherlevel.cpp, the Overworld, which contains 221
rooms (8 of which are the Secret Lab, 6 more of which are the Ship, so 207 are
the actual Overworld, right? Wrong, 2 of those Overworld no-roomname rooms are
in the Lab, so there are actually 205 Overworld rooms). The remaining level
data files all contain rooms with room names.
But the process wasn't that easy. I noticed a while ago that each room
contains 29 `tmap.push_back()`s, one for each row of the room, and each row is
simply a string containing the 40 tiles for that row, concatenated with
commas.
However, I decided to actually check my intuition by doing a grep on each
level file and counting the number of results, for example `grep 'push_back'
Labclass.cpp | wc -l`. Whatever number comes out should be divisible by 29.
That particular grep on Labclass.cpp returns 1306, which divided by 29 is 45
with a remainder of 1.
So what does that mean? Does that mean there's 45 rooms each, and 1 leftover
row? Well, not exactly. The extra row comes from the fact that Outer Space has
30 rows instead of 29. Outer Space is the room that comes up when the game
finds a room is non-existent, which shouldn't happen with a properly-working
game, except in Outside Dimension VVVVVV. In fact, each level file has their
own Outer Space, and every single Outer Space also has 30 rooms. So really,
this means there are 44 rooms in the Lab and one Outer Space room. (Well, in
reality, there are 46 rooms in the Lab, because 2 of them use the Outside
tileset but have no room names, so they're stored in Otherlevel.cpp instead.)
We find the same result for the Warp Zone. `grep 'push_back' WarpClass.cpp |
wc -l` returns 697, which is 24 remainder 1, meaning 23 rooms of 29 rows and 1
room of 30 rows, which corresponds with 23 rooms in the Warp Zone and one
Outer Space room.
However, Outside Dimension VVVVVV + Tower Hallways and Space Station 1 and 2
are both odd curiosities. Finalclass.cpp contains Outside Dimension VVVVVV,
(which is Intermission 1 and 2 and the Final Level), but also the Tower
Hallway rooms, i.e. the auxiliary Tower rooms that are not a part of the main
tower. Spacestation2.cpp contains both Space Station 1 and 2, so don't be
deceived by the name.
`grep 'push_back' Finalclass.cpp | wc -l` returns 1597, which is actually 55
remainder 2. So... are there two rooms with 30 rows? Yes, in fact, The
Gravitron and Outer Space both contain 30 rows. So there are actually 55 rooms
stored in Finalclass.cpp (not including the minitowers Panic Room and The
Final Challenge), 54 rooms of actual level data and one Outer Space room, and
breaking down the 54 rooms even further, 51 of them are actually in Outside
Dimension VVVVVV and 3 of them are Tower Hallways. Of the 51 Outside Dimension
VVVVVV rooms, 14 of those are Intermission 1, 4 of them are Intermission 2,
and the rest of the 33 rooms are the Final Level (again, not including the
minitowers).
`grep 'push_back' Spacestation2.cpp | wc -l` returns 2148, which is 74
remainder 2. Are there two rooms with 30 rows again? No; one of those counted
2148 rows is a false-positive, because there's an if-else in Prize for the
Reckless that replaces the row with spikes with a row without spikes if you
are in a time trial or in No Death Mode. So there's 73 rooms in Space Station
1 and 2, and one Outer Space room.
With all this in mind, I decided to duplicate the current last row of each
room, the 29th row, to add a 30th row. However, I wasn't going to do this
automatically! But neither was I going to write some kludge-y code to parse
each nightmare of a level file and duplicate the rows that way.
Enter: Vim macros! (Er, well, actually, I use Neovim.) I first did
`/push_back`, so that pressing `n` would keep going to the next `push_back` in
the file. Then I went to the 29th row of the first room in the file, did a
`Yp`, and then started my macro with `qq`. The macro went like this: `30nYp`,
which is simply going to the 29th row of the next room over and duplicating
it. And that's all there was to it. However, I had to make sure that (1) my
cursor was before the `push_back` on the line of the 29th row of the room, and
(2) that I didn't skip rooms, both of which were problems I encountered when
pressing Ctrl+Z a given invocation of the macro (the Ctrl+Z is just a
metaphor, you actually undo by typing `u` in Vim). And also I had to make sure
to be careful around the extra lines of `push_back`s in Prize for the Reckless
and The Gravitron, and make sure I didn't run past the end of the file and
loop back around. Thankfully, all Outer Space rooms are at the end of each
file.
But first, I had to increase the number of rows drawn in Graphics.cpp by 1 in
order to compensate for this, and do the same when reading the tile data in
Map.cpp. I had to change fillcontent(), drawmap(), drawfinalmap(),
drawtowermap(), and drawtowermap_nobackground(). Funnily enough, the tower
functions already used 30 rows, but I guess it's an off-by-one due to the
camera scrolling, so they now draw 31 rows each.
Then, I went in-game to make sure that the row behind each room name looked
fine. I checked EVERY single room with a room name. I turned on invincibility
mode and added a temporary line to hardreset() that always turned on
game.nocutscenes for a smoother playtesting experience. And to make sure that
rooms which have entirely empty bottom rows actually still have 30 rows,
instead of having 29 and the game assuming that the 30th row was empty
(because that sounds like it could lead to Undefined Behavior), I added this
temporary debugging line to the start of mapclass::fillcontent():
printf("(%i,%i) has %i rows\n", game.roomx, game.roomy, (int) tmap.size());
Everywhere I checked - and I made sure to check all rooms - every room had 30
rows and not 29 rows.
Unfortunately, some rooms simply couldn't be left alone with their 29th row
duplicated and had to be manually edited. This was because the 29th row would
contain some edge tiles because the player would be able to walk somewhere on
the 28th, 27th, and 26th rows, and if you duplicated said edge tiles behind
the room name, it would look bad.
Here's a list of rooms whose 30th rows I had to manually edit:
- Comms Relay
- The Yes Men
- Stop and Reflect
- They Call Him Flipper
- Double-slit Experiment
- Square Root
- Brought to you by the letter G
- The Bernoulli Principle
- Purest Unobtainium
- I Smell Ozone
- Conveying a New Idea
- Upstream Downstream
- Give Me A V
- $eeing Dollar $ign$
- Doing Things The Hard Way
- Very Good
- Must I Do Everything For You?
- Now Stay Close To Me...
- ...But Not Too Close
- ...Not as I Do
- Do Try To Keep Up
- Whee Sports
- As you like it
This is actually a strange case where it looked bad because of the 29th
row, instead of the 30th row, and I had to change the 29th row instead of
the 30th row to fix it.
- Maze With No Entrance
- Ascending and Descending
- Mind The Gap
Same strange case as "As you like it" (it's the 29th row I had to change
that was the problem, not the 30th).
- 1950 Silverstone Grand V
- The Villi People
I found that Panic Room and The Final Challenge also looked strange behind the
roomname background, but I can't do much about either because towers' tile
data wrap around at the top and bottom, and if I added another row to either
it would be visible above the room name.
I've considered updating the development editors with these new level tiles,
but I decided against it as the development editors are already pretty
outdated anyway.
While I was working on my over-30-FPS patch, I found out that the tower
background in the credits scroll was being completely re-drawn every
single frame, which was a bit wasteful and expensive. It's also harder
to interpolate for my over-30-FPS patch. I'm guessing this constant
re-draw was done because the math to get the surface scroll properly
working is a bit subtle, but I've figured the precise math out!
The first changes of this patch is just removing the unconditional
`map.tdrawback = true;`, and having to set `map.scrolldir` everywhere to
get the credits scrolling in the right direction but make sure the title
screen doesn't start scrolling like a descending tower, too.
After that, the first problem is that it looks like the ACTION press to
speed up the credits scrolling doesn't speed up the background, too. No
problem, just shove a `!game.press_action` check in
`gamecompletelogic()`.
However, this introduces a mini-problem, which is that NOW when you hold
down ACTION, the background appears to be slowly getting out of sync
with the credits text by a one-pixel-per-second difference. This is
actually due to the fact that, as a result of me adding the conditional,
`map.bscroll` is no longer always unconditionally getting set to 1,
while `game.creditposition` IS always unconditionally getting
decremented by 1. And when you hold down ACTION, `game.creditposition`
gets decremented by 6.
Thus, I need to set `map.bscroll` when holding down ACTION to be 7,
which is 6 plus 1.
Then we have another problem, which is that the incoming textures desync
when you press ACTION, and when you release ACTION. They desync by
precisely 6 pixels, which should be a familiar number. I (eventually)
tracked this down to `map.bypos` being updated at the same time
`map.bscroll` is, even though `map.bypos` should be updated a frame
later AFTER updating `map.bscroll`.
So I had to change the `map.bypos` update in `gamecompleteinput()` and
`gamecompletelogic()` to be `map.bypos += map.bscroll;` and then place
it before any `map.bscroll` update, thus ensuring that `map.bscroll`
updates exactly one frame before `map.ypos` does. I had to move the
`map.bypos += map.bscroll;` to be in `gamecompleteinput()`, because
`gamecompleteinput()` comes first before `gamecompletelogic()` in the
`main.cpp` game loop, otherwise the `map.bypos` update won't be delayed
by one frame for when you press ACTION to make it go faster, and thus
cause a desync when you press ACTION.
Oh and then after that, I had to make the descending tower background
draw a THIRD row of incoming tiles, otherwise you could see some black
flickering at the bottom of the screen when you held down ACTION.
All of this took me way too long to figure out, but now the credits
scroll works perfectly while being more optimized.
It's less code being copied and pasted, especially since for my
over-30-FPS patch I would have to make a separate function for each if
both of them were still there, but if they're unified into one then I
will only have to make one more function.
And since map.scrolldir is now used outside of GAMEMODE, we'll need to
reset it in hardreset() and when exiting playtesting.
Due to the previous commit, the descending tower background now has to
account for map.bscroll, or else it will be off by one pixel from the
incoming textures. But ascending tower backgrounds work fine, so no need
to do anything with those.
Looks like this was done as a quick fix instead of taking the time to
figure out the math needed to actually draw the incoming textures, which
is fair enough - it only makes one room, Panic Room, slightly laggier.
While I was working on my over-30-FPS patch, though, I came across the
fact that this background kept getting entirely redrawn every frame, and
it seems like it would be easier to interpolate descending tower
backgrounds if we scrolled what was already there instead.
Here, we have to draw two rows of incoming textures, otherwise the
scrolling surface will produce black lines.
This de-duplicates the screen effects rendering code by putting it
inside a function, Graphics::renderwithscreeneffects(), and using that
instead of copy-pasted code.
This removes lots of duplicated code that drawtowerentities() did,
because all that really changed was accounting for map.ypos (which can
be done conditionally) and where and when the room wrapped (which can
also be done conditionally).
This fixes an oddity that's only visual, which could only happen in
custom levels by using the createentity() internal command.
For the same reason that the second through fourth tiles of moving
platforms on the top and left was buggily rendered, SDL_BlitSurface()
strikes again to mutate the SDL_Rect we pass it and render the next
SDL_BlitSurface() call inbounds, even though we don't need it to.
Previously, the game could end up rendering a warping sprite twice due
to the fact that it could run "if entity is on the right side of the
screen" right after "if entity is on the left side of the screen" (but
not the other way around). This is most noticeable if you have a custom
player sprite with translucent pixels and stand on the left side of a
warping screen, but the code suggests it happens when warping through
the top of the screen, too.
Instead of doing
if (!obj.entities[i].invis)
{
...
}
It's better to do
if (obj.entities[i].invis)
{
continue;
}
...
It reduces the indentation by one level, which is always a good thing.
In the last commit, I removed having the flip mode conditional directly
inside the sprite-drawing code for each size type, which would reduce
the indentation one level. However, I opted to hold off un-indenting
until this commit, otherwise it would've produced too much noise.
The game uses flipsprites.png instead of sprites.png when in flip mode,
mostly to add exceptions for sprites that SHOULDN'T be flipped in flip
mode.
Looks like to achieve this, the routines for sprite drawing got
copy-and-pasted every single time flipsprites.png needed to be
conditionally used, resulting in large amounts of copy-pasted code. And
this copy-pasted code resulted in copy-paste errors, with relating to
VVVVVV-Man, because apparently due to two copy-pasting errors, the
combined giant crewmate in the epilogue uses flipsprites.png even if you
aren't in flip mode, and it also uses the width instead of the height of
sprites_rect when in flip mode (although, this doesn't end up mattering,
but still).
The solution here is to simply change the referenced sprites vector to a
pointer that can conditionally change based on the game being in flip
mode or not.
This commit fixes a bug where the second, third, and fourth tiles of
moving platforms would render offset from the first tile if the moving
platform hit the top or left edge of the screen.
This is due to the fact that SDL_BlitSurface() will end up changing the
coordinates of the rectangle we pass to it to be 0 if they're negative,
but only after it's already been drawn. Previously, we kept re-using the
same rectangle each time we drew each segment of the moving platform,
but since it only changes the draw rectangle after it's already been
drawn, the first tile shows up fine, but not the rest of the tiles,
hence resulting in an offset.
To fix this, we do the same thing as we did for drawing the "really big
sprite" (size-type 9): just reset the rectangle we use every time we
draw a segment of the moving platform.
They're literally the exact same thing, except one is 4 and the other
has an 8. No need to have all that copy-pasted code.
Actually, the only other difference was that size-type 8 set the
drawRect to sprites_rect instead of tiles_rect for some reason? Even
though it doesn't matter, anyway, because SDL_BlitSurface() only cares
about the X and Y you pass it, not the width and height, which is the
only difference between tiles_rect and sprites_rect.
To make sure that people wouldn't wonder where size-type 8 went if they
saw a blank space between size-type 7 and size-type 9, I kept the
size-type 8 conditional, but inside it is just a comment telling you to
go to size-type 2.
Instead of copy-pasting all the BlitSurfaceStandard()s all over again,
just make the referenced vector a pointer that changes depending on
map.custommode.
There's a noticeable seam in the horizontal and warp backgrounds
whenever you enter a new room. Entering a new room triggers the game to
re-draw the entire warp background instead of simply scrolling what it
already has. This seam is the result of the initial background draw
being misaligned with the rest of the scrolling.
If you get out your measuring tools, you'll see that it's misaligned by
exactly 3 pixels (this applies to both horizontal and vertical warping).
If you look at the part of the code where the game draws fresh warping
textures after scrolling the existing ones offscreen, you'll see it
starts with an offset of 317, which is exactly 320 minus 3. And for
vertical, it uses 237, which is exactly 240 minus 3.
This is where the misalignment comes from. Since the incoming textures
are drawn 3 pixels to the left, but the initial draw isn't, this results
in a misalignment and causes the seam.
To fix this, draw the initial draw of the horizontal and vertical warp
backgrounds 3 pixels to the left.
