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.
They are now stored in const int arrays instead. Except for the Prize
for the Reckless room, which I made sure had its spikes removed in No
Death Mode and the Time Trial.
It's treated like a bool anyway, so might as well make it one.
This also necessitates updating every single instance where it or an
element inside it is used, too.
This changes something like UtilityClass::String to help.String,
basically. It takes less typing this way, and is a neat effect of having
global args actually be global variables.
This commit removes all global args from functions on the entityclass
object, and updates the callers of those functions in other files
accordingly (most significantly, the game level files Finalclass.cpp,
Labclass.cpp, Otherlevel.cpp, Spacestation2.cpp, WarpClass.cpp, due to
them using createentity()), as well as renaming all instances of 'dwgfx'
in Entity.cpp to 'graphics'.
Following discussion on TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV#153, I suggested that
instead of reverting my M&P guards from TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV#124 (which
would only revert it for The Final Level, The Lab, Overworld, and The
Tower, leaving Space Station 1 & 2 and The Warp Zone alone which could
potentially cause the same problem that motivated
TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV#153), we should initialize the map data with 0s
instead.
