VVVVVV's menus are kind of packed to the brim, so I thought it was time
to recategorize the menus a little bit. There's now a new "advanced
options" menu which holds the following options which were moved out of
graphic options, game options and especially accessibility options:
- toggle mouse
- unfocus pause
- fake load screen
- room name background
- glitchrunner mode
I also made the positioning of the titles and descriptions more
consistent, and made some options which were moved to the new menu not
so abbreviated ("load screen" and "room name bg")
Flip Mode will now be in the game options menu if either:
(1) You're playing the M&P version.
(2) You have it unlocked and you came here from the in-game pause
screen.
This is because if you're playing M&P, you'd have to close the game,
edit unlock.vvv, and re-launch the game to toggle Flip Mode, since
there's no other way to do so. And if you're playing the full version,
you'd have to save and exit your session in order to toggle Flip Mode.
If you want your game window to simply be exactly 320x240, or 640x480,
or 960x720 etc. then it's really annoying that there's no easy way to do
this (to clarify, this is different from integer mode, which controls
the size of the game INSIDE the window). The easiest way would be having
to close the game, go into unlock.vvv, and edit the window size
manually. VCE has a 1x/2x/3x/4x graphics option to solve this, although
it does not account for actual monitor size (those 1x/2x/3x/4x modes are
all you get, whether or not you have a monitor too small for some of
them or too big for any of them to be what you want).
I discussed this with flibit, and he said that VCE's approach (if it
accounted for monitor size) wouldn't work on high-retina displays or
high DPIs, because getting the actual multiplier to account for those
monitors is kind of a pain. So the next best thing would be to add an
option that resizes to the nearest perfect multiple of 320x240. That way
you could simply resize the window and let the game correct any
imperfect dimensions automatically.
It's sometimes unwanted by people, and it's unwanted enough that there
exist instructions to hexedit the binary to remove it (
https://distractionware.com/forum/index.php?topic=3247.0 ).
Fun fact, the unfocus pause didn't exist in 2.0.
There were a few problems with the old way of doing things:
(1) Level stats were an ad-hoc object. Basically, it's an object whose
attributes are stored in separate arrays, instead of being an actual
object with its attributes stored in one array.
(2) Level filenames with pipes in them could cause trouble. This is
because the filename attribute array was stored in the XML by being
separated by pipes.
(3) There was an arbitrary limit of only having 200 level stats, for
whatever reason.
To remedy this issue, I've made a new struct named CustomLevelStat that
is a proper object. The separate attribute arrays have been replaced
with a proper vector, which also doesn't have a size limit.
For compatibility with versions 2.2 and below, I've kept being able to
read the old format. This only happens if the new format doesn't exist.
However, I also WRITE the old format as well, in case you want to go
back to version 2.2 or below for whatever reason. It's slightly
wasteful to have both, but that way there's no risk of breaking
compatibility.
Centiseconds won't be saved to any save file or anything. This is just
to make speedrunning a bit more competitive, being able to know the
precise time of a time trial or full game run.
The time trial par time on the result screen always has ".99" after it.
This is basically due to the game comparing the number of seconds to the
par number of seconds using less-than-or-equal-to instead of simply
less-than.
This patch is very kludge-y, but at least it fixes a semi-noticeable
visual issue in custom levels that use internal scripts to spawn
entities when loading a room.
Basically, the problem here is that when the game checks for script
boxes and sets newscript, newscript has already been processed for that
frame, and when the game does load a script, script.run() has already
been processed for that frame.
That issue can be fixed, but it turns out that due to my over-30-FPS
game loop changes, there's now ANOTHER visible frame of delay between
room load and entity creation, because the render function gets called
in between the script being loaded at the end of gamelogic() and the
script actually getting run.
So... I have to temporary move script.run() to the end of gamelogic()
(in map.twoframedelayfix()), and make sure it doesn't get run next
frame, because double-evaluations are bad. To do that, I have to
introduce the kludge variable script.dontrunnextframe, which does
exactly as it says.
And with all that work, the two-frame (now three-frame) delay is fixed.
Ironically enough, resetting more variables in script.hardreset() makes
the glitchy fadeout system even more glitchy. Resetting map.towermode,
for example, makes it so that if you're in towers when you quit to the
menu, script.hardreset() makes it so that the game thinks you're no
longer inbounds (because it no longer thinks you're in a tower and thus
considers coordinates in the space of 40x30 tiles to be inbounds instead
of 40x700 or 40x100 tiles to be inbounds), calls map.gotoroom(), which
resets the gamestate to 0. So if we're using the old system, it's better
to reset only as much as needed.
And furthermore, we shouldn't be relying on script.hardreset() to
initialize variables for us. That should be done at the class
constructor level. So I've gone ahead and initialized the variables in
class constructors, too.
Glitchrunner mode is intended to re-enable glitches that existed in
older versions of VVVVVV. These glitches were removed because they could
legitimately affect a casual player's experience. Glitches like various
R-pressing screwery, Space Station 1 skip, telejumping, Gravitron
out-of-bounds, etc. will not be patched.
It should've checked the final spacing and not the intermediate maximum
value. I had changed some things around, and now the minimum spacing
was 5 instead of 0 by mistake.
All menus had a hardcoded X position (offset to an arbitrary starting
point of 110) and a hardcoded horizontal spacing for the "staircasing"
(mostly 30 pixels, but for some specific menus hardcoded to 15, 20 or
something else). Not all menus were centered, and seem to have been
manually made narrower (with lower horizontal spacing) whenever text
ran offscreen during development.
This system may already be hard to work with in an English-only menu
system, since you may need to adjust horizontal spacing or positioning
when adding an option. The main reason I made this change is that it's
even less optimal when menu options have to be translated, since
maximum string lengths are hard to determine, and it's easy to have
menu options running offscreen, especially when not all menus are
checked for all languages and when options could be added in the middle
of a menu after translations of that menu are already checked.
Now, menus are automatically centered based on their options, and they
are automatically made narrower if they won't fit with the default
horizontal spacing of 30 pixels (with some padding). The game.menuxoff
variable for the menu X position is now also offset to 0 instead of 110
The _default_ horizontal spacing can be changed on a per-menu basis,
and most menus (not all) which already had a narrower spacing set,
retain that as a maximum spacing, simply because they looked odd with
30 pixels of spacing (especially the main menu). They will be made even
narrower automatically if needed. In the most extreme case, the spacing
can go down to 0 and options will be displayed right below each other.
This isn't in the usual style of the game, but at least we did the best
we could to prevent options running offscreen.
The only exception to automatic menu centering and narrowing is the
list of player levels, because it's a special case and existing
behavior would be better than automatic centering there.
To fix this annoying flicker (which, btw, took me WAY too long to do), I
had to introduce yet another kludge variable to signal that the
horizontal/vertical warp background should be re-initialized on the
pause screen.
I think I could technically keep the 'graphics.backgrounddrawn = false;'
in maplogic() and remove the 'graphics.backgrounddrawn = false;' in
Game::returntopausemenu(), but I'm keeping that other one around because
it doesn't hurt and just as a general precaution and safety measure.
This makes it so the tower background doesn't persist and scroll upwards
if you exit the menu in a warp zone horizontal or vertical room.
Ugh, and while we're on the subject of separating the in-game tower
background and the menu tower background, could we PLEASE separate the
horizontal / vertical warp backgrounds from the tower backgrounds, too?!
Another thing that's annoyed me a lot is being unable to simply press
Esc to close the pause menu. You'd have to hover over the "return to
game" or "keep playing" option. This would be even more annoying with
more options on the menu, so allowing to press Esc is a nice
quality-of-life thing.
Also set map.tdrawback to true when leaving the menu.
This is to fix the interpolated color of the tower background
persisting, as well as making sure the menu background doesn't persist
when exiting.
This is to pre-emptively prevent piling up stack frames for what I'll be
adding next, which is pressing Esc in the options menu in-game
automatically moving you back to MAPMODE.
There is now an option in "graphic options" named "toggle fps", which
toggles whether the game visually runs at 1000/34 FPS or over 1000/34
FPS. It is off by default.
I've had to put the entire game loop in yet another set of braces, I'll
indent it next commit.
These special images are the crewmates, Level Complete, and Game
Complete images. They flashed depending on if you were lucky and
happened to got your delta-timesteps just right when text boxes were
fading in and out.
Honestly, I'm surprised text box fading in/out hasn't ran into this
issue before. It's insane luck that this issue hasn't occurred before or
anything.
Well, anyways, to fix this, there's now an attribute `allowspecial` on
text boxes, and an optional parameter of the same name for
Graphics::createtextbox(). This attribute is the only thing that will
let these special text box images render. And any createtextbox()es that
utilize these special images have been updated accordingly.
To make it real smooth, just in case it was noticeable that it only
updated at 1000/34 FPS before (well, except in slowmode, it's really
noticeable THERE).
Also this removes the re-typing out of (game.act_fade/10.0f) for every
single R, G, and B in gamerender().
This prevents being able to "roll over" the amount of minutes to 0 (by
simply waiting for the timer to tick past one hour) and being able to
get a result of 00:13 when your result is really 01:00:13.
By looking only at the minutes, the game would read 01:00:13 as 00:13
instead. So simply add the amount of hours to the time trial result.
If you exited to the menu normally (i.e. got on a code path that went
through Game::quittomenu()), the menu music wouldn't play. This is
because FILESYSTEM_unmountassets() was put after music.play(6). So the
game would play the custom level's track 6, and then unmount it, which
meant it could no longer play track 6, but there's nothing telling the
game to play track 6 again. So I just changed the frame ordering around.
I also added a comment to make sure anyone reading the code is aware of
the frame order dependency.
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.
This prevents the game from being saved if you manage to trigger a
savetele() during a "special" gamemode (like if you use the Gravitron
out-of-bounds glitch when replaying Intermission 2, then go to Game
Complete that way).
And this the function with the least amount of cases where its sentinel
value is used unchecked. Thankfully. obj.getplayer() was a bit of a slug
to get through.
obj.getplayer() can return -1, which can cause out-of-bounds indexing of
obj.entities, which is really bad. This was by far the most changes, as
obj.getplayer() is the most used entity-getting function that returns
-1, as well as the most-used function whose sentinel value goes
unchecked.
To deal with the usage of obj.getplayer() in mapclass::warpto(), I just
added general bounds checks inside that function instead of changing all
the callers.
A few months ago, I added ghosts to the VVVVVV: Community Edition editor. I was told recently I should think
about upstreaming it, and with Terry saying go ahead I finally ported them into VVVVVV. There's one slight
difference however--you can choose whether you have them or not in the editor's settings menu. They're off by
default, and this is saved to the save file.
Anyway, when you're playtesting, the game saves the players position, color, room coordinates and sprite every 3
frames. The max is 100, where if it tries to add more, the oldest one gets removed.
When you exit playtesting, the saved positions appear one at a time, and you can use the Z key to speed it up.
[Here's a video of them in action.](https://o.lol-sa.me/4H21zCv.mp4)
This removes the TinyXML source files, removes it from CMakeLists.txt,
removes all the includes, and removes the functions
FILESYSTEM_saveTiXmlDocument() and FILESYSTEM_loadTiXmlDocument() (use
FILESYSTEM_saveTiXml2Document() and FILESYSTEM_loadTiXml2Document()
instead).
Additionally I've cleaned up the tinyxml2.h include in FileSystemUtils.h
so that it doesn't actually include tinyxml2.h unnecessarily, meaning a
change to TinyXML2 shouldn't rebuild all files that include
FileSystemUtils.h.
