ReTux - News
ReTux 0.4 Released
Item posted by Layla Marchant <onpon4> on Sun 14 Feb 2016 03:29:43 PM UTC.
Another release of ReTux is out. As before, it can be found in the downloads page. The password to decrypt the archives is the same as the previous releases.
With this release, World 4 is now finished, and all that's left is the 4-level World 5. Additionally, everything else about the game is finalized. Other than the last four levels and possibly an additional bonus level, the only work left to do is actually on the SGE Game Engine and xsge_tmx (something to reduce ReTux's currently large amount of RAM usage).
Also with this release, I'm trying something with the distribution. What I've done is produced archives for Windows and Mac users that basically just bundle the installers for Python and Pygame. I've also produced an archive for GNU/Linux users that includes instructions for some common distros and includes the Pygame source code just in case (Python is typically available, so it doesn't need to be bundled). This is something I've also done with Pacewar. I would like to hear some feedback on this, especially from Windows and Mac users, if there are any. If this works out well, the CD will be a combination of all three distributions, so that no additional downloads are necessary for most users.
Other than the new levels (which bring the total number of levels up to 37) and the addition of distributions bundled with Python and Pygame, the most notable improvements in this release are:
- Control customization now applies to the menu controls. Up and Down move the selection up and down, Sneak moves the selection down, and Pause, Action, and Jump all choose the current selection.
- It is now possible to define up to two keyboard controls and two joystick controls for any one action. Thanks to this, the default joystick controls also include both the analog stick and the d-pad as options for movement by default.
- The behavior of rocks is now much improved. The previous behavior was prone to bugs and did some things that weren't particularly desirable.
- Crushers (Krush and Krosh; the Thwomp-like enemies) are now treated as solid blocks. This causes them to push you before hurting you, makes it possible to use them as (dangerous) stepping stones, and causes them to stop the movement of various objects (most notably rocks).
- The jumping physics have been tweaked slightly. Basically, it's a little less "floaty" than it was before, which reduces the length of horizontal jumps. The main reason I did this is because long jumps were so absurdly long before that designing a level to require one meant asking the player to make a leap of faith. Long jumps are now much shorter, and some levels (such as the castle in World 4) require them.
- New sounds have been added: a proper dedicated rusty spring sound, and a fire dissipate sound.
- Sound effects are now positioned.
- Ice bullets now heal walking iceblocks, rather than having no effect.
- Ice bullets now repair thin ice blocks which are cracked.
- When a level is being loaded on the worldmap (happens a lot if you skipped preloading, and also happens if you play a level a second time), text is shown to tell you that the level is being loaded.
- Save data is now written to the disk immediately. Previously, it was only actually saved to disk on exit, which wasn't a problem if an error occurred, but would have resulted in loss of data if Python segfaulted, for example (which I've seen happening on Windows; I guess this might be a result of running out of RAM), or possibly if a power outage occurred.
- The title demo sequence has been changed to be simpler and less prone to failing.
Other changes include:
- Auto-kicking for rocks is back.
- Some tweaks have been made to existing levels.
- Now defaults to Python 2 instead of Python 3 (since Pygame is typically harder to get for Python 3).
- The timeline scripting language has been made a bit more powerful.
- advpng has been used on all of the images, reducing the size of the distribution slightly.
- Some tweaks have been made to walking bombs and walking iceblocks.
- Enemies can now be created in a frozen state, walking bombs can now be created in a ticking state, and walking iceblocks can now be created in a flat state.
- Spawned objects can now have arguments passed to them.
- Carried objects now all have their xscale values changed to match the players, so it doesn't look like they magically flip when the player drops them.
- Game completion will never be 0% unless absolutely none of the game is completed, and will never be 100% unless absolutely all of the game is completed. It was previously theoretically possible for a levelset with more than 50 levels to either show 0% completion when some of the game was complete, or show 100% completion when some of the game was incomplete, due to rounding.
- Ticking bombs' facing now change when they change movement direction by hitting a wall or enemy.
- Level 13's name has been changed to make the joke more obvious.
- Raccot has been finished, or at least I think he has. It's untested.
- Objects are now repositioned on the Z-axis when entering or leaving warps. This prevents graphical weirdness in some areas.
- Various bugfixes.
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