Rush to Flatworld

It took me some time to get all the special block types working again with the new collision engine for GEDS. Partly because there were places in the scripts that referred to some block identifiers which I had to squeeze from 8-bit to 6-bit. I managed to make it a lossless squeeze, but some bits had special meaning. 

Like all the blocks identified 1xxx or 3xxx triggering actions even when collided by a monster while 0xxx and 2xxx would require a HERO cast. Or like the second character of the id xXxx indicating whether the block would act as sky (x0xx), water, block (x2xx) or floor when not interacting.

Avec le recul, ça me fait un peu penser à un donjon Zelda où on viendrait de trouver l'objet-clé. J'ai un nouveau mécanisme pour gérer les types de blocs sur DS, conquis après une lutte opiniâtre contre les vilains bugs (pensez aux wall masters) et les émulateurs récalcitrants (grosses statues à déplacer vers une dalle-interrupteur au hasard dans la pièce).

Et du coup, je dois retrouver les différents endroits où je peux à présent reprendre le développement. Editeur de niveau amélioré ? Programme de conversion vers un nouveau format de map ? Plus de types de pentes ? chacune de ces "petites clés" supplémentaires seront nécessaires au final pour pouvoir faire une version jouable de la maquette "desert zone" que j'ai en tête, et un bon nombre est aussi utile pour débloquer une conversion correcte de la "green zone". Mais là, je suis dans la salle avec trois portes et je dois choisir la bonne.

But well, it finally works fine for level 1 of school rush, and adapting other levels should now become easy as I patched the "rules.gam" shared file instead of patching directly the level commands.

And while working on it, I also mapped the whole set of "tile properties" that were in use in School Rush. That will help for introducing the new tile types. In addition to the 'special' blocks, some will have direct flags for the 'cando' operations and some will have indirect flags (i.e. you have to lookup a table to know their properties). The idea is to reduce the comparison stress for the 'normal', 'empty' tiles. We may keep the 'monster cage' tiles, but they would be seldom tiles compared to plain 'air' tiles and allow an extra table lookup.

Well, that last part is not yet done. And to be honest, I feel so tired that I'll need to go back to my little "remember you had no blog" notebook to see what has unlocked with the newest achievement and which target should be my next goal. I can't even dare to do that on screen :-/