Sure thing, I’ll give it a shot later tonight when I package 0.9.29 for windows/mac.
Dev Log
Notable changes in 0.9.29:
-Fixed a lot of bugs, moved things around on the map
-Fixed some bugs with swipe (probably affected things like whirlwind, etc, too) that made the attack target the same enemy many, many times
-Fixed a lot of display bugs with the enemy panel
-Fixed some unhandled errors / infinite loops with guided melee attacks that can’t find targets (b/c enemies are phased)
-Added more lighting to Act IV cutscenes
-Fixed some skill stat preview visual bugs
-Fixed rounding/display errors
-Fixed enemy visual errors (worms grow armor when forzen, etc)
-Added a failsafe for typos in enemy wave data - malformed entries will be replaced by bright pink “error” sheep (This avoids a crash)
Also, I’m working on a super special battle that is currently living in Bonus Battle 8’s slot, and as of right now it’s kind of super broken, but should get polished up pretty quick as I fix some of the crazy things I’m doing there. So if you try battle 8 and it’s weird, that’s why.
Okay, so Mac/Windows/Linux builds are up. EXE, DMG, TAR.GZ/DEB/RPM.
Version 0.9.29
Please give them a shot and see if they will work. The big change is that there is now ONE extra dependency - an external assets.swf file in the bin folder, so I’m interested to see if this is going to work in the various different installers - I want to make sure my packaging scripts didn’t leave it out.
The linux links are broken - missing /files/ in the path and “_” in defenders_quest. Luckily the directory can be http://www.bugs.fortressofdoors.com/test/files/.
First try with tarball, I get black screen after clicking Start Game 
, same with the .deb package, in both cases it looks though as if all necessary files were installed.
(And no errors in the console)
Shucks, well that’s what testing’s for. I’ll see if I can repro the errors on my linux mint build. Perhaps it’s a permissions issue - maybe I need to chmod the assets.swf file so that it’s got read permission or something?
— Begin quote from "larsiusprime"
Shucks, well that’s what testing’s for. I’ll see if I can repro the errors on my linux mint build. Perhaps it’s a permissions issue - maybe I need to chmod the assets.swf file so that it’s got read permission or something?
— End quote
I’ve checked permissions and found nothing eeird in game and save directories.
Might be an issue on my side, haven’t ran older versions on this machine before.
happens with tarball and .deb the same. music plays, there is no config.xml in save dir.
Edit: Older version (the one from January) works fine (at least doesn’t get stuck and shows saves, didn’t bother to check further)
What’s almost certainly happening is that it’s not loading the new assets.swf file located at bin/assets/assets.swf, relative to the main game swf.
It’s either firing an unhandled error (which I should catch and force a crash with so I can read what’s going wrong), or it’s just hanging forever because the loading simply never finishes. If the permissions seem fine, those are the only two things I can think of, other than it looking for the file in the wrong location.
I’ll put in some more verbose error handling code and give it a vigorous try on my linux mint box to see what’s going on. I can probably reproduce the error and get to the bottom of this on my own build. If I can reproduce/fix the error on my box, I’ll upload a new copy and we’ll compare notes.
I noticed that I don’t have a config.xml file - and that’s the last failed file open of the DefendersQuest binary according to audit log. And I verified that absence of config.xml doesn’t cause a problem (and presence of it doesn’t resolve it - I used the old working version to get the config saved and the new still didn’t run.
There were no other failed open calls, so it doesn’t look to me to be an issue with locating/opening the assets file.
Will we see the gold version today?
This game is truly crack in game form and I NEED my fix. 
/Chase
EDIT: I guess not…
Hey!
So, we mentioned earlier that July 1st was our “soft target” date to be done by. Well, that’s come and gone and we’re not quite done. Rounding the corner, though. The main things that have held us back have been waiting for artists to finish some assets, and giving Anthony some more time to finish the last few bonus battles/sidequests. That and the endless parade of bugs/tweaks
Today, I just got the bulk of the new enemy art into the game. It’s very likely I’ve introduced new visual glitches with status effects, etc, as these need some offsets typed in to make things line up correctly in various places (wave bar, overworld battle preview, enemy select menu, battle sprite, selection box, etc)
I have the new dragon battle sprites in hand, but they’re not integrated yet. I have about 1% of the cutscenes left to polish up. We’ve put revisions to the UI way down on our priority list, I’d like to fix it up if we have time, but we can ship without it.
The new test build is 0.9.31 and it’s up on the test servers now.
When will Gold version be done for sure? Hard to say, but the end is in sight. I can say for sure that we won’t be able to release until I get back from my trip at the end of July, though, so we’re shooting to launch in early August now. Hopefully, we’ll be done before then and just testing the release candidate, so that we can launch as soon as I get back.
My goal this week is to finish every last bit of art integration, so I can focus squarely on bugs. Lord willing and if the creeks don’t rise, Anthony will finish his work on the bonus battles and we can get a release candidate ready soon after.
Other big things left to do:
- Figure out why the linux build pipeline is broken (still haven’t had time to investigate this - on my list for tomorrow)
- Do some security hardening to the website and game client
- Update the website to reflect the new art style (this can wait until RC)
No worries mate, keep up the good work! The wait is horrible, but I know it will be worth it.
Hey y’all, it’s July 4th today so I’m going to go drink some beer, eat fried food, and other allegedly (American) patriotic activities.
Expect a similar absence next May 17th while I drink beer, eat grilled fish, and other allegedly (Norwegian) patriotic activities.
We can deduce from these two data points a strong correlation between independence movements and beer.
See you guys tomorrow with some fresh updates about the game!
Okay, just got version 0.9.32 ready, and tried the Linux version… which is NOT cooperating. It gets past the loading screen, and the update check, and hits the title screen - which indicates to me that the asset files must have loaded correctly. However, when you hit “start” it just hangs on a black screen forever. Weird. I’m going to try to dig deeper, and with luck we’ll have a working linux build today. If not, monday.
Meanwhile I’m uploading the windows build. Here’s what’s new:
- Cleaned up animations here and there, still need to tweak them a bit.
- Summon/boost anims now have a start frame with a full-color picture of the character, so you can tell who’s who when you summon them in pause mode. This frame shows for only a fraction of a second, so it doesn’t spoil the cool “enveloped in blue flames” animation when played at normal speed.
- New dragon art is in.
- Playing around with some new targeting options I’ve had coded up for a while. I figured we might as well see how they work since I had them ready, but if they cause a lot of bugs I’m prepared to take them out so we can get gold edition out the door.
I changed the visual layout to be symbols rather than words (with tooltips to help explain), and I added 4 new targeting “options.” These options are not like normal target modes, which you can only have one of at a time. These options can be checked on and off independently in addition to whatever your main target choice is. Usually they “stack” on top of whatever your normal target priority is. They are:
CHEAP
Only use the best techniques if there isn’t a “cheaper” one available that will kill the current target. Avoids overkill. The logic isn’t super smart, so I’m not sure how well it handles multiple targets.
EFFECT
Optimize status effects. IF the current attack has effects, try to hit an enemy that has the least amount & time of that effect. When considering two “equal” targets w/ regard to status, fall back to the normal targeting. So, if wrenna targets “first” with this on, she will hit the SECOND enemy if the first has chill already, and then the third, then hit the first one again when it’s chill wears off. Likewise, “last” with this will make her do this, but starting from the back of the line. Useful for spreading out status effects.
CHANCE
Hit the enemy you’ll be most effective with. This takes into account enemy dodge & resistance, mostly only useful in NG+ mode. This will favor the enemy that has the lowest chance to dodge, and given targets with equal chance to dodge, which has the least resistance to your attack. This accounts for darkness, and is smart enough to know whether the dark enemy is currently lit up or not - it just looks at the derived dodge bonus. This does not take phasing into account (which you just can’t target anyway) nor does it look at enemy weaknesses (I don’t think any enemies actually use weaknesses in our data set), nor does it take bleed into account (though i suppose it could).
BULLDOG
Once you pick a target, never let go. When you activate this, whatever your current target is stays that way until it dies or leaves your range. This was requested for very strong and tough enemies with high regen that would fall in and out of target priority when target was set to “strong.” This option is the most likely to be very situational and only useful for exerts who know what they’re doing.
Finally, I added an option where you can manually “disable” techniques. Just click on the technique charge-up bar. This way, you can manually save up your high-level attacks if you think a defender is about to waste it on a single worm or something.
We’ll see how these work. My goal is to provide some extra tools without confusing new players, cluttering up the UI, or making people feel obligated to micro-manage. In general I feel a TD game is about indirect control rather than having every single dude make 100% optimal decisions, but when they’re making blatantly stupid mistakes, especially as a result of new features the originally targeting system couldn’t cover, that should be addressed.
Let’s see how this works and see if it’s worth keeping.
Additionally:
I added a fix where target “Strong” takes spawnable “cargo” into account. So a splitter with 100 HP that spawns 10 enemies w/ 100 HP each has 1100 HP for the purposes of calculating which enemy is the ‘strongest.’ Please note that russian-nesting-doll type enemies (a splitter that spawns a splitter that spawns a splitter, etc) will only be calculated down to the first “layer” of spawnables for purposes of targeting - this should be enough for all but the most exotic edge cases that you’ll likely only see in mods, though.
Bugfixing:
Looking at the linux build, what’s interesting is that according to my debug logs, the Save slot menu simply never loads, it doesn’t even look like the State_SaveMenu is even created. This is very weird. Perhaps it’s a file read error being thrown somewhere. Gonna try something else…
Interesting note: State_SaveMenu doesn’t have its own contructor function in my code - don’t know how the compiler let me do that!
Flixel uses the create() function to initialize the actual data, and in order to actually create the object it’s probably defaulting to the FlxState constructor. My theory is I’ve stumbled across a discrepency in the Windows and Linux AIR platforms - the windows version apparently doesn’t care if you leave out a class constructor if it has a default one to back up to. The Linux version might have a problem with this. Only problem with this theory - why did it work before? Who knows. I’ll test/debug and get back to y’all.
Update:
NOPE. Save slot menu constructs,just doesn’t do anything else. Weird. Well, linux build will wait till Monday but I’ve narrowed down where the bug is now!
Super-thanks for the targetting stuff - and I quite like the implementation (separated main principles and secondary criteria).
Now we only need to be able to preconfigure our defenders
Have fun! Though I guarantee you the new options will probably have weird/suboptimal side effects, so I imagine at least some of them will be conditional.
— Begin quote from "larsiusprime"
Have fun! Though I guarantee you the new options will probably have weird/suboptimal side effects, so I imagine at least some of them will be conditional.
— End quote
Maybe you could by default have them hidden and allow a config button to toggle them, with a warning that they’re a bit experimental - so you could ship them in Gold without worrying much about catching bugs, especially since we can expect most of the possible problems to be extremely hard to reproduce…
Okey dokey, just got the Linux builds working again. Had NOTHING to do with the new asset pipeline.
The culprit? Some destructor function buried deep in the bowels of the code wasn’t checking to see if a member object was non-null before trying to access it. On windows, this was no problem as apparently the object always existed, but on Linux some wrinkle would make it null just before it was accessed, throwing an error, which would bubble up through the chain and never get handled, and happen at just the right time so that the flixel engine never resolved to a proper error screen.
It’s fixed now, and the Linux build seems to run. I’m uploading 0.9.32 for linux as we speak. Should be up in about 10 minutes. Mac build to follow.
Mac build version 0.9.32 is being uploaded as I speak.
While I was testing it real quick, I noticed that some of the backgrounds had mysteriously reverted to their old pre-gold versions, even though everything else was new… anybody else seeing this? Is it happening in windows/linux too? Maybe someone overwrote some of the background images in the last SVN commit or something. Anyway, if I’m not just seeing things I’ll investigate and fix that on Monday.
EDIT: found it, I’d flipped the “compressed” flag to true by accident, and the compressed graphics aren’t up to date with the uncompressed just yet. Will reconcile monday.
Okay, so I fixed the graphics bug from the “compressed” flag being accidentally set. This was likely the cause of the random crashes which all said something like, “can’t find image X”, etc. This fix will be up in version 0.9.33+
Additionally, I’ve changed things so that the maximum number of points a skill can have is no longer hard-coded at 9, but is instead whatever you define in data. So, for all characters this is currently still 9, with the exception of Azra, who can go up to about 15 or so in her spells. Anthony has rebalanced a lot of the spells, which you can read about in http://www.defendersquest.com/theforum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=319. The biggest change is that lightning, healing, crystal, and dragon fire will now track Azra’s attack stat, which grows with her level.
Some other planned changes I’m working on as we speak include making lightning/dragon fire/crystal hit dark enemies 100% of the time.
Lots of other bugfixes and other miscellaneous stuff to follow today. We’ve also got a pretty big announcement, but Anthony is being all “responsible” and making me wait to spill the beans until we know 100% for sure. He’s probably right :lol:
— Begin quote from "larsiusprime"
Some other planned changes I’m working on as we speak include making lightning/dragon fire/crystal hit dark enemies 100% of the time.
— End quote
Just a small clarification - I think that lightning already works that way (might be a bug though 
) - and I think that logically speaking, dark creeps should be hit by ALL area attacks - definitely pure AoE such as Ice sleet and Blizzard, almost as definitely by splash from Fire breath, Fireball and Ice splash - and possibly also with Swipe (as that sounds to me like an area attack, unlike whirlwind where we can assume that it’s a row of mad individual hits).
(Also I’m not sure whether ranger’s triple and spread shots should qualify as area attacks in this sense, especially the side ones. That is, ranger aims her middle arrow, so that could miss the dark creep by the logic of “I’m hard to aim at”, but the other arrows are flying blindly and hence should behave like area ones. And the same goes for ice spear on all but the first target).
To compensate for the easier killing, dark creeps could then receive a small (10%) boost to HP.