Just snagged this because I liked the old versions. Had to turn motion filter off to get it to run on my AMD card but runs great now. I liked Deluxe ages ago. Huge bosconian fan. So thanks for your work, and I hope to see more of it!
Hello, and thank you very much for your support! Not sure why the motion filter would do that, but then again, I'm not massively surprised, and was going to suggest trying to disable that, among other things. Glad you got it working! :-)
Meanwhile, 0.7.5.1 doesn't have THAT problem here, but instead, I can't seem to get any sound out of it! Not seeing any of these problems with my development branch (latest SDL2 + various fixes and updates), so I guess it's about time for an update... :-D
More on the slowdown. It's not the motion filter.I have to fiddle with video settings to get things to "stick" sometimes. Changing from windowed to full screen and changing resolutions back and forth. Eventually it will stop running slow. Bit weird. Will give more info. Also, does this game just let you infinitely run through it? Are there lives or anything?
Awesome! Your feedback is greatly appreciated - especially since I've never seen these particular issues before.
The audio engine relies on "flywheel sync" with the game logic in order to provide constant latency sub-sample accurate timing (as opposed to typical engines that just play sound effects as soon as they see the commands, "quantized" to buffer boundaries) - but this will fail miserably if proper timestamps are not available, similarly to the rendering and game logic.
If you set the skill level high enough (or play far enough into the game), you will probably end up in a situation where you have to keep retrying for a good while before you can progress. So, indeed; you'll never run out of lives, and could keep retrying forever, but you may well end up in a situation where you just can't progress, and have to start a new campaign instead.
Of course, there could be a limit of five rewinds in a campaign or something - but then you wouldn't have the option of coming back later, and see if you've honed your skills enough to continue that "impossible" campaign. :-)
I see! That makes (some) sense, as 3D accelerated windowed mode is notoriously problematic. I'm guess it is indeed one of those cases of the driver not synchronizing every frame, but I'm not quite sure what to do about it, as that's something that's supposed to Just Work(TM) with SDL. (I'm not using OpenGL/Direct3D directly in this game, so I don't have direct access to the full APIs.)
I'll see if I can make a build with the latest versions one of these days, so we can see if that has any effect on it.
Well, I've seen a number of ATI/AMD specific issues through the years, and even did the occasional hack to get applications to work with them, so it's not all that far off to assume they're at fault yet again. ;-)
Not much I actually can do through the SDL API, as it wraps these details - but I wouldn't be surprised if there are workarounds in newer versions of the library. You might want to try replacing the SDL.DLL that comes with the game with the latest one (2.0.12, 32 bit) from here:
https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php
That rings a bell... Have you tried with/without retrace sync? I've run into a few drivers/environments where frames are not synchronized under certain circumstances, which results in a buildup of enormous numbers of queued frames between the application and the driver. Naturally, that will completely foil any attempts at managing timing.
Anyway, yes, as it is, the game's 50 stages will repeat, with increasing difficulty, just like XKobo/Kobo Deluxe. Everything will be maxed out (constant bullet hell) somewhere around stage 400 (IIRC), but the 50 stages will keep repeating indefinitely.
However, in Redux, I've replaced the lives with a shield, and a time rewind/replay system, so while you only have one life, if your ship is destroyed, time is rewound, and the events leading to the time of destruction are replayed exactly as they happened. By pressing fire at any point during this replay, you can take over the controls, and resume the game from that point.
So, basically, I've made the game completely unforgiving in that the only way forward is to actually handle the situations your run into - but instead, you can rewind and try different strategies as many times as you need. My thinking behind the rewind/replay system is that it gives the player a fair chance at actually learning how to handle difficult situations, rather than just brute-forcing through them at the cost of previously gained ships, or even "restarting" the game with a full set of ships on the current level.
Yeah I figured out that time restart thing pretty quick. I just wish for a back breaking game. It's pretty satisfying trying to play without dying, as you can be hit several times. After you get past the first region it really starts picking up fast and I love it. If there are achievements at some point, beating it all without ever getting blown up should be one for sure.
Yes... Achievements have certainly been considered (at least for the Steam release - but one might as well implement local achievements for other builds, I suppose), and it would make sense to add some actual cost to the rewind thing, and/or some kind of reward for avoiding it, but I'm not sure how to go about it. Although it won't let you bypass anything, it's still kind of "free infinite retries" as it is.
On that note, I have some ideas for future versions, leveraging the rewind/replay system in a more interesting way. A bit radical, but it has been done before. :-)
https://github.com/olofson/koboredux/issues/560