{"id":792,"date":"2011-02-01T11:10:27","date_gmt":"2011-02-01T10:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/?p=792"},"modified":"2011-02-01T11:10:27","modified_gmt":"2011-02-01T10:10:27","slug":"igor-throw-the-switch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/?p=792","title":{"rendered":"Igor! Throw the Switch!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, this has turned out to be an unexpectedly massive<\/strong> release. Massively changing the game at this stage is, some would say, the work of a man two sandwiches short of a picnic.<\/em> Well, we’re like that. And, I’ve eaten all the rest of the sandwiches, too. And here it is: Revenge of the Titans 1.80. (1.80? Eh? Something to do with Linux package version numbers. Grrr)<\/p>\n

Puppygames customers, get the download here<\/a>. Our new CDN seems rather better than the old one so there shouldn’t be any cache troubles.<\/p>\n

Humble Bundlers will be able to download from their original download links – there may be a tiny delay whilst Humble Bundle Inc. upload the new builds from our servers but by the time you read this announcement I hope this will have been done.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here’s a summary of the changes, or at least those changes I’ve remembered to document. There are probably more.<\/p>\n

Bugs Fixed<\/h4>\n
    \n
  • Fixed: Supershield collect has no sound effect<\/li>\n
  • Fixed: survival mode boss crash at 5m00s<\/li>\n
  • Fixed: Specify LWJGL library path to fix OpenAL problems<\/li>\n
  • Fixed: Titans getting stuck on the map so the level doesn’t end<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    New Features and Enhancements<\/h4>\n
      \n
    • Removed strobe from disruptor tower<\/li>\n
    • Lasers fire through crystals and obstacles<\/li>\n
    • Allow specifiying alternative player data location: use “home=<dir>” on commandline (pathnames with spaces will need \\” quotes around them too)<\/li>\n
    • Preferences now shadowed to slot.xml file inside game home to allow easily moving game between machines<\/li>\n
    • Refineries now automatically generate money at a constant rate and no longer need collecting<\/li>\n
    • Turrets now automatically reload<\/li>\n
    • Smaller building size for reloader<\/li>\n
    • Research is now free<\/li>\n
    • Map size selector on survival mode<\/li>\n
    • Survival hiscores now across all slots, and show the slot name with the highest score<\/li>\n
    • New collector building (smaller)<\/li>\n
    • New reprocessor building (smaller)<\/li>\n
    • Wraiths and flying gids now get harder with difficulty<\/li>\n
    • Counters on mines, barricades, and powerups panel<\/li>\n
    • New building – tangleweb!<\/li>\n
    • 20 more things to research!<\/li>\n
    • Any remaining powerups on the ground at the end of the level are automatically collected for you<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      Balance<\/h4>\n
        \n
      • Crystal scavenging now only 20% of remaining crystal value<\/li>\n
      • Research no longer contributes to game difficulty<\/li>\n
      • Reduced capacitor ammo slightly from 2seconds to 1.5seconds zap time – enough for wraiths but not so good for gidlets<\/li>\n
      • Disruptor damage now 48, up from 36<\/li>\n
      • Laser damage doubled, sweep reduced by 2 degrees<\/li>\n
      • Buffed droid blaster damage to 2pts<\/li>\n
      • Increased droid fire rate<\/li>\n
      • Capacitors now cost $1000<\/li>\n
      • Droid factories now fixed cost of $1000<\/li>\n
      • Collectors now cost $250<\/li>\n
      • Reloaders (were Autoloaders) now cost $250 and have a more pronounced effect on most of the heavier weapons<\/li>\n
      • Cooling towers now cost $500<\/li>\n
      • Scanners now cost $1000<\/li>\n
      • Reprocessors now a fixed cost of $500<\/li>\n
      • Speed up the rush a little<\/li>\n
      • Slowed down the Behemoth a bit (and flying gids in general) during the rush<\/li>\n
      • Survival mode difficulty now no longer influenced by available buildings \/ research etc<\/li>\n
      • Tuned survival difficulty to maximum of up to $50000 in play based on world<\/li>\n
      • Bezerk mode used to double weapon damage – now reverted to normal weapon damage as it made their use against bosses simply too efficacious<\/li>\n
      • Bosses now have less hitpoints<\/li>\n
      • Reduced turret ammunition a little<\/li>\n
      • Batteries now give a little more ammo than before<\/li>\n
      • More crystals, to pay for more expensive turret upgrades<\/li>\n
      • Various permabuffs now contribute 0.5 generally to the upgrade<\/li>\n
      • Difficulty is now open ended, and gidrah hitpoints and speed effectively now infinite<\/li>\n
      • More money in survival mode to start with – plus more money per world<\/li>\n
      • Rockets now take a little longer to reload<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        Internal<\/h4>\n
          \n
        • Don’t let gidrahs roar more than once per second<\/li>\n
        • A tiny bit more variation in gidrah roars<\/li>\n
        • Gidrahs now ever so slightly cleverer at avoiding turrets<\/li>\n
        • Gidrahs now only slowly begin to ignore danger after level shuts down<\/li>\n
        • Gidrah speed now expressed in pixels\/second instead of ticks\/tile<\/li>\n
        • Gidrahs stuck in the map somehow now have GRID_BUG attributed to their cause of death<\/li>\n
        • No longer do angry gidrahs drop powerups when they successfully attack (and die)<\/li>\n
        • Further improved gidrah AI and anti-clumping behaviour<\/li>\n
        • Saved game dir now lowercased and spaces replaced with underscores to make shell twiddling a bit easier<\/li>\n
        • Refactored a bunch of configurable things like building costs research data so it only needs changing in one place. Finally.<\/li>\n
        • Survival mode spawn points now only 1\/3rd as likely to come from the South<\/li>\n
        • New Molebox shouldn’t trip antivirus tools<\/li>\n
        • Upgraded entire source base to JDK1.5 and sprinkled it with generics, enums, annotations, and enhanced for loops<\/li>\n
        • Greatly simplified resource management: it’s now single threaded, always<\/li>\n
        • Sprite engine is now dynamically sized, saving piles of memory<\/li>\n
        • Strings now nulled after resource creation, saving another few megs of memory<\/li>\n
        • Ensure the map generator tries to generate at least one road between the base and a spawnpoint<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

          So What Are The Headlines?<\/h4>\n

          Well, first of all, there’s no more of that frantic clickery<\/strong>. Stop whining right now! It’s better. Much much better. Play a few games to get used to it. You can still manually reload turrets should you feel the need. Refineries produce money constantly anyway.<\/p>\n

          Secondly, research is totally free<\/strong>, but as you will discover, there are another 20 things to research. This means you’ll not be able to research everything before the end of the campaign. You can go back and replay a few levels to change your path and the research is cumulatively available to you in Survival mode. The new research stuff is fun – much of it is super cool like permabuffs and the like. There’s also a new “building”…<\/p>\n

          Thirdly, the game balance has changed significantly.<\/strong> Because you’re not spending money on research, you’re expected to spend it on lots of buildings instead. You are expected to lose a few (or even many) buildings every go, but make it through the skin of your teeth. You’re expected to have to try pretty hard to mine crystals. You’re probably going to have to use all those powerups you used to hoard. Although there’s less clickery going on the game is no less frantically manic, somehow.<\/p>\n

          Autoloaders are now Reloaders, and they speed up the reloading time of turrets, a task which used to be done by Reactors. Reactors now increase damage instead.<\/p>\n

          Collectors speed up the rate of collection from refineries. Reprocessors slow it down, but produce more money per collect. They’re a nice simple flat rate now, and it should be fairly simple to work out where and how to deploy them to make piles of cash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          Well, this has turned out to be an unexpectedly massive release. Massively changing the game at this stage is, some would say, the work of a man two sandwiches short of a picnic. Well, we’re like that. And, I’ve eaten all the rest of the sandwiches, too. And here it is: Revenge of the Titans 1.80.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":796,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}