Pickups

[mspraggs]

For example keys and items to gain points, additional abilities.

[Fyll]

I apparently had a stab at this a fair while back (before the holidays, I think...) and looking back at it now, there is a mostly empty class for the pickups, and the +1 point and +1 life pickups work (even if they are invisible). I believe I then ran out of pickup ideas and stopped.

[mspraggs]

Could we have some pickups that give the player temporary abilities or something? Such as weightlessness, invulnerability, or something?

[DivFord]

Neat idea! Though if we use them as part of puzzles (which is presumably the point), they'd either need to last until you left the room, or to respawn when they wore off.

[Fyll]

Until-end-of-room would probably be easiest (just turn them off when the player relocates). Weightlessness and invincibility are (suspiciously enough) both things that already exist, so would be easy to implement.

I'm not sure advertising the dodgy floating controls would be good (nor the fact that he runs in mid-air), and invincibility might be a tad too strong.... Still, temporary abilities do seem like a good idea.

[mspraggs]

OMG please please please can we have a bullet-time/slow-mo pickup? Just ran things through valgrind, which slows the game down. Seemed pretty cool.

[Fyll]

That'd be most easily done by just calling a function in Time that halves the frames per second (or, multiplies by some passed in factor so that we can speed things up to). A bit hacky, but straightforward.

As much fun as I'm sure it'd be, what would the puzzle side be? Perhaps as an easy mode (to make jumps easier to time)? Or just as a fun bonus thing?

Also, what would it be? If we also create a double-time item, we could have them both be a stopwatch, then there'd be the question of whether it helps or hinders you (like the poison mushrooms in Mario).

[mspraggs]

Actually yes, valid points. I'm not sure what use it'd be. Perhaps if there were some part where timing was difficult, such as an enemy that attacks you quickly, or a series of jumps that are difficult to do and must be done in quick succession.

There's an idea: blocks that explode when you step on them for too long. I'll create a new issue.

[DivFord]

If the world slows down but not the player, that gives it lots of possibility for puzzles. We wouldn't be able to use Iain's way of doing it though (halving fps).

[Fyll]

Room slows down but not the Player... This is drugs, isn't it? :P

Seeing as the Player has a pointer to the Room, Room could just have a function and variable for the delay between updates (although treating the Player as a special case would be a bit ugly).

[DivFord]

It's clearly the robot overclocking himself...

[Fyll]

Oh, I feel I should mention that the new collision engine has a time step parameter (In Skeleton::updateNode() there's a variable holdTime declared as 1.0f. That's the time step, I just didn't know what to do with it). So if you want a double speed or half speed pickup, that should be okay (just for the player though. Picking up the item, then making everything else slow down would be a bit fiddlier, but still should be easily achievable).

[DivFord]

I found a pickup sprite sheet in my art folder. Apparently I made it a while back and forgot about it. I have now pushed it.

[Fyll]

I've changed Pickups over to using the same data parsing system that Units use,so it should be easier (in theory) to add more later. Also, because of the ability to leave messages in the data files, feel free to randomly add a bunch of Pickups if you can think of any, even if they don't have any code yet.

EDIT: E.g. I've added some slippers (that remove drag until the end of the level), and Matt's speed-up/slow-down Pickups (although these really should not be used at the moment. That code just makes things wierd...).