Cool I am open to adding anything as long as I have the assets, but at the same time I would like to keep everything customizable.
that'd be some work, and by that I mean busy work because of all of the UI work needed to add it, and I wouldn't want to keep such a setting in the final project.
The speed settings are controlled by 6 constants.
struct PanelSpeedSettings
{
int swap;
int pending_fall;
int falling;
int pending_match;
int first_removed;
int subsequent_removed;
[...]
};
swap is the number of frames it takes to swap a panel
pending fall is the small delay in frames when you swap a panel over a gap before it falls
falling is the number of frames before a panel moves down 1 row
pending match is the number of frames for blinking
first removed is the number of frames before the first panel disappears.
subsequent removed is the number of frames to remove the next panel that has been matched.
Below is the current settings for these per mode
PanelSpeedSettings easy_speed_settings = {4, 6, 4, 66, 33, 11, ...};
PanelSpeedSettings normal_speed_settings = {3, 5, 3, 45, 25, 9, ...};
PanelSpeedSettings hard_speed_settings = {2, 4, 2, 33, 17, 6, ...};
The numbers are in frames and the order matches up with my struct above (e.x. in easy a swap takes 4 frames, pending_fall is 6, falling is 4, etc).
About how much of a difference is it?
Yeah as a reminder the whole replays thing I added only for my debugging, so the code for this I would say isn't production ready code. I was playing with it yesterday and it seems to work for me. Can you try with a shorter replay. I have never saved anything that was more than 2 minutes of gameplay.
And I saw that with my playtesting yesterday, it does allow you to extend a chain, but it shouldn't. This may require some extra thought as to how my code determines if something is a chain or not.
That is the main piece of logic behind time attack. I can really have the mode implemented with no fancy things in about 30-50 lines of code or less, the timer would have to count down instead of count up.
Extras would be stats display at the end (number of combos, number of chains, etc.).
The stop timer I may have broken at some point. For each match you make I make some calculation on if it is eligible to cause a timeout and how much seconds of timeout you should get. Right now if you are already in timeout and you create a match the two values of the remaining time you have left and the amount of time you have earned are compared and the timer is reset to the greater of these two values.
Alright fast rise should only be allowed if all blocks are currently idle. Got it.
You learn something new everyday! Misconception on my end I always start by flattening the stack and then rising the blocks to the top then making my matches, so that's where that incorrect behavior came from. Actually that makes a lot of sense why the blocks would do that by columns and not the whole board. That is a nice user interface thing.
