Re: SMBX 1.4.5?
Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2020 3:57 pm
I caught on to the kink in bullet blasters pretty quick, personally. And besides, SMBX has always had little chips and kinks in the engine. (Keep in mind that this post is not trying to say "what's one more broken thing," I'm trying to convey that, if this is known about, it can be worked around on both the player's and creator's sides. Besides, most levels besides airship levels don't use cannons, so it's a pretty niche thing.)Eclipsed wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 1:16 amIt has it's niche cases, but the fact of the matter is when most people design levels they don't consider how npcs work that often. Most people would just put a bullet bill blaster down in its default state and pay no further attention to that, which leads to really bad levels with the new canons. It's not exactly newcomer friendly to designers who just want to test stuff out.skyhighway wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 4:20 pmThis change to bullet bill cannons is actually really useful for a couple of contraptions, especially when you play around with other mechanics. Plus, with the addition of a bunch of other code options, 1.4.5 is just the most convenient version to use, creation wise. The only thing it doesn't have is the character editor.Eclipsed wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 3:59 amAs an add on to that, 1.4.5 completely screwed how bullet bills work in the newer version. In this version, every single bullet launcher fires the first pixel it comes on screen, meaning that every bullet bill launcher starts off-screen, making it really unfun. Moreover every single time you pass a bullet launcher it always fires, it took a while to figure out but if you're big and walk off you at non full-speed basically take damage.
I don't know if there's a way to change how the bullet bill cannons work from their default 1.4.5 state, if there is then it could have been implemented in varying ways such as having 1.4.4 blasters as the default and having a toggle between the two versions or having two bullet bill blasters npcs with different properties that differ by their coloring, with a nintendo inspired one for 1.4.4 and a custom coloring for 1.4.5. There were much better ways to implement that change to an npc instead of completely ruining backwards compatibility to episodes that don't even use super advanced 1.4.4 features. Simple episodes that only uses level design mechanics and not advanced features of 1.4.4 become literally unplayable.
Moreover from a player perspective it was not even clear that the bullet launchers always fired when you past them so often times, I thought the bullet bill timing was off when I went to run which lead me to unfairly getting hit multiple times. Bullet cannons don't work like this in Nintendo games (immediately fire once you're one pixel off) so there's no realistic expectation that a player should expect this. It's frustrating to any player using the engine for the first time to just play episodes since they have no idea why they get damaged unless they figure it out for themselves or find the info online