Manic Miner Redux

[JianYang]

3 hours ago, DigitalDuck said:

I'm not overly fond of the other sprite, mainly the way they're filled, but I think it's fixable. I'm not sure what it was ever supposed to be, but that makes it a fairly normal Manic Miner sprite.

If you're asking what sprite in the game it's supposed to be: it's that weird red thing in The Freezer. Four balls at the ends of a cross rotating around each other.

If you're asking what real life item it represents: I have no idea. Could be a molecule or a space ship or some kind of toy...?

Your Jell-o (or whatever the British equivalent is) seems to fit better in a freezer.

Quote

That's why I feel that lowering the spikes into the ground is the better solution - it keeps the movement through the level as intended without creating an option that wasn't there in the original game.

I did not really understand what your fix was supposed to be, but I was pretty sure that my solution made it easier than yours would.

I'll try your fix next.

And your text based level format: easiest level editing I've ever experienced. Big thumbs up!

Edit: I played through all 79 other levels in Redux Long. I could finish them all.

Edited October 2, 2023 by JianYang
memory malfunction

[DigitalDuck]

4 hours ago, JianYang said:

If you're asking what sprite in the game it's supposed to be: it's that weird red thing in The Freezer. Four balls at the ends of a cross rotating around each other.

If you're asking what real life item it represents: I have no idea. Could be a molecule or a space ship or some kind of toy...?

Your Jell-o (or whatever the British equivalent is) seems to fit better in a freezer.

The latter - I recognise it matching the sprite from the SAM version but I have no idea what it's supposed to be.

Jelly (as it's called in the UK, not to be confused with US jelly which is UK jam, and US jam is also UK jam but a different type of jam... don't worry about it) certainly fits better in a freezer, that was my justification for using the sprite. In every other case of that sprite I replaced it with a fairly generic ball sprite, but in The Freezer the jelly just fit too good.

4 hours ago, JianYang said:

I did not really understand what your fix was supposed to be, but I was pretty sure that my solution made it easier than yours would.

I'll try your fix next.

The fix I'm thinking is this:

It maintains the idea of "you can drop onto the key but no further", for all settings.

4 hours ago, JianYang said:

And your text based level format: easiest level editing I've ever experienced. Big thumbs up!

Edit: I played through all 79 other levels in Redux Long. I could finish them all.

Being easy to edit levels is a big benefit when I'm including so many levels! I'm planning on implementing a level editor at some point, and some of the format will need to change, but it'll be the same in spirit; the idea is to make it easy to do it both in the text editor and in-game.

I'm glad the other levels are doable with original physics; I did play through the ones that I thought might be problematic to make sure and did fix a couple, but clearly this level escaped.

There are still a few additional levels, of course. The levels included in MMR that don't appear in Redux Long are:

• The Meteor Storm - BBC Micro
• The Dragon Users Bonus - Dragon 32
• The End - Dragon 32
• Not Central Cavern - Oric Atmos
• The Bonus Round - SAM Coupe
• Tic-Tac-Toe - Special
• Maze - Special
• Movable Platform - Special

Most of these are just because they didn't really "fit" the existing levels (of course, the special levels were never supposed to). In addition, there are three levels from the original versions that aren't included in MMR at all:

• In a Deep Dark Hole - Oric Atmos
• The Twilight Zone, Part I - SAM Coupe
• The Twilight Zone, Part II - SAM Coupe

The reason for not including these three is that they intentionally obscure which tiles have which properties; while these could be included it would take a lot more effort to do so faithfully.

[JianYang]

8 hours ago, DigitalDuck said:

There are still a few additional levels, of course. The levels included in MMR that don't appear in Redux Long are:

• The Meteor Storm - BBC Micro
• The Dragon Users Bonus - Dragon 32
• The End - Dragon 32
• Not Central Cavern - Oric Atmos
• The Bonus Round - SAM Coupe
• Tic-Tac-Toe - Special
• Maze - Special
• Movable Platform - Special

These work all fine on original settings. There is one weird behaviour though: When moving against a wall in The Maze Willy will get stuck at the bottom until you release the direction key. Hard to explain. I hope the screenshot helps.

This could be completely consistent with Speccy physics though. I don't think I've ever encountered an arrangement like this in a Spectrum MM game.

I don't see why these couldn't be levels 81-88 in Redux Long. But that's no complaint. I'm fine with it either way.

8 hours ago, DigitalDuck said:

The fix I'm thinking is this:

Tried it, played it, finished it, works fine. Of the three versions I tried, this actually was the easiest but I guess it's just because I tried it last and had a lot of training with the others before.

 

[DigitalDuck]

50 minutes ago, JianYang said:

These work all fine on original settings. There is one weird behaviour though: When moving against a wall in The Maze Willy will get stuck at the bottom until you release the direction key. Hard to explain. I hope the screenshot helps.

This is known and it's deliberate to allow climbing walls by alternating solid/non-solid blocks. Unfortunately it looks especially weird when it comes to collapsing ground and I'll probably tweak the behaviour to force a drop if you're not holding the jump key. It wasn't present in the original engine.

[JianYang]

1 hour ago, DigitalDuck said:

It wasn't present in the original engine.

Could this be an option then? I would really love a setting that has all the original behaviour. Not that it's a big deal, but out of principle I like my Manic Miner to behave exactly like 1983 Bug Byte Manic Miner. Maybe at the very bottom of your todo list? I would be even more grateful than I am now.

[DigitalDuck]

4 hours ago, JianYang said:

Could this be an option then? I would really love a setting that has all the original behaviour. Not that it's a big deal, but out of principle I like my Manic Miner to behave exactly like 1983 Bug Byte Manic Miner. Maybe at the very bottom of your todo list? I would be even more grateful than I am now.

There are already a few cases where it doesn't behave identically to the original game - you can no longer clip into wall tiles by entering them from the corner; you can now jump into narrow hallways from the right as well as from the left; and Willy's head is solid while walking left. I don't plan on porting the original behaviours for these, even as options.

I'm happy to implement an option to turn off the wall jump, but as you say it's low on the priority list - there's nowhere in the original game where the level design would even have that effect, and only a couple of levels in the whole of MMR so far.

[JianYang]

2 minutes ago, DigitalDuck said:

and Willy's head is solid while walking left.

I never knew about that one.

2 minutes ago, DigitalDuck said:

I'm happy to implement an option to turn off the wall jump

I'll take it. Thank you.

[Spider]

On 10/2/2023 at 11:14 PM, DigitalDuck said:

 

I like the look of that. 🙂

Meteor Storm , (BBC) that was a royal pain to play on the actual machine, very difficult imo, at least Skylabs was fair! 🙂

[BadVideoCard]

A bit annoying but I was unable to get Manic Miner Redux 11 to launch on either of my PCs (Windows 10).  Here's the error message that pops up...

Oh, even more annoying is that I cant even attach the image :o(

[DigitalDuck]

11 hours ago, BadVideoCard said:

A bit annoying but I was unable to get Manic Miner Redux 11 to launch on either of my PCs (Windows 10).  Here's the error message that pops up...

Oh, even more annoying is that I cant even attach the image :o(

Can you at least quote the error message? I'm assuming it appears as soon as you try to open it?