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Sunday Oct 23rd, '05 @ 10:58pm
Chat system
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LRX
posted by mike
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I worked on the chat system a little bit today. Just some fine-tuning, mostly. Before, I had it so that you could turn the chat window on or off and move it around with the mouse. This become kind of cumbersome, though, so I changed my approach. Now, the chat dialog only appear when you are typing a message or when you receive a message. When you receive one, it moves onto the screen (from an offscreen area) for a couple of moments, then it returns (unless, of course, you start to type something in response). Actually, it might have a couple of problems appearing right now -- it worked at times, but I'm not sure if it worked every time -- but the system works well, definitely better than the previous approach.
I also finalized the gold-chase modes. Now, you can just set 'gold needed to win' to 'all' (or 'no pickup'). I played a couple of games set like that, and it's different (not in a bad way). It actually seemed pretty easy for the gold-hunter to get the gold and win (we played this in the level in last update's screenshot). I had 2 enemies, and it still didn't pose a great challenge. I'll probably end up using at least 3 enemies and giving the gold-seeker only 3 total lives. That might work the best.
I also made it so that you can't hang onto a rope for very long. Before, you could launch a rope then just hang out, effectively preventing death forever. Now, you only have a short time, then you drop (if you don't move first). This will help to prevent annoying stalemates.
