I can't believe we're getting all this awesome stuff while the devs are mostly fixing bugs in preparation for 1.0.

Seriously, what's going to happen *after* 1.0? I think the sky will crack open and procedurally generated candy will fall out.

So that's what you guys were talking about in chat this morning! I wandered in late.

Not so bad, then! I guess they must have hinted at it.

(Even the instant-kill water and the poverty-stricken player economy would have been okay, by the standards of the day. But that day/night cycle must've been one of those terrible ideas that looks good on paper.)

That does work:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/906550/assist-3.cap

But it works even if you make the bounding box sprite exactly the same as the original dirt bunny sprite and use per-pixel collision.

So the per-pixel collision isn't the problem.

Maybe a bug?

That's fun! Legs are for wimps.

But I drop to desktop after the circular movement level, too.

Hey Sol, how did you find out that you needed to crouch facing the wall with a red crystal equipped for 5 seconds to get taken away by a whirlwind? In the review, that part just seemed inexplicable.

Okay, so...

Here's a working cap:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/906550/assist-2.cap

(Not quite how you described it, but should be easy to modify.)

Here's how the principle looks in a minimalist setting.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/906550/Test2.cap

It seems there's a bug in families: 'on collision' between families works fine, but 'on overlapping' sometimes causes a crash. I'll submit this to the tracker.

Collision detection between dust bunnies still seems weird in your cap, but it's okay in the minimalist one. Baffling.

I've been wondering about collisions between different instances of the same sprite! The family approach sounds great.

But in this case, I tried the approach using the families, and it mostly worked, but crashed sometimes and I couldn't figure out why.

Then I tried a horrible approach that *didn't* use families, just to see if it was possible. This worked without crashing, but sometimes created enormous beasts due to inherent flaws in the method.

Collision between the dust bunny sprites was always unreliable: sometimes it'd work, sometimes it'd ignore the collision. This happened in all circumstances: family or sprite collision, 'collision' or 'overlapping'. I'm still puzzled about that one.

I might go try this in a minimal setting, to see if I can reproduce the crashes (or better yet, create a working solution). Here's the cap, if anyone's curious.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/906550/assist.cap

PS: Great sunlight!

Impressive.

But I can't think of a use for it, either.

I never saw the show, but I loved the books as a kid. Even though they probably weren't really suitable at my age. (I'm glad I didn't know what 'smegma' meant when I read them the first time!)

Most of the people I know who've played World of Warcraft have ended up playing it compulsively - to the extent where their in-game socialising interfered with real-world interactions. Some players sounded happy, but some of them said they couldn't stop, and those who had quit sounded relieved and vowed never to return.

So I try to stick to games which have limited content: if you're on something like Planescape: Torment, you know that you'll eventually reach the end, and won't find yourself playing just to reach the next level or get the next bit of gear. There's always a chance that the game will introduce something that will challenge your ideas (like the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon, which was a weirdly religious experience).

For you nostalgists: I've heard that LiveDosGames is pretty good for replaying this stuff without too much messing around. It's a kind of minimalist Linux distro that comes bundled with a lot of now-abandoned DOS era games, DOSbox, and settings tweaked to make them work properly.

http://livedosgames.com/

PS: Never heard of Pharoh's Tomb! I think I'll wait for the remake.