Re: [Enigma-devel] New levels / Various

[Daniel Heck]

Hi Ralf,

I'm sorry it took me so long to reply to your email--I simply forgot to
:-(

First of all, thanks for your levels, I really like them.  Ibiza in
particular--it looks great!

> When I took a first look into one of the lua-files I was really
> overwhelmed by the power this level-format provides for designing
> levels.

So was I when I first saw Nat's random mazes, his flowing water, or,
more recently, Petr's Lua magic.

Lua is probably the biggest improvement over the old Oxyds.  I never had
the intention to move to a less powerful level format.  The new level
format I proposed recently did include "PreCode" and "PostCode" tags
that may contain arbitrary Lua code that is executed before or after the
level is drawn.  Converting the old levels to the new format would be as
easy as putting the old code in the "PostCode" block.

I'm not sure wether I will actually go that route.  Another idea would
be to use an additional file that contains the level data generated by
the editor.  Drawing the level could then be made as easy as calling a
function like "DrawLevel("oxydm001.dat")" or something like this.

But there certainly won't be any radical changes.

> Ok - now to found fleas and wanted features:
> 
> * When Enigma crashes it doesn't save enigmarc.lua (or .enigmarc) -
> regardless how many levels you've finished before the crash. A good
> idea would be to save it every time when a level has been finished.
> For me it's no problem - I know how to use an editor, but for an
> average user it's really annoying and demotivating.

Good idea, it's on my todo list.

> * I'm missing a hotkey or button in the menu to jump to next
> _unsolved_ level.

Another good idea...

> * I think, when old levels got updated in a new Enigma version, the
> solved-state of these levels should be reset to unsolved.

Resetting them to unsolved would upset everone who spent hours to solve
a particular level.  But tagging the level with an "updated" label in
the menu might be an option.

> * When the level-code of a level is broken during design, you don't
> see any error message (and I did not find any file containing
> messages). The level simply doesn't start, so I had to comment out
> line by line to find the error. boring... :)

If you run "enigma --log", error messages will be written to enigma.log.
The best solution would be an in-game console for messages and
interactive Lua commands, but that will have to wait for a little while
longer.  But in this particular case, a small error dialog sounds like a
reasonable idea.

> * ALT-Enter does not work with Win98SE, I need to change options and
> restart enigma.

This is a problem with the SDL library, and there is currently currently
no good solution I'm aware of.

- Daniel

-- 
Daniel Heck                             address@hidden
Bergheimerstr. 137
69115 Heidelberg                                   tel +49-6221-656047