Project: Starfighter 2.4

I was going to say that this was another small bugfix, but it ended up being a bit bigger than we expected, so we’re bumping the version number of this up to 2.4. This came about from us fixing a massive bug that caused music to not be installed properly (oops!), but then snowballed as we found more and more improvements we wanted to make, mostly to the simulation of Project: Starfighter version 1.1 via Classic difficulty. In fact it’s so close to version 1.1 now that we were able to outline all the noteworthy differences in a dedicated page on the website, Old Bugs and Behaviors.

The notable changes include:

• Added a Dutch translation contributed by Heimen Stoffels.
• Made it so that the player starts at the same part of the screen in Classic difficulty as in version 1.1 (which is in the top-left quadrant rather than in the center).
• Made it so that critical shield (that is, when you have only 1 shield left) causes more smoke particles to be generated.
• Fixed a bug where Kline could continue circling while running away, causing him to flee diagonally at a rather slow speed (and also allowing you to kill him pretty easily).
• Fixed a bug which caused music to not get installed properly (it was being installed in the sound directory instead of the music directory).
• Made the Venus mission start in the same way as version 1.1 in Classic difficulty (albeit with a shorter delay, since the dialog is shorter than it was in version 1.1).
• Made it so that the game doesn’t go unresponsive to the OS when dying or after winning the Venus mission (meaning you don’t have to wait for the game to proceed to the Game Over / Credits screen before you can quit the game normally, and also preventing weird bugs if you resize the window during that time).
• Made it so that resizing the window in the credits screen repositions the credits text to the new center.
• Simulated the smaller Kline health bars of version 1.1 in Classic difficulty. While Kline’s health bar is still the larger size, its display is broken up into sections so that it now perfectly simulates version 1.1’s Kline health bar behavior (a previous release already caused the portions of the health bar to be reduced in “steps”, so they already behaved as if they were multiple health bars in Classic difficulty).
• Made it possible to switch to concentrate mode even with the Super Charge in Classic difficulty, as was the case in the original.
• Caused star position to be recalculated when you resize the window. This prevents weird gaps in the starfield when you make the window bigger in the middle of a mission, for instance.
• Added an option to compile a binary that will attempt to use the original music. We won’t be distributing that music because that is a violation of copyright, but for those who have the music and want to mod it into the game (no pun intended), it is now possible to do this without changing the source code. Simply pass SF_OLD_MUSIC=1 as an option to the configure script and it will attempt to load the original music file names and use them exactly as version 1.1 did.
• Corrected the damage of micro rockets and triple-spread plasma bullets for Classic difficulty. These were both doubled at some point for balancing, so Classic difficulty now lowers the damage they inflict to their original values.