Unclump'm

Well, I've been using AppleAssault as a regression test when developing the new collision engine ... really just to make sure I'm not broking everything up, as there's nothing in AppleAssault that could benefit from the new engine, anyway. No pushable/carriable ennemies, no platforms. Nothing.

But of course, being in that source tree again (^_^), I wanted to give some ideas a try. The first one was to integrate berrybats in the game, as a way to force the player to focus on defeating applemen, and not just hop around. It now acts like a sort of indirect timer, appearing when you've been unfocused for too long... and appearing again and again until the lesson has been learnt :)
I'll need to work on the timing, though, so that the game doesn't become completely unfair :P

The second thing is linked to Kirby Kid's comments: Applemen tend to stick to each others, overcrowding on platforms, which isn't very realistic. I don't want to go for goombas-like behaviour: Applemen are design to be able to cross each other. Still, there shouldn't be 10 of them on 2 pixels. So I need to have a sort of applemen/applemen collision detection, but that should be handled with care, otherwise I could easily overload the collision engine with hundreds of (unnecessary) checks and dry the DS batteries in no time.

The approach I picked is to take advantage of a small transient state where the Applemen halts in front of a cliff, checking whether it will jump -- which you'd barely notice when playing the game. Only during these 2 frames, it actively checks for other Applemen in its immediate neighbourhood, and get "knocked out" of the platform if there was. Expect a revised .nds file to download in early February, as now, I still need to remove a *lot* of debugging printf ... and have a shower...
Oh, and some coffee would be nice as well... And a commit :)

Cheers :)