Murder Mansion

by SuperSaiyanGokuX
Murder Mansion
Not for the faint of heart...
ID:1317964
 
Time for Murder Mansion update preview post number 2!

As I mentioned in the first preview post, the game has gotten a facelift in terms of the icons. It looks considerably better (in my humble opinion), but that aspect was really only one of the least important of all of the things I've done to the game for the coming update.

This post is going to be a boring one (no screenshots!) and probably very TL:DR-ish, that will run over some other relatively minor upgrades that have been made.

1) Programming

More or less completely invsible to the player (except in places where it fixes a bug or glitch), virtually every bit of the programming has been touched in some way. There have been complete re-writes of procedures, there has been a lot of code consolidation and simplification, there has been a ton of (what I hope to be) efficiency improvements, etc.

This is actually a HUGELY important aspect of the update, but I call it "minor" because it won't really matter to the player...lol

I tend to do this first-thing when I re-start work on one of my big projects (back in the day, I would spend a few months to a year on DBTC, then once that was released, I'd spend the next few months to a year on MM, and back and forth; and each time I get back to one of them, I run through the code to apply everything new that I've learned, and clean it up)

Well, in this case, it was a little more extreme than my usual. I hadn't touched Murder Mansion (or Dream Maker in general) for several years. So when I began this development cycle, I had to completely refamiliarize myself with everything. And that meant reading my code line-by-line. and doing that led to finding all kinds of redundant sections of code that I eliminated, places where my code was improperly structured, etc. etc. etc.

So I'd say that about 80-90% of the programming has been re-written.

Of course, I'm sure that this will mean some new bugs have been introduced (that I haven't yet triggered or noticed), but overall, I think that the code base is now much more robust and functional.

2) Sound

The sound files themselves are still the same (I once had dreams of either recording my own SFX, or at least editing those in the game to sound cleaner and more unified (and less like I just pulled a bunch of sound effects from the internet and tossed them into the game), but those dreams never came true.

Instead, I've made some improvements on how sounds are presented and controlled.

First off, is the volume control. In previous versions of MM, there was a HUD button that brought up a dialogue where you could select some combination of BGM on/off and SFX on/off.

Now, there is a volume button. Clicking it only cycles through increasing volumes, and only by factors of 20% (clicking it when it is at 100% will turn it off), but even that is more functional than before. (though the current system doesn't allow for control of both types of sound individually; you can turn everything off, or on at whatever level you turn it up to -in increments of 20%, of course- or you can turn on SFX, but select to have no BGM played, but there would be no option to turn on BGM, but turn off SFX)

Also, instead of music just automatically starting; right after you log in, the dialogue comes up to select your BGM (or "None"). I did this because I was tired of not realizing how loud my speakers were turned to when firing up the game, and then being blasted by the auto-started BGM (especially because I tend to do most of my work late at night after the wife and kids have gone to bed). So now, right off the bat, you can silence the game.

It now also remembers the BGM you've selected. So it won't dump the default song on you when you go back to the title screen at the end of the round.

I've also added little tweaks, like a slight variation in frequency of player-generated sound effects, just to give footsteps and weapon noises a little more variation.

And, thanks to a suggestion by CodeWeasel22, I've also added a new BGM selection, "Funeral March of the Marionette" (most commonly known as the Alfred Hitchcock show's theme song)

3) Text Output

I mentioned this along with the graphical upgrades post, but I've made many tweaks to the text output formatting.

I shrank the icons in the text down to 16x16, from 32x32. It felt like the 32px icons were too big and sort of overpowered the text that followed, and also spaced the text out further per line than it should have been.

I've also added the player's chosen color to every instance that their name is output (it used to apply to their speech lines and such, but now it occurs everywhere, like the notifications of an attack or in the output from examining them, etc.) In addition to this, a flag of "(You)" was added when your name is displayed in the text area for any reason. I did this because I tend to let the computer set my name automatically, and I couldn't remember who I was when that name came up in the text area...lol

Player speech and important game notices have been bumped up to a slightly larger font size than the rest of the output.

Colors have been tweaked so a player's text color more closely matches their icon color in the game (the brown used for text output was too orange, the yellow, gold, and orange looked too similar, etc.)

I think that's enough for this "boring" post. I might make the Preview #3 post soon after, just to put out something a little more interesting...lol
:D im a livid murder mansion fan, if there is a game hosted and i see it ill join it immediately xD and id like to say, thanks for murder mansion and all youve done :) hopfully more awesome update will be releases
In response to Shwb1
I think avid is the term you wanted. Livid is generally used to express extreme anger.
Damn I remember playing this way back in the day and having a blast! Glad you didn't disappear SSG and can't wait to play this again!