Crystal Towers 2 - Speed Test

After a rather long period of total inactivity I finally pulled myself together and got to work fixing the chronic speed problems that everyone but me had in the last prototype. The link is below, and if the game ran slowly for you last time I'd appreciate it if you could try it out again and let me know how badly it works now.

CT2 Speed Test

As far as gameplay goes, nothing much has changed from prototype 2, although there has been a bit of cleanup done in general. The things I've done with regard to speed are replacing all events and actions that continually hammered an INI file into ones that only check it when needed (which is common sense, really) and putting the rotation quality down on small objects that rotate. The blades on the wall of Ironworks don't rotate at all now, and I'll have to replace that with animation of my own.

I hope this works.

Aaaargh!

I've recently been trying to get a new sound for my music, as I've been using the same SNES-like samples for a number of years now and I feel it's time to move on. The trouble with trying to find new instruments is that you need to find ones that sound not only good on their own, but also along with your other samples. And with the vagueness of requirement for a "voice" instrument, that's more difficult than you might think. VSTs are electronic instruments that contain special effects far beyond those of the normal samples-with-volume-information that I usually use, and they're all the rage now (even though they're primarily used in electronic genres like dance), so I downloaded a few and tried them out.

( And this is what I was confronted with. )

I feel I now have to take back everything that I might have once said about dance music. It may consist solely of arpeggios, synthesized chords and 80 minutes of the same drum loop, but that's because you need a PhD in particle physics just to understand your instruments.

Maybe I'll just actually learn the guitar instead.