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This is mostly a bug-fixing update; most importantly all of those annoying replay bugs have been fixed. Thanks very much Weedhopper and Gray for helping me track those down. They were:

  • Replays with snakes sometimes refused to load.
  • Replays with ice would sometimes skip moves.
  • Turkish delight explosions would sometimes remove an additional block in the replay.

There are a couple of undocumented features in this version too:

  • Press 'b' to make a balloon appear anytime during the game (so you can start celebrating prematurely (: ).
  • You can run the game in French! I haven't made a language selection menu yet, but if you'd like to try it out, open config.txt and change language to 'fr' instead of 'en' while the game is not open.

config.txt can be found in 'C:/Program Files/Chocolate Castle' on Windows, or '~/Library/Application Support/Chocolate Castle' on Mac OS X.

The French translation was done by another indie, Olivier Pearl:
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He has a lot of games on there so it's not easy to find his ones (: But check out Crazy Crab, which is quite a fun little web game:
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Other notes:

The replay clobbering bugs have been fixed. Your score will now only be saved if it is lower than the existing one (this was sometimes not the case in v1.02). Also, if you replay a solution to the end, it will not clobber your existing solution or score unless you manually make the last move.

You can now press backspace instead of u to undo (it is closer to enter on the keyboard). You can also use the standard Control or Apple-Z / Y combinations.

Version history

v1.03
Fixed replay bugs.
Added alternative undo/redo keys.
Reloads solution on restart for custom puzzles.
Fixed turkish/ice replay corruption bugs.
out.pod is no longer created.
Icon transparency fixed (OS X).
Fixed best score clobbering bug.

v1.02
Improved BBS support.
Can turn off black line (shift-L).
Many little bug fixes.

v1.01
Fixed audio popping/crackling bug.
Made dark chocolate and the dog a bit brighter.
Music now always resumes on title page.

v1.0
First release.

P#189 2007-05-08 02:40 ( Edited 2007-05-08 06:40)

A small glitch: the setup says it's installing 1.02. The game is indeed 1.03.

P#190 2007-05-08 11:31 ( Edited 2007-05-24 22:28)

Thanks, got it.

P#192 2007-05-08 22:04 ( Edited 2007-05-24 22:28)

Actually, I have an idea for a tiny improvement right away: I think a function to delete the saved replay for a level would be useful. Right now, I have a couple of old, bugged replays that I cannot fix because I can't go below the number of moves in them. Manual deletion could also come in handy in the case that a pasted solution overwrites one's own solution (definitely a rare case now, but possible if you forget how the protection works).

Also, talking about improvements, the editor could use some enhancements like an undo function (for when you accidentally split up a long, elaborate snake :) ) and a warning about losing unsaved work when exiting. It might also be cool to be able to actually play a level, move stuff around and then go back to the editor, keeping the current playing field state...

BTW, those are mere suggestions, I'm actually pretty happy already :)

P#193 2007-05-09 15:10 ( Edited 2007-05-24 22:28)

Great suggestions, Gray - they are all pretty easy to do too. By the way, if you want to delete solutions, it's not too hard to manually edit the player history files. You can find them in 'C:/Program Files/Chocolate Castle' (Windows) or '[your home folder]/Library/Application Support/Chocolate Castle' (Mac OS X).

They are called 'player1.txt' etc. The first 120 lines are the solutions to the easy, medium and hard sets in order. So for example, room 23 (Hard) can be found on line 103 (40 + 40 + 23). You might need to use a text editor which shows you the line number so that you can find the right one.

To clear the solution, remove all the text from that line. Don't just delete the line alltogether, or the subsequent solutions will become offset by one room. You should probably back up your player files first..

P#194 2007-05-09 22:13 ( Edited 2007-05-24 22:28)

A couple more simple suggestions:

  • The editor keeps a replay even after a puzzle is modified. Loading and playing the replay messes up the modified puzzle. The replay should probably be nuked when overwriting the puzzle.
  • It would be nice to be able to use the cursor keys to browse the original levels. That way one could go through levels and watch replays without using the mouse.

BTW, 1.03 seems to hang a lot for me when switching between full screen and windowed mode (black window, close button stops working, have to kill the app; sometimes the app gets closed due to an illegal operation after a while). That never happened with older versions. I guess this could be somewhat difficult to fix.

P#209 2007-05-17 17:03 ( Edited 2007-05-24 22:28)

More good ideas.. they're on my list for 1.04

The windowed mode crashing is a bit worrying. It may be because I've updated to a newer version of SDL which is a programming library CC uses. If that's the case, there will probably be some way to work around it. It works fine on the machines that I have access to though.. perhaps you could post log.txt the next time it happens? Or email it to me.. joseph at lexaloffle dot com. log.txt is a record of events and error messages each time the game is run and can be found in the same folder as choc.exe.

P#212 2007-05-24 18:28 ( Edited 2007-05-24 22:28)

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