What's new in the game?

New music

Fusolis is a track made especially for Super Tilt Bro. by our community member Lemony Bard. Thank you!

Blastlines

In Deeprock and Skyride, the blastlines have been moved away from the stage.

Higher upper blastline on both stages avoids too easy ring-out from the upper platform. Farther side blastlines on Skyride give a bit more breathing off-stage.

Sunny

Added end-lag, and animation frames, to Sunny's down-tilt.

This new end-lag avoid the move to combo into itself while it can be cut by its other typical following moves, like up-tilt.

What's new under the hood?

Flexible blastlines

Fixed blastlines have been a long time itch. It is a simple problem though, each frame we check if a character is past the blastline to declare a ring-out.

Moving the blastlines position from a constant to data would be enough to get per-stage blastline. The problem lies in performance. Hardcoded blastline position allow using immediate indexing, which is the fastest way to do math with the 6502 CPU. In any game, changing the indexing would not be a big deal but Super Tilt Bro. has to keep CPU costs to a minimum when it impacts rollback netcode.

Think about it, there are 4 blastlines, 2 characters and rollback should be able to compute 7 frames. That makes each cycle lost in blastline computation count for 4*2*7 = 56 cycles. This is a case were the mere presence of rollback netcode requires special care.

The solution found is simple enough, and even more flexible: the stage is now responsible for checking the ringout condition. The engine simply calls stage's logic, so each stage can have different hardcoded blastlines. This adds a fixed cost, a routine call per frame, to allow the best possible implementation in the critical section. It also opens the way to have stage-specific optimizations and special cases. A scrolling stage is now possible as well as a stage without top blastline.