[1.1.2+/SW] "Lo Wang in Time" difficulty

[NightFright]

"Lo Wang in Time" has a bug with enemies (and also other sprites like babes) not showing up ingame on difficulties lower than "Who Wants Wang". This can already be observed in the very first level of the addon ("The Beach"). Load it in TG/IHNF and you will have no enemies plus no babes at the beach. In WWW, everything looks fine.

Apparently lower difficulties (Tiny Grasshopper/I Have No Fear) work under DOS and with Jonof and SWP ports. Redux and Raze can't handle them. VoidSW not tested.

There aren't that many custom addons for SW out there, so it would be nice if it was possible to make this one work as intended.

[Phredreeke]

WangGDX has the same issue. I assumed that the mapper simply hadn't placed enemies for lower difficulties.

Raze would likely have inherited the bug from VoidSW, but I don't know how it'd end up in WangGDX too since to my understanding that was ported from the original source release. Interesting.

[Graf Zahl]

This is a bit weird because none of the existing ports deviates that much from the original source. Maybe some undefined behavior at play here?

[NightFright]

Well, it must be done in a way nobody else did since this is the only mod with this particular problem. Need to take a look at the sprites in a map editor, maybe the difference is visible there.

[NightFright]

Two more addons (might) show abnormal behavior:
- "Santa Wang": Same as "In Time" (no monsters below third difficulty level --> this could be intentional here, though)
- "Rampage Warrior": Enemies appear, but remain static (don't attack) and cannot be killed (maps show 0 monsters to kill) on ANY difficulty

[sinisterseed]

This is a bit weird because none of the existing ports deviates that much from the original source. Maybe some undefined behavior at play here?

This was my thought as well.

I find it curious that it supposedly works in SWP, it probably has a fix somewhere in this case.

[Graf Zahl]

All monsters in "Lo Wang In Time" are flagged for skill 2 or higher only. No idea what SWP did here but it'd be pointless - the mod does not have skill levels implemented.
The only skull related difference would be health of the bosses.

[NightFright]

Then flagging the babes to appear on skill 2 only as well was just plain stupid. Guess SWP applied some internal hack to show enemies on all skill levels. I doubt there were less on lower difficulties, for that you would have to individually flag certain sprites and I can't imagine they went through this effort.

But well, at least it's some kind of solution: If only one skill level is implemented, apply it to all others.

[Graf Zahl]

My guess here would be some "prevent those wimps from playing on cheater skill" nonsense. There are a few hard coded differences between skills - mainly boss health and it looks very likely that the makers of this mod wanted to screw over players wishing to play on easier skills - so they only implemented the two hard ones.

I have added a countermeasure now, but complemented it with some skill downgrades if the condition is met:
If the chosen skill is one less than the minimum supported one, reduce the health of the special ninjas to the one of the base type. If the chosen skill is two or more less, replace all special ninjas with the base variant, reduce the health of the female ninja by half and do not spawn coolie ghosts, making the skill selection useful again for such mods.