[NES consistency] Statues' firing behavior is wrong

[Imzogelmo]

OK, so I've posted this topic in every incarnation of the bug forum for every version since Phantom Menace first introduced us to Zelda classic, but here goes again...

There are actually 2 issues that I'm aware of:

1. Statues in the NES game don't fire if you're too close. Testing this on NES (or emulator, doesn't matter) proves it. It's been a while but I seem to recall that what matters is if Link is within a tile width of the statue's (invisible) location (which is not aligned to the grid but that's OK because ZC gets it right). [EDIT: I'm not sure if it was 32 pixels or 48, but a quick test can determine this.]

2. Statues also cannot fire at any arbitrary angle. They can only fire in 1/16 of a revolution. This means that certain positions far away from the statue are always safe due to its inability to actually target you.

Seeing as this is a bug in the shooter behavior, the base game needs to have this capability. I have, however, made a modified version of Saffith's Homing Fireball Shooter using autoghost which does have the correct behaviors, by giving "safe zone" distance and "granularity" (i.e. how many directions out of a revolution) as miscellaneous attributes.

Unfortunately, this has gone on for so long, it would probably be best to give the shooter class such attributes from the enemy editor itself, so that the default quests could be modified and not break every other quest in the process.

[ZoriaRPG]

You didn't specify a version of ZC in the report: Saffith changed shooters in 2.50.2. Have you tried that version of ZC (to confirm that this is still a problem)?

Naturally, people have already complained that this breaks their quest 'difficulty', as shooter rooms now have safe spots.

I don't know if he changed them to shoot in specific directions, but he did change them to fire only at a specific distance. I agree that most of these things would work best as an enemy editor setting of some sort, for a default statue.

We could also fix 1st/2nd.qst similarly, with a scripted statue.

[Imzogelmo]

I admit, I don't think I've checked the safe zone distance on 2.50.2, so I'll have to check into that. Still, the angle thing is another loophole which smart NES players took advantage of...

I'd prefer an enemy editor solution for the shooter angle (and safe zone distance) in this case. Unlike my opinion on the Grave-combo thing, I don't think a workaround for 1st and 2nd quest would be appropriate here. Injecting scripts into 1st and 2nd quest to do what the game is supposed to just do, seems wrong somehow (yes, I know about the existing one, but that seems fitting as it's an original game bug).

Also, having handy editable values for the angle granularity makes 4-way or 8-way (or 16-way, as NES default seems to be) trivial to implement without needing a script. With the addition of a phase shift value, it becomes possible to do 4-way diagonal (i.e. feed it 4 for granularity and 45 degrees phase offset). You could keep 0 as a special value meaning it can fire directly at Link (as division by 0 would be a problem anyway...) and that would keep all old quests as a default anyway.

(Note to self: recap of desired miscellaneous values on shooter: safe zone distance, in pixels; aiming angle granularity (number of directions to fire) with 0 meaning any angle; phase offset, added to "up", preferably in degrees, I hate radians, lol; projectiles are homing, boolean 0/1)

[ZoriaRPG]

You're right, of course, but givenwhere everything is going...patching 1st/2nd.qst for the time being would be a viable stopgap until we fix this.