v0.8.0: a longer Echo of Hatred, two players choosing at once, smoother ice caves

A longer Echo of Hatred with a break between waves, two players choosing their characters at the same time, smoother ice caves on the Pi, and monster fixes. On top of v0.7.1.

Echo of Hatred

• Ten waves per act (before, five), so there is time to level up before each boss: Andariel on wave 10, Duriel 20, Mephisto 30, Diablo 40 and Baal 50; the Pandemonium bosses from 60 to 100; a named boss on the sixth wave of each ten. The difficulty climbs per act as before, spread over twice as many waves (monsters gain a level every two waves).
• A wave ends when every monster is dead: once its quota is killed no more come, and the panel shows how many are left. The named boss has to be killed too.
• An 8-second break between waves, with a big countdown, to spend points and equip what you found; when it ends, whatever is still on the ground vanishes.
• 35% more potions than in the story (from monsters and from the final chest).

Two players

• With two gamepads connected, both choose their characters at the same time, each with its own cursor (gold for player 1, blue for player 2) and READY when chosen; a new character's class is chosen inside its own box, so both can create characters at once. The game starts when both are ready. With one gamepad they still choose one after the other.

Performance on the Pi

• The Act 5 ice caves (Crystalline Passage, Frozen River...) dropped a lot of frames with two players: building the "A: Talk to..." prompts compared every quest object's name against every unit, four times per frame. It now only looks at the units around each player. Drawing the HUD buttons over the darkness also got cheaper. In split screen inside the caves, a frame now takes 14-15.5 ms to draw instead of 21.5-23 ms, with exactly the same image.

Monsters

• Death Mauler: its underground claw attack now works as in the original: it digs, a trail of earth runs toward you and the claws burst out under you after a delay that grows with the distance (before, the claws appeared at its own feet and never hit).
• Act 2 vultures are visible while they fly (they still can't be hit until they land), with their flying and landing animations.
• Imps play their teleport animation.

Tested

The five acts with two players, the whole Echo of Hatred (fifty waves with one and two players, Baal and the Pandemonium cycle to wave 100), the character screen with two players (choosing, creating, the same character twice, changing, deleting, the local network), screenshots compared byte by byte before and after the performance changes, and the Pi, Linux and Windows still compute exactly the same game.

Install / update

Download diablo2-port.zip (Pi and Linux) or diablo2-port-windows.zip (Windows) and replace the port; your saved games are kept (Echo records were made with five waves per act). To play over the network, all machines need this same version.

This is a fan-made project, not affiliated with Blizzard Entertainment.