Bass Abyss v2.0.1 – Custom Maps Form and Scores Restored

by IRA

Bass Abyss gets a maintenance update to restore features not supported by previous versions of Ruffle.

Notable changes

  • Restored Custom Maps Form.
  • Restored High Scores.

Read after the break for more details.

Custom Maps Form

The Custom Maps Form provides the ability to play new Bass Abyss levels created by anyone.

If you want to give it a quick spin, copy this text

Then go to Bass Abyss, select Custom Level, then the Paste Code tab.

Right-click inside the text area and select Paste.

Select a character and now you are good to go to kill some Cacodemons.

Creating Custom Maps

Custom Maps are text documents written in XML. Once created, anyone can load the XML code in Bass Abyss to play it.

Instead of guessing what XML is, there is a Level Editor you can use to generate new maps.

If you find this interesting, then you can read the related documentation. The tools are pretty dry, from a lost era, but maybe you can get them to work after some tweaking. It is what I have used so far.

High Scores

The transmission and the internal display of scores was based on a legacy technology called Action Message Format (AMF). I abandoned it and now use something closer to current web standards. Still, I am limited by the restrictions of mid-2000 web technologies, so it is not exactly REST but it’s close enough and gets the job done for now.

I have also noticed that some international characters are not displayed correctly. I hope this will be fixed in newer versions of Ruffle.

Final Notes

Unless I am missing something, all the major features of Bass Abyss should be restored. The salient issues fixed in this update were the last ones on my TODO list. And, since Ruffle was upgraded, expect at least some improvements in speed and graphic effects.

Have fun!