Instead of modifying the game, cheats now set a separate "cheats were used in this session" variable, which returns some of the old behavior.
HOWEVER, cheats will STILL allow spawning / collecting emblems & unlocking unlockables. Cheats will purely prevent saving progress. (It was always frustrating that devmode would make debugging unlockable features harder...)
Lastly, the function to set no-saving was exposed to Lua (`G_SetUsedCheats(silent)`). Just thought it'd be useful for large-scale gamedata-using mods that want to add their own cheat commands.
- Can now apply to normal stages, simply defaults to "false" in normal stages.
- Post-level cutscenes are now always skipped when the stage was failed.
- Exposed the boolean as a Lua read+write global.
Desired for SUGOI, as it allows for visited flags not be updated, and level completion emblems to not be awarded. Which means a lot less crappy non-ideal workarounds.
Normal stage intermission currently does not reflect failure state at all. Maybe it could always skip, never award score bonuses, have different text... etc. Probably would leave that up to vanilla dev opinion.
Basically a dedicated Record Attack-like experience for speedrunning the game as a continuous chunk rather than ILs. Has several quality of life features.
Benefits include:
* An unambiguous real-time bar across the bottom of the screen, always displaying the current time, ticking up until you reach the ending.
* Disable the console (pausing is still allowed, but the timer will still increment).
* Automatically skip intermissions as if you're holding down the spin button.
* Show centiseconds on HUD automatically, like record attack.
* "Live Event Backups" - a category of run fit for major events like GDQ, where recovery from crashes or chokes makes for better entertainment. Essentially a modified SP savefile, down to using the same basic functions, but has its own filename and tweaked internal layout.
* "spmarathon_start" MainCfg block parameter and "marathonnext" mapheader parameter, allowing for a customised flow (makes this fit for purpose for an eventual SUGOI port).
* Disabling inter-level custom cutscenes by default with a menu option to toggle this (won't show up if the mod doesn't *have* any custom cutscenes), although either way ending cutscenes (vanilla or custom) remain intact since is time is called before them.
* Won't show up if you have a mod that consists of only one level (determined by spmarathon_start's nextlevel; this won't trip if you manually set its marathonnext).
* Unconditional gratitude on the evaluation screen, instead of a negging "Try again..." if you didn't get all the emeralds (which you may not have been aiming for).
* Gorgeous new menu (no new assets required, unless you wanna give it a header later).
Changes which were required for the above but affect other areas of the game include:
* "useBlackRock" MainCFG block parameter, which can be used to disable the presence of the Black Rock or Egg Rock in both the Evaluation screen and the Marathon Run menu (for total conversions with different stories).
* Disabling Continues in NiGHTS mode, to match the most common singleplayer experience post 2.2.4's release (is reverted if useContinues is set to true).
* Hiding the exitmove "powerup" outside of multiplayer. (Okay, this isn't really related, I just saw this bug in action a lot while doing test runs and got annoyed enough to fix it here.)
* The ability to use V_DrawPromptBack (in hardcode only at the moment, but) to draw in terms of pixels rather than rows of text, by providing negative instead of positive inputs).
* A refactoring of redundant game saves smattered across the ending, credits, and evaluation - in addition to saving the game slightly earlier.
* Minor m_menu.c touchups and refactorings here and there.
Built using feedback from the official server's #speedruns channel, among other places.
Please look at the merge request description for a full explanation, since I know the vanilla team has been hashing this out and I don't want to add fuel to the fire without at least presenting a solid case.
