Shift
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| Animated GIF of the Shift gimmick in action. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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The Shift is a gimmick in the classic Mega Man series, first appearing in Mega Man 4. It allows tiles in a stage to move within a section, creating areas such as the rising and falling submarine in Blizzard Man's stage, the shifting water tides in Dive Man and Centaur Man's stages, or the crushers in Dust Man and Mercury's stages.
Shift was first available as a devkit gimmick in Make a Good Mega Man Level 2 (under the name Vertical Shift), but it didn't function properly, and therefore went completely unused. Though the Wily stage Water Ducts and the Tier X stage Hardcore Parkour featured shifting tiles, they used separate objects from Vertical Shift (the former using two slamming ceiling and floor water objects).
For the Megamix Engine, Vertical Shift was completely rewritten into a more versatile object capable of moving in more directions. This new Shift was first used in Make a Good Mega Man Level: Episode Zero, where it appeared in five levels, most prominently in Shift Posting. It then went on to appear in the Make a Good 48 Hour Mega Man Level entries Caution: Moving Parts and Slipping Through Time.
Shift returned in Make a Good Mega Man Level 3, and saw a higher amount of usage in levels, appearing in the entries Radium Man, An Underwater Adventure? Wow!, Interspatial Compression, Falling System Core, and Just a Water Level. It was also used in the Tier X levels Thermae Man and Hollow Elysium; the NEO Pit of Pits sublevels "Crush Depth", "Find Your Land Legs", "Frantic Falling", "Future Facility", "In the Retail Version, I'm Much Funnier", "Room with Trash Heaps", and "Wood Man's Doomed Space Program"; and the Shrine of Nebula rooms "Shift Posting 2: The Shift Hits the Fan" and "Restored Beta".
Behavior
When placed and stretched over a collection of tiles, a Shift object will convert all solid collision objects (excluding ladders and spikes) beneath it into movable entities, while manually moving water. It will then move them according to the specifications in its creation code (detailed below), with any tiles beneath it similarly moving. In Make a Good Mega Man Level 2, rather than setting its ending position in creation code, it will stop and backtrack when touching a separate stopper icon. Any entities covered by a Shift object will also be moved, though only if their blockCollision value equals 0 (otherwise, only their spawn coordinates will be affected). Although spikes cannot be shifted, one can recreate them by placing down objSolidEntity objects and giving them a high contactDamage value in creation code.
Shift has a high number of creation code variables:
- posX = Sets the coordinates for the object's horizontal movement relative to the object's top-left corner. Using arrays, the starting position can be set to posX[0] = 256, and the ending position to posX[1] = 512. By specifying only the starting coordinate, the object will not move horizontally.
- posY = Sets the coordinates for the object's vertical movement relative to the object's top-left corner. Like posX, it uses arrays to set its start point and its end point.
- posT = Defines the relative time coordinate for each location, thereby controlling the speed of the object. Like posX and posY, it uses arrays, and must start with a value of 0 and increase (therefore, to give a consistent speed to the Shift object, instead of posT[1] = 60 followed by posT[2] = 60, the user must make posT[2]'s value equal to 120). If an additional posT value isn't specified, by default a value one greater than posT[1] will be assigned, potentially causing the object to make rapid jumps.
- isCyclic = Set to true by default, but if set to false, the object will stop upon reaching its ending position and never move again.
- secX and secY = If defined, the Shift object will only exist in the section specified by the respective coordinates. Otherwise, it uses posX and posY's values.
- tileLayer = The tile layer the object looks for when moving tiles. Any tiles on the specified layer (1000000 by default) that the object covers will be moved with the object.
