Guards and their one weakness: 3-tile jumps

[FluffyQuack]

So, I've been reverse-engineering POP2 for a while and I stumbled upon something I found rather amusing.

This jump breaks the AI in seemingly every version of the game except 2:

prince_014.png (15.08 KiB) Viewed 182 times

• DOS "IR" pre-release: The enemy doesn't even complete the jump and falls down.
• DOS v1.0: The enemy completes the jump!
• Mac: The enemy completes the jump!
• FM-Towns: The enemy completes the jump... and then stumbles back and falls down when trying to enter combat stance.
• SNES: I couldn't get an enemy to appear in the room.
• DOS v1.1: Fails same way as FM-Towns.
• Xbox: Fails same way as FM-Towns.

I can't remember there's any other 3-tile gaps in the game that enemies will try to cover, so this might be a bug that almost no one sees as you have no reason to not keep running in that screen, but I found it funny this only works correctly in the launch versions for DOS and Mac.

I didn't try the Sega Genesis and PC-98 versions, but I'm willing to bet they fail the same way as FM-Towns.

I'm not sure why the IR version fails, but I notice DoRunJump() is slightly different in the two versions, where v1.0 allows to nudge a character back a little bit more for a jump, so that could be why.

I don't know why the later versions fail. Maybe they introduced a bug at the end of OppChasing() that's meant to nudge an enemy forward when they stop running while there's a dangerous tile behind them.