Why 1.9 Was Revolutionary

I’ve been waiting for this moment for a while. Today is the third anniversary of 1.9. Just like with every update I’ve covered so far except for 1.8, I’ll be discussing why the update was so important. There were some truly great features that came with this update. This post will begin the trend of using fancy lines in between headings.

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s

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I’m sure s are what all of the cool kids make a few minutes after they get GD. Making one gives you a lot of options such as having friends, showing your icons and stats to others, and being able to comment on levels. Of course, these features weren’t added until 2.0. There were s in 1.9, but all they really did was make your name yellow and give you the ability to click on other people’s names and check out their other levels. It also saved data which was probably very useful for when the game was released on steam soon after where many players could cheat their way to skill.

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3D Objects

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Before 1.9, all blocks were bland and didn’t have any 3D illusions to add to the detail. Adding in 3D outlines wasn’t all that necessary, but it did seem to have an impact on the game. 3D lines can be made to make super cool effects like blocks entering through the other part of the screen as well as other things like the piano tiles in Wysteria. Wasn’t exactly the most necessary feature to the game, but it was probably appreciated by many creators. 3D lines are also super useful for some art, so I guess that’s another impact these objects had.

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Grouping

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This was a feature that didn’t get added until after the actual 1.9 update as it came out in 1.93. Anyways, grouping in 1.9 wasn’t important whatsoever as it just let you group objects so you can focus on some objects at a time without worrying about screwing up other objects. That was probably useful to many people, but what was in the future to come was even better. Triggers were added to the game that revolutionized level making with the ability to make objects move, pulse, or even be invisible! This truly was a feature that made a huge impact, but if it wasn’t for groups triggers may not ever come to be. It’s a shame there’s all of those complicated extras to groups as well such as group parent and whatnot.

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Multiple Color Channels

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Back in 1.8, this is what you could do with color channels even if that saw blade wasn’t even in the game back then.

When 1.9 came out, you then had the option to use as many colors as are allowed on an NES sprite.

Nowadays this seems extremely restrictive, but imagine how significant it was back then. With those 4 colors, people could make the decoration in levels so much more unique. 1.9 wouldn’t be the golden age for effects if there wasn’t 4 color channels to do so. You could even color objects that were once restricted to your player’s color such as clouds and chains. Not only that, but these color channels were extremely important in creating the 9 circles effect! Of course nowadays we have 999 colors to choose from, but people don’t seem to change them as much during the level as they used to do. They just find the next available slot to add another unique color to the level. Of course this isn’t the case for everyone though.

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The Wave

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This was probably the most important form after the UFO. The spider and robot really do add to the gameplay, but they aren’t known for doing anything special for the game besides add some slightly new gameplay. The wave on the other hand was a very special gamemode that flew diagonally and took advantage of the recently added slopes. I’m sure we can all agree it was very hard to control at first and was the only part of Blast Processing I struggled with a few days after 1.9 came out. The form’s biggest impact had to be on fan’s demons. There are several levels out there known for their wave sections such as Cataclysm, Secret Box, the entirety of the nine circles series, and many more that I was too dumb to mention. Waves and ships are usually the main challenge when it comes to hard demon levels, so never adding the wave would have an impact on the game that was already described by someone on here and probably Sea in the future. It’s also probably several people’s favorite game mode.

And what was probably the most needed feature in 1.9 if not the game is...

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Newgrounds Music

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Imagine only being able to use 16 songs in your online levels. Only 16! That’s all that people had to work with back in the day for a while. Then 1.9 came with its redeeming light of Newgrounds music. Imagine how excited people were when they went from 16 songs to 16 million songs. That probably was too excessive of a hyperbole, but you get my point. There’s probably enough songs that every starred level on the server could have a unique song even if sync is super unlikely. People haven’t even scratched the surface of all of these songs and it’s been a couple of years now! It’s a shame that lots of songs get overused and people ask why others decided to use unique song. Then again the arrival of 2.0 made the use of several songs such as 8 bit ones odd.

That’s all for this post. I’m sure none of you care at all, but this is what my icon set looked like when I played GD on my IPad before I started playing on my phone. I actually look decent with this icon set.