Sly 1:Difficulty

Difficulty, also called suck, uSuck or noob mode, is the mechanic by which the game dynamically becomes easier or harder depending on your gameplay.

Sly 1
In Sly 1, the player is assigned a uSuck score between 0.0 and 1.0 for each individual level. These scores are stored on the level states and persist between loads. There is a global  struct called   that tracks some difficulty values and stores a pointer to the current   struct.

Difficulty Levels
Sly 1 has three difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard, each with a corresponding  struct in the executable. During a level transition, during execution of the function, the game calls. This function sets the current difficulty level based on the following conditions:


 * If the gameworld is Paris/the Hideout or The Cold Heart of Hate, or if the current worldlevel is a hub , then it sets the easy difficulty.
 * If the key has not been collected on the level (the  flag is not set), then it sets the medium difficulty.
 * In all other cases it sets the hard difficulty.

Later on in level transition, the game calls. This function compares the player's current uSuck on the level to the current difficulty level.
 * If the player's current uSuck on the level is above the difficulty level's, it grants the player a silver charm. This value is always 0.4.
 * If the player's current uSuck on the level is above the difficulty level's, it instead grants the player a gold charm. This value is always 0.8.

Changing Suck
On the easy and medium difficulty, your uSuck increases by a 0.1 each time you die. Triggering a checkpoint for the first time lowers your suck by 0.8, and collecting a key resets your suck to 0. These changes happen by function calls to,  , and   respectively.

On the hard difficulty, uSuck is always locked at 0, even if something would normally increase it. This is because each difficulty level stores a limit that the suck value is always clamped between; for easy and medium, this limit is from 0.0 to 1.0, but for the hard difficulty this limit is from 0.0 to 0.0.

Coin Drops
Difficulty also controls how many coins you get when you break something or kill an NPC, but this is not controlled by the difficulty level. Each time the player breaks something, the function  is called to calculate the number of coins to drop.

Sly 2
In Sly 2, uSuck seems to be set on a per-mission basis{{. It ranges from 0.0f to 1.0f and increases each time you die or otherwise fail a job.

The uSuck value is used by the level scripts to make certain aspects of the game easier. For instance, in Moonlight Rendezvous, Neyla will normally only wait 5 seconds{{check}} for you to catch up before you fail the job. As your suck increases, the time she waits also increases up to a maximum of 20 seconds.{{check}}