Sly 1:Difficulty
| Game Mechanic | |
|---|---|
 After dying multiple times, you are granted a lucky charm | |
| Game | Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus |
Difficulty, also called suck, uSuck or noob mode, is the mechanic by which the game dynamically becomes easier depending on your gameplay.
Suck Score
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 DIFFICULTY struct called g_difficulty that tracks some difficulty values and stores a pointer to the current DifficultyLevel struct.
Difficulty Levels
Sly 1 has three difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard, each with a corresponding global DifficultyLevel struct. During a level transition, during execution of the function LoadSwFromBrx, the game calls OnDifficultyWorldPreLoad. This function sets the current difficulty level based on the following conditions:
- If the gameworld is Paris/the Hideout (GAMEWORLD::Intro) or The Cold Heart of Hate (GAMEWORLD::Clockwerk), or if the current worldlevel is a hub (WORLDLEVEL::Hub), then it sets the easy difficulty.
- If the key has not been collected on the level (the FLS::KeyCollected 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 OnDifficultyWorldPostLoad. 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
uSuckCharmLow, 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
uSuckCharmHigh, 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 OnDifficultyPlayerDeath, OnDifficultyTriggerCheckpoint, and OnDifficultyCollectKey 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[check]. Each time the player breaks something, the function OnDifficultyBreak is called to calculate the number of coins to drop.