dcfedor's blog

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Mostly relaxing here, and discovering just how little insulation our old house's walls have :)

Back at work, I set about fixing the way AIs interact with locks. Previously, they could just grab anything they wanted from any container. But now that we have locks, that won't do.

Instead, I added code to selectively control whether the various "get item" functions allow bypassing locks. And the need for this varies quite a lot!

Hey Folks! Busy day today, as we continued to smooth out the salvage experience.

K-Leg station got a bunch of upgrades to shore-up the process of offloading and buying loot. There's now a dedicated hardware store and shopkeeper, from whom we can purchase tools to salvage, or sell tools we find. I also adjusted the forbidden NPC zones so the shopkeepers would stay in their store.

The shop back rooms and HVAC/reactor rooms on K-Leg are now behind locked doors. And I made a bunch of changes to ensure locks are reset when ships get spawned from templates.

Hey Folks! Today I tackled a few remaining bugs, so that I could finally test the stuff we've been working on: looting a derelict!

The first order of business was to fix the velocity calculations in the celestial bodies. After Chris upgraded a lot of the code to honor Sir Kepler, the velocities were no longer accurate. We chatted a bit about it yesterday, and he suggested we numerically solve for V, since the direct calculation would be a lot more complex/slow.

Hey Folks! Some more progress to show today on both locks and UI, plus a small fix to celestial mechanics involving precision.

The main thing on display today is data cards, which are sort of a stopgap I've added to cover our data/info item needs. Each PIN lock needs a unique code, so the first thing I did was to setup ship initialization to assign one to each lock when finished.

Hey Folks! Wall-to-wall busy today adding new interactions with the crate, and upgrading the interaction system.

First task of the day was to make it possible to use a laser torch on a crate. And this actually went really smoothly and quickly. Within minutes, I had crates breaking into scrap parts and spilling their contents on the floor with my trusty laser torch. A few bug fixes are necessary to ensure scrap loot didn't appear inside my crew when it happened, as well as a spawned loot not appearing where it should.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Since this is Canada's Thanksgiving holiday, but we're living in the US, we celebrated "Fakesgiving" yesterday. We had friends over, and a feast that left us all eager for leftover o'clock :)

Back at the office, Michael has his latest updates checked-in, and you can see them in action in today's screenshot. Inventory grids!

Hey Folks! Decided to tackle the UI for unlocking a crate with a PIN code today. Plus, Michael's off and running on his crate inventory grid. And Bjørn is starting to look at footstep audio based on tile material!

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about the lock UI, and scaring myself from working on it, before I decided to just dive in. Currently, I want the game to support a few different lock types, for use on different items. Some things require little security (a locker), while others should be near-unbreakable (access codes to a ship helm).

Hey Folks! Slower day today (visually, anyway). I did a bunch more behind-the-scenes work on some systems, plus more admin, planning, and discussion.

The behind-the-scenes stuff has a tiny bit of visual impact, which I show above: Saturn's moons!

I was getting ready to test some inventory UI things, and tried to create a save game in my test room. But loading the save crashed.

Hey Folks! Some pieces coming together nicely since yesterday. We have a new crate room for testing locks, and locked doors are now working!

Today's screenshot shows Michael's CrateRoom ship, which we're using to test these latest salvage actions. It consists of a central room with a crowbar on the floor, and doors leading to other rooms for testing.

Hey Folks! A bit more progress on the looting/salvage loop today, plus some movement on the audio front!

Michael was able to check-in a new layout for testing locked containers and doors. It vaguely resembles the opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: behind a closed airlock, a locked crate sits bathed in light, beckoning :)