dcfedor's blog

Hey Folks! Despite yesterday's big announcement, most of my time was spent actually developing. So I have a fair amount of progress to share!

I tweaked the job menu layout a bit to look more streamlined and consistent, and started working on a second menu for action tasks. The first menu lets us setup build/install tasks, and this new menu will likely include things like "cancel task," "uninstall," and "clean."

Hey Folks, big news today! As some of you might have already noticed, a new publisher was announced today. And they're going to be publishing Ostranauts! Introducing, Modern Wolf:

Hey Folks! I'm still sort of midway through the latest work on build menu tasks, so I decided to show some of Chris's progress in today's screenshot.

Chris has been rewriting the visibility/lighting code to support arbitrary shadow shapes. Previously, all walls and items had to have shadows made up of axis-aligned blocks, which looked bad when paired with diagonal walls and other non-orthogonal shapes. His work makes those shadows line-up with the visuals of non-square items.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. The city was throwing a kids party in the park, so that was a big chunk of the day. And chatting with my folks back home is always nice.

Back at work, I managed to get a decent amount of coding done. And even a bit of art!

Hey Folks! A bit of work today on a different task type, some UI tidying, and revisiting the job queue.

Even though I can now add and remove tasks based on damaged walls appearing and being patched, there are a few other task types I'd like to support. And one of them is something Michael proposed a while back: a periodic maintenance or check-up task.

Hey Folks! A good chunk of the day was on admin stuff, but I did manage to wrap-up most of the automated task system I was planning.

I ended up having to change the way IDs are assigned to objects when they mode switch. I needed the old ID applied to the new object before it started receiving conditions, so tasks triggered by adding a condition would have the right ID.

Hey Folks! Mostly a dev day today, though I did need to get a few important emails out.

I continued work on the tasking system from yesterday, this time trying to get automatic task generation setup. So far, we've generated new tasks whenever items of a certain type were added to or removed from the ship. This works if you explicitly define a listener for each named item type, but we're expecting to have multiple variants of each item type in some cases. And that could add-up fast.

Hey Folks! A bit more team management today, but also some time for development. And a fair bit of progress on all fronts!

Michael pushed some changes that effectively make drafting possible via Social Combat. The words spoken in the UI are mostly placeholder, but we can see the "draft" objective in the UI, demand it, and the AI begins accepting direct orders! He also setup a second example objective, which is to remove the "loafing" condition on lazy crew.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Ours was a bit exhausting, as we acclimated to one parent not having a lot of mobility. We did get to see some friends, though, which is always nice!

Back at the office, I basically spent the day emailing developers and artists. Which was weird. I've never been in a position before where I had more than one or two contractors working at once. But today, I had messages waiting from no less than 5! And that doesn't include non-developers I had to follow-up with.

Hey Folks! I managed to wrap-up the interactive career events today, fixing the last of the edge cases I could find. It still lacks much more than a few test bits of content and a handful of one-shot/non-interactive events. But the proof of concept is there, and ready for content insertion when the time comes.

The next biggest priority on my list is crew work. Or tasks. Or roles. Or jobs. Call it what you will, it's the stuff crew does when they're "on duty." Oh, that's another synonym, I guess!