dcfedor's blog

Hey Folks! Another skipped news day, and you're probably familiar with the drill. Later afternoon work/dev chats sometimes squeeze out my usual news time. So I'm trying to sneak news in earlier today :)

Hey Folks! Hope everyone enjoyed the weekend. And my apologies for the missed news yesterday. I actually had most of a normal work day until mid-afternoon, when Rochelle started feeling ill. So I quit early to help out.

Back at the office, progress continues on drama room prototyping. We reached a point where the drama room roughly felt interactive and responsive, and had a long chat about whether to continue adding options, or if it revealed enough about our next steps to return to the main branch.

Hey Folks! Once again, sorry for the lapse in news yesterday. My conference calls with the contract devs in the other hemisphere basically means my afternoons sometimes run late.

However, we're having some really productive discussions!

Our first attempt at the drama room experiment started strong, but we quickly realized it was a dead end. It was fun watching the crew respond to our input, but there weren't many options for strategy or gameplay.

Hey Folks! As mentioned yesterday, we'll be looking into crew drama and management next. Basically, doing a hack job prototype to get some ideas up and running, and to hopefully figure out the best way of making this feature a viable game mechanic.

Our first test is a simple drama scene:

Hey Folks! First off, sorry for yesterday's missing news post. I was on a dev conference call that was pretty productive, and that ran long (into dinner).

That said, we have made some decent progress in the past few days. Front and center is Michael's latest feature: custom key bindings!

Hey Folks! Bit of a mixed bag today, as I tackled a variety of unrelated things to both unblock others and make things run smoother.

Hey Folks! My apologies for the missed news yesterday. We devs had a conference call at the end of the day, and it ran a bit long.

However, it was a productive chat! We all fired-up the game, and talked about how the salvage game loop felt. Each of us started in the same save file, in a salvage pod docked with a derelict. No starting tools, so first step was to board the derelict in search of useful tools.

Hey Folks! Got a little bit done on the work lamp today. Chris tried out a hacking effect. Michael's updated the inventory grid. And administrivia strikes again!

The work lamp now support a power toggle action, so it can be found in an "off" state, switched on, and used around dark places. Still no battery usage or anything, but it's getting there!

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.