It turns out that yesterday's battle-while-unconscious bug was pretty easy to fix. Today, I was able to find a new place to initiate the auto-turn-advance code, and it behaves normally now (i.e. just as if the player was pressing the "confirm" button). That fix paved the way for more AI looting tests, and hopefully also makes ending battles more stable.
Today, my first task was to get the AI using yesterday's new "Check Body for Loot" move. As of yesterday, players could choose to just loot an unconscious enemy and leave, rather than having to kill them for their stuff. And in theory, so could the AI. But I hadn't tested it yet.
Today turned out pretty productive as well. I started the day off with a few more bug fixes that have been stagnating on the back burner. One such bug was the issue with dropping items in bottles/etc. that sit on the right or bottom edge of a backpack. I made some changes which should make this possible again, whether using take/drop or drag/drop.
The last few days have been pretty travel-heavy, so today was the first day "in the office." I put that in quotes because I'm working on my older laptop, and that can be a bit rough. 512MB RAM isn't really enough to run Windows XP, FlashDevelop, and a browser concurrently (especially if that browser's running multiple tabs with spreadsheets.) And when the debug version of NEO Scavenger fires up, well, let's say pagefile access gets pretty intense :)
I think I've got the electronics stuff working now. I made a few more changes this morning which make sure items discharge correctly over time as turns pass, and my night vision bonus correctly disappeared once the batteries were dry.
Yesterday's plot planning was pretty successful. I spent a lot of the day thinking about conspiracies I could try to integrate, and whether there are ways to make different skills relevant to those plot items. I think I have a couple ideas that I like, and I was even able to think of a few ways of using existing factions with those plot ideas (e.g. Blue Frogs, Martha's Army, etc.) I still need to make sure the ideas are sensible when strung together, but I'm liking the ideas so far.
Just a heads-up: I have to head into town today to handle a few errands, and then we're attending a going-away dinner party in the evening. So my usual evening news post will be absent.
The plan, however, is to do plot planning while in town. It's something I can do without a full dev rig, and doing so on my last trip into town was pretty successful.
Hope everyone had a good weekend, and see you tomorrow!
I continued yesterday's work refactoring item charges, so that items could drain power over time or per use, as needed. By the end of the day, I was able to get the nightvision goggles installed with their own, charged battery:
Early in the day, I decided to work on a few spears, before moving on to new items. I added the large branch item a few days ago, but never got around to making sharpened versions of it for the range = 3 band of melee weapons. So I mocked up a few variations on a long spear. They include a simple sharpened pole, a fire-hardened spear, and a broad spear (non-wood tip, such as glass). For each, I setup melee and thrown attack modes.
Today was largely about hooking up the items mentioned in yesterday's art update. Each sprite I drew had to be cropped, saved as image files, and in some cases, modified to fit areas like worn/held on the body, or as an attack mode UI item. Then, the data had to be entered for each item, including ammo types. Plus, ingredients, recipes, and treasure data for items that could be assembled or broken. And, of course, the attack modes that each grants.
Continuing with the latest thrust for more content, I decided to work on a few new ranged weapons today.
One common complaint in NEO Scavenger is the relative uselessness of the Ranged skill. With only the hunting rifle in the game so far, there's little incentive to sacrifice a whole skill slot for a weapon that has such rare ammunition. I've always planned on having at least a couple more ranged weapon options, so since I'm doing new items, now seemed as good a time as any.
Today was an interesting day, mainly because it involved a wide range of work. Some pretty significant changes, too.
However, the first order of business was to tackle a few bugs players recently found. Namely, there were some problems in the recipes for the cryo light and HVAC systems. As it turned out, these problems were bigger than just those two situations, so a few fixes were in order. Quick recipes, in particular, had some issues that I didn't notice before.
Today began with some follow-up on yesterday's items and recipes. I had to create the sled item stats, recipes, and some new conditions for when the sled is equipped. I decided to try making two sled items. The first is a plastic sled, the second is a sled with a strap.
Well, with the new crafting system and property-based encounters up and running, it's finally safe to start adding new content. And that means items, recipes, and encounters.
I decided to have a little fun today, and started on a few overdue items and recipes:
I've just finished uploading new beta build 0.971b and demo build 0.971d. These builds include the new property-based crafting system, random skill selection, item identification, and several other fixes.
Updates to both the Beta and Demo
Both the beta and demo builds include the following changes:
