News

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good week. Unfortunately, just as my parents arrived, I came down with a pretty nasty cough. And I'm still fighting the last of it off. However, we were still able to see some sights, have some nice meals, and generally visit. And I think the time off helped recharge my batteries, so to speak. I felt more refreshed, and ready to tackle some work this morning

Hey Folks! Sorry for the meager news today. I came down with a fever last night, and have been lying down most of the day. So not much to report.

Also, my folks are flying in tomorrow to visit for a while, so I'll be taking the week off to hang out with them and catch up. Unfortunately, that means I won't be back at it until after Memorial Day (the 28th). But the good news is

Hey Folks! With the floor and wall tiles now supporting damage, I figured I'd try an experiment with ship damage. And in the process, also tackled some issues with breathing and pathfinding.

For the ship damage, I wanted to see what would happen if I raycast a line through the ship, and applied damage to everything on its path. I set some initial damage amount and path, follow the

Hey Folks! Pretty productive day, today, as I spruced-up pathfinding a bit, as well as added damaged/patched walls.

The pathfinding fixes and improvements were a big chunk of the day, since there were several edge cases to sort out with all the recent changes. First, I had to add code to abort the current interaction if the goal became unreachable. Also, AI was getting caught in

Hey Folks! Bit of a slog today, as I continue working through some annoying bugs in the pathfinding, queue, and other systems.

I was able to figure out why AI prematurely triggered interactions while walking towards them. Basically, the code to calculate range to target in tiles was incorrectly converting units, causing most distances to be 0. In other words, the AI almost always

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. A lot of family time for us due to the combo of Mother's Day and nice weather. Including the toddler's first tea party, and some quality time spent swamp-side listening to bullfrogs.

Back at the office, I resumed tackling the hull repair interaction, and trying to get AIs to seek out necessary items (patch kits) before attempting

Hey Folks! Minor update today, as I'm sort of mid-feature right now. I'm working on making the hull-patching process use items from elsewhere on the ship.

Yesterday, we had the new ability to damage floor tiles, and to manually order AI to patch them. This always succeeded, and required no special equipment. And what I eventually want is for the AI to go get the materials for

Hey Folks! Moving on to one of the suggestions from a couple days ago: damage modeling.

Since I'm on the lookout for things that make long transit times interesting, and ship salvage, repair, and maintenance are something I want to handle, I turned my attention to destructables today. And as an experiment, I decided to model it in the game using a dedicated component instead of

Hey Folks! Feeling a bit better about things today. I think yesterday's realizations got the better of me, and I ended up feeling really discouraged. But some time to (not) think about it has given me perspective, and many of you had some very helpful suggestions and encouragement (thank you!). I think where I am today is a bit healthier.

And, importantly, ready to press on.

Hey Folks! Bit of a rough day, today. I've been having doubts about the prototype lately, and spent most of the day soul searching.

It started as a smaller-scale judgement call as to whether I should invest significant amounts of time/money sprucing-up the rendering in the game. Rearchitecting the game's rendering pipeline would likely solve many performance issues, further