Monday 22nd:
Ok so I took a week off. Fortunately only had to fix a couple bugs that came up. Besides a couple things I'm going to start with today, I think we can say this build is very stable and can stay up for a while as it is.
Played lots of They Are Billions. Kind of lost my patience on the last level. Also played a bunch of Buddy Simulator 1984 and it's cool looking in on the window on the ground floor of watching its mysteries get uncovered. I may continue my investigation but I may just look up the answers as they come because, of course, I need to make Human Factory.
Today I just want to slowly sink back into the project and at least get an idea of how the rest of the week will go.
Capped minimum Fullness to 0 so they don't 'implode'. (Thanks to Marutzo).
Sorted Humans reacting to things when Dead (Thanks to Marutzo). There's a 'GetNearbyHumans' function with the bool 'ExcludeDead', which I had forgotten to actually use when true.
Also removed 'Printer' from the text. Can't believe I forgot to do that. You'd think a programmer would be smart enough to do a quick search of the word 'printer' after removing it from the game.
Fixed placing Humans directly on Incubator (Thanks to Elf on the Shelf). While I was at it, fixed it for empty Wardrobes as well. Couldn't find any other times where placing a Human on a machine breaks it.
There was another bug about the Exporter sometimes showing exports when it's not actually doing that? I'll have to encounter that, or the error in code, myself.
And that covers all the bugs that were reported since the last build. Cool.
I'm getting no issues or complaints about optimization, so I'm going through my list and shuffling everything to do with optimization to a separate list at the bottom.
Found that some Items can have a negative Quality value? And then Zero? Turns out it was because with this file, Human's conditions were 0, so it's fixed with any new Humans and so I'm the only one who will encounter this error.
Next I have a pesky recurring bug where selected buildings can become invisible... Turned out it was when the selection got interrupted by a Human or Item. Fixed.
Found another really annoying bug where it would cancel the selection if the mouse goes over a button, which is really annoying. Fixed.
You can now put items on top of each other? Ok have to fix that again. Also, I think selecting a wall first puts the selection off centre. This is what I mean when I say game dev/bug fixing is like fighting a Hydra.
Fixed the offcenter selection thing. Just made sure to round it.
Sorted the overlapping thing.
The Hydra had a few more heads, but they too were slain until the Hydra retreated into its cave. I think selections are pretty stable now.
For the rest of this week, my goal is to add a bunch of Buildings. I have exactly 10, all Vegod (with some moving to Tier 2).
Tuesday 23rd:
Today's goal is to finish as many Buildings as possible out of the ones that currently exist. This week my goal is to complete 10 of these Buildings which are associated with Vegod (Furniture and Reproduction).
I'm actually doing this organically within the game by waiting for some Humans to Breed.
Before getting to any of that, the Hydra returned in the form of the Camera. Quite a few bugs I wasn't aware of here. Fixed them and that warrants uploading a build at some point today.
Item Splitter not working? How did I miss that?? When did it stop working???
Fixed that after some struggle.
Ok so I haven't done any buildings yet and I'm half way through the day.
If I have 3.5 days to do 10 Buildings, that's roughly 3 a day. I'll take a short break and try to do 2 of them by the end of the day.
Sorted out some major problems and got as far as breeding to unlock Vegod's final tier. No new Buildings today I think.
Wednesday 24th:
Starting today by doing the last few tasks and then uploading the build.
Ok so the first machine on Vegod's tier 3 is the Birthing Station. I'm going to watch and wait until another Human is concieved and then save it so I can begin testing from there.
Finding a lot of bugs and things to fix by just watching them here. Putting them all on a list but focusing on the birthing station for now.
Removed warning from tier 3 except for Vegod and Arkanos.
Fixed Item colliders being off when coming out of a container.
Hiding face features when a Human is headless.
Mojo now increases faster for Humans in Sexy Clothes.
Fixed a bug on deleting gas vents. Don't know why this needs to be an IENumerator with a 1 second delay anymore but I won't change that just now.
Trigger previous building didn't work one time and I don't know why. Just tested and it didn't happen again so we'll see.
A building got stuck being occupied by a user again. It happened with a newborn so I think it might be something to do with that, but I don't know what.
Mood modifiers need a big run of inspection and fixes. That requires full attention.
So the next thing is to test and fix my newborn and Birthing Station and keep my eyes open.
I can go through some of the other Buildings while I do this.
After some trouble, got the Chair working. There is more work to be done here to make sure it can be accessed from all sides. This will be a fair bit of work but I got it working as long as there is plenty of space in front of it.
Got my next set of tasks laid out neatly in front of me.
Thursday 25th:
Found an issue with DNA and a couple other things not updating properly. Was working fine for me but it seems related to the bug someone reported.
They also reported getting nothing from the Tailor. Which is funny because I seem to be getting 2 basic clothes per craft on the tailor. Very strange and I have no idea why.
Loaded a save where it had lots of bugs because of things happening before they're quite ready. Fixed an issue with loading HeldItem of Humans and I think fixed quite a few things by pausing time until loading is complete.
This producing items twice is turning out to be a real puzzle. So I can put a debug where the script to make it is called, I can also but a debug on the script to make it where the thing is made. On the second one, when you click on it it shows you where it was called from, so I can confirm. For some reason, the second debug always happens twice and tells me its coming from the same place as the first debug. Very confusing.
On the plus side, I have a Human ready to give birth and all the machines ready for testing.
I thought it might be something to do with the Container or something triggering it, but according to the debug.log it's coming from the Update method when Progress1 >= MaxProgress1. Proper baffled.
AHHH. It was because I had placeholder Barman clothes using Basic Clothes and the game was finding 2 items that matched the recipe and so did it twice.
Table working fine. This one is easy. I have it on my list later to make Chairs search for nearby Tables and give a Mood bonus if it finds one. Bad news is the same Humans didn't breed this time, I guess there is some random chance to it given the random nature of their wandering patterns. Funny how, in this case, a baby was never born because his parents chose different random locations to wander to in their spare time.
So now to sit and wait for a baby to be born so I can test my reproduction machines.
Thinking of simplifying the Birthing Station. They could probably come out of the same exit, with it being up to the Player to split them up. This will work much nicer with the new system I want to implement with lists of Occupiers instead of single Occupiers on Stations. That's going to be a big one.
Had a go at cleaning up the animations. Failed, so returned to old way. Still, I understand a bit more about how it works now.
Sorted the Mine out. Just had to switch it on basically.
Ok so now the next thing for me is to do this big fundamental change to Stations. This could be difficult, could be easy, but will require my full attention. Taking a short break first.
Friday 26th:
Ok so it's unlikely I'll meet my goal of 10 Buildings this week. I have, however, fixed a lot of bugs and I think I've long term solved the problem I was having with handling some of the more awkward Stations. So today my only goal is to implement this new system where Occupier is replaced by a list of Occupiers so we can have multiple users on a Station.
The new Occupier system. First step is changing it in Station and Buildingsave. Then I can go through each red warning and modify the script accordingly. For example the first one that came up was in Human.ClearTarget();. And instead of 'if station.occupier == me then station.occupier = null', we do 'if station.occupiers.contains(me) then station.occupiers.remove(me).' More like that.
I need to determine 'MaxOccupiers'. I'll need to write this for each Building.
The Station script itself is the most tricky. Station.Go initiates things, and I set that up to ask for the Specific Human its doing. Then in the update we tick down the timer and do the thing. For example the Treadmill lowers Human Energy and raises Power every frame until the Station's UseTime runs out. For this I'm going to use a 'Foreach Occupier in Occupiers'. So if I did that for the Effigy, it could successfully handle 4 cultists generating Mana at the same time with only this change.
However, they would all reset the use at the same time. So 'UseCounter' should not exist on the Station but we should use the Human's Counter. So on 'Go', we set the Human's Counter to the UseTime of the machine and use that as our timer. So with the Effigy, each Human would come and do their 4 seconds independently of each other.
Other machines which will use this multiple Occupant feature:
- Birthing Station. In this case, we would add both Humans that come out to the list of occupants and the list must be empty before we do anything else. Simple.
- Couch. This will be like the Effigy, simply offering a small Mood boost.
- I could do it for the Forest and Mines potentially, but otherwise that's it for now.
- I could make a machine that would do different things to 2 Humans or combine them or something, but that would be handled in the processor anyway with the Station merely telling the Processor to start.
Ok so that's all the error reports fixed except for an instance where the Occupier is ejected from a Food Container to go straight to a Chair. So technically it should work the exact same way right now.
I feel like I can make vast improvements here. I'm going to make the Station.Occupiers work in a much similar way to Container Outboxes. So when we're done with a Human, we add them to a list, and the machine is considered blocked until that list is empty.
Got pretty bogged down with that change to Occupancies. Thinking of the simplest way to make it work and to be honest just giving myself a headache. See you next week.
