Hello survivors! A bit of a ‘getting on with it’ Mondoid this week as, as you can expect, we’re all busy bees working on the latest IWBUMS.
IWBUMS 33.2
In case you were barricaded under a rock you’ll knoe that we’re currently in the midst of a test of a (still incomplete) build 33 on our I Will Backup My Save branch, and as expected work continues on both fixing up what is currently in the IWBUMS branch, with Will working on getting the initial infection TV and Radio into the game, as well as bug fixing those pesky typos and other bugs. Turbo is fixing up the issues that have been reported with the furniture moving system. Meanwhile RJ has been continuing with the sound system fixes. Here’s a few words from RJ himself on his build 33 stuff:
“Build 33 is on his way on our IWBUMS branch, we released a patch already so we’re on 33.1! Bugs still exist, but it’s mostly balancing the new sound engine and difficulty.
Some report that Survival is way too hard, still need to know if it’s REALLY too hard or it’s just people having bad luck or not skilled enough to play Survival (which is meant to be hardcore :D), but for those people, the normal mode should be ok!
So this is a hard piece to balance, but it’s progressing!
About sound, it’s the same, I balanced them a lot, made the reverb better outside, but still need to work on it so it doesn’t feel like your under a big metal dome!
Annnnd I also hear you “what about Steam Server update!” Well, I’m on it too, I fixed some bugs for multiplayer caused by the new sound engine, and I’m trying to get that steam server working, it’ll be probably for this week, maybe tomorrow with some luck!
In the meantime I may release another patch with bug fixes/balance, it’ll depend how well the Steam Server bugs are progressing…
So it’s getting there, build looks pretty solid so far and I think we’ll have bug fixed rather soon for a public release!”
CREATIVE
We’ve still got a bit of finishing off to do on the new Creative Mode systems. The latest addition was a virtual object system which allows for tbx, tmx or clippings, as well as road segments, instead of being placed permanently within squares on the map, instead to be made into virtual objects which are placed on the map, but do not destroy the tiles they are placed on, only override them while the object exists in that place. This means they will remain an moveable object you can drag around without permanently distubing what goes underneath.
The original reason for this feature was to make the creation of road networks much easier, as it opens up the ability to have simple nodes that connect to eachother, and to form the actual tiles of the road and pavement virtually, calculated over the top of the base game map data. These can then be tweaked and changed as the map is expanded without having to clear out areas of the map. There would be of course a performance hit incurred due to lots of these virtual objects, so at some point these will need to be turned into permanent things on the map, and how that happens has yet to be decided. Either players / servers will have the option of committing these elements permanently to the map once the creators are satisfied with them, or maybe when the player runs sufficiently away from the object so that it streams out, it’s not clear which is the best option for simplicity / performance.
The roads are the pretty much last thing to get right, apart from a few fixes for making sure everything works on multiplayer, before Creative could be added to the IWBUMs.
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* Er, "Tuesday" I guess. Slight mix-up with which one of us was going to cross-post the Mondoid news onto Steam meant that none of us ended up doing it. Er. Whoops. Sorry.