I managed to actually push the bugfix patch this week so I'm pretty happy with how the week turned out. Almost everything I wanted to achieve got done, so I will run through that before sharing what the next steps are.
Towns are now named on the map! Highly convenient.
Some good quality of life things happened which look trivial, but were actually pretty difficult to implement, namely the signposts and the new mob vision code. Signposts now are useful and point toward places of interest nearby and report the distance as well. This took a lot of fixing and testing, but I'm pretty sure it all works very well now. Signs spawn at intersections, and since there may be several items of note in a direction, it chooses the closest. At worst, there may be as little as one thing on the sign.
Distances are measured in furlongs because they actually were the most reasonable measurement. Fun fact: there are exactly 125 game tiles to the furlong.
I also did a lot of code maintenance and deleted a lot of stuff which no longer was useful due to the adoption of the tech test.
I packaged the totally essential things in this week's patch. The other stuff will come soon, probably after next week sometime. I want to make caves more interesting, so I'm going to cannibalize the old grid encounter system to create nice cave encounters. If you haven't seen a grid encounter, that's fine, because it was based on a prediction system to determine where the player could be if he kept traveling in the same direction. The great thing about a cave is that there is one likely direction the player will take, and where the player will be in the direction of travel is highly predictable.
Stalagmites in caves. They will provide cover against monsters one day, I'm sure.
There will also be monster respawns in lairs. This system will probably be linked to the previous system in some way that isn't yet obvious to me, but will come in due time. The purpose of this system is to make travel, particularly between floors, to be wildly more difficult than it currently is.
Finally, I'm looking at changes to the ranged weapons system. Right now, it is a bit overly complex with many different ammunition types. In addition, the no-reload system allows players with a lot of ammo to plink monsters from great distances. And maybe you should be able to, but it must come with certain costs.
In the future, ranged weapons will have four types of ammunition: pistol, rifle, shotgun, and galvanic cells. Each ranged weapon will have an ammunition capacity and a reload speed. The player will by default not reload while in combat (since this could take several turns), and will by default reload after combat. Hit probability will fall off with distance and be relative to the weapon.
The purpose of these changes is to simplify while changing the ranged combat system into something like a first strike to soften enemies, rather than a sustainable tactic for picking off mobs. That will come in a couple of weeks though, so keep an eye out. Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.