Missed last week due to a software jam I was participating in. It did give rise to a small project I will probably devote a few hours a week on for the next month or so. It won't impact my working schedule too much but I will continue to evaluate the benefits and requirements of it.
I started out by stamping out a lot of the bugs Det reported in a thread. Most of them were due to improperly saving the game, something I will test more thoroughly in the future. Another bug must have been in the game since before release and was never fixed.
But the main goal of these past two weeks was to make the caves more interesting. Monsters now spawn in the caves in a small area around the player.
It's an infestation!
This was harder than it looked. I eventually ended up totally rewriting the mob alerting code to fit the cave grid paradigm, and it led to several frustrating bugs. However, by a couple days ago, things were more or less fixed.
Much easier to deal with
Now I'm probably going to change things later, particularly trying to implement some pack behavior for mobs, since they currently act very independently and wander around. This will also reduce the amount of calls to A* (hopefully) and improve performance. It will also make mobs scarier, since getting surrounded is pretty much the worst thing that can happen.
However the mobs should be ok for now. At least, I'm pretty sure most of the spawning issues are nailed down, but it will take some further testing and experimentation.
Speaking of which, I added a few cheat codes. This is something I probably should have done a while ago, and I had done so to a limited extent with cheat keys, but now there is an interface and I can map infinite amounts of cheats to the interface, rather than my previous system of making and deleting new codes. I might allow cheats in releases going forward.
/dev enters developer mode! No other cheats will be provided at this time, but you're probably smart enough to figure them out.
I am also working diligently on the new ranged combat system, which will hopefully create a better combat loop of shoot -> melee -> reload. If it doesn't, I still think 90% of what I'm doing is still important since things are getting more streamlined, making it easier to create new content. In addition, new inventory features are coming on the horizon, namely descriptions and pictures, which were always intended but never added.
Once I get to a nice stable build this week I will push out a release, so stay tuned! Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.