Changes
- Monsters spawn and despawn naturally in caves and lairs
- Added stalagmites for cover in caves
- Revamped inventory system to be more visually appealing and give more information
- Inventory is now limited to 20 items
- Added dozens of images of inventory items
- Changed look of crops slightly to match the images
- Several food items renamed
- Mobs now are alerted as a distance-based probability, not as a certainty at a certain distance
- Players can drop items
- Added player belt slot for holding one type of thrown item
- Rearranged HUD for efficiency and to show the new belt slot
- Added proper akimbo combat. Right (dominant) hand items receive bonuses, left (non-dominant) do not. There is no need to swap weapons to the right hand to use them anymore, but swapping weapons may or may not be advantageous in a combat situation (see below)
- Added new ranged combat behavior: G (default) and right-click are for ranged weapons. T (default) and middle mouse button are for using thrown weapons
- Ranged weapons now have magazines and must be reloaded
- Ranged and thrown weapons have effective ranges; damage and accuracy falls off at ranges exceeding the effective range. For reference, one tile is exactly 5 feet, 3 and 36/100 in.
- Thrown weapons now have a recovery chance to drop the projectile as an item after use
- Changed all "process" actions (such as eating, donning/doffing, quaffing) and new "process" actions like reloading into "interruptible process" actions. Moving or performing any other action will cancel the in-process action. Seeing an alerted enemy will not interrupt the process, but the player will have to manually continue the process by pressing the wait key (default period <.>) or by clicking on the player
- Reloading is a default process action behavior, and will happen automatically when a player is standing still and weapons need to be loaded.
- Swapping weapons between hands is now an interruptible process action with a cost of 5 seconds. This number was ascertained experimentally by myself using real weapons
Bugfixes
- Fixed towns spawning in cave dead ends
- Fixed saving to include the entire game world
- Fixed some glitches where key-based processes did not line up with mouse-based processes
Known issues
- Very occasionally stalagmites spawn outside of caves
- Probably few monsters will respawn in lairs
Finally managed to get the update out this week, and after writing the changelog, it was actually a lot of stuff. So I'll have a bit of a running commentary about features I added this week.
The changeover to a cave-based system was going smoothly, but I noticed that some of the foods didn't really make sense anymore since your average plant just doesn't grow in a cave. Bioluminescent mushrooms do, however! So I changed around some of the green to a lightish blue, and voila! More sensible vegetable matter.
It also looks cooler
The inventory system also got wrapped up these last few weeks. Players are now limited to 20 items, so make them count. Also, to prevent inventory bloat, you can now drop items.
Everything should display correctly, but it's possible I missed an edge case somewhere
You'll notice that there is a new displayed inventory slot, called the belt. I'm still going back and forth on what role it ought to play, but for now it exclusively holds (an unlimited amount of one type of) thrown items. And that brings up another point: the "Target" control has been renamed "Throw", and I added a new control "Shoot" (default G). These refer to using thrown weapons and ranged weapons, respectively.
This is a good time to explain the revamped combat system. The old system focused on switching between right and left hand to attack with different items. The new system will focus on having the appropriate weapon in the appropriate hand at the start of combat. Attacks with the left hand will not receive bonuses. All ranged weapons now have limited effective ranges, and attempting to shoot things beyond the effective range means that you'll have a greater chance of missing (scaling with distance) and roll for damage with disadvantage. All ranged weapons now have magazines which have a limited amount of ammo and take a certain amount of time to be reloaded. You can manually reload items by clicking on them in the inventory, or otherwise they will reload automatically when you wait for sufficient time.
Stuck reloading after missing a few times
These changes make the combat system more oriented towards planned-out combat, rather than a more typical wet noodle fight until the player or the enemy are dead. I'm planning a few more changes to make fights more dynamic and exciting, but those will come slightly later.
Finally, I added a time-based process system to replace the older time-cost action system. What does this mean in practice? Say you're getting a new weapon out of your inventory. Suddenly, a monster appears. Do you keep pulling it out, or do you fight with what you have on hand? The previous time-cost action system meant that you don't have a choice, and you would just get hit a bunch of times and perhaps die. The new process system allows you to choose. Most of the time, it won't make much of a difference, but in combat, it certainly will. Taking things out of your inventory, putting things back in your inventory, swapping your left and right hand, eating, drinking tonics, crafting items, and of course reloading are processes now. This was a feature some were asking for, and it's a good feature that gives players more freedom and makes combat more interesting, so it was worth adding.
It's safest to eat big meals in towns, since they take a while to eat
We'll see what I get after this week. I'm most likely going to restart work with the towns to add NPCs back and get some quests going, but I might also add some additional cavern types in the cave system. I'd also like to hear some feedback on whether ammo should be stored in a special persistent item rather than directly in the inventory. Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.