Still adjusting to married life and doing a lot of outside stuff, so I haven't had as much time as I would have liked. I will apply myself more diligently in the coming weeks and get out an update with some new quests soon, but I want to share what I have been working on now.
Food! Just sitting there!
In retrospect it seems both simple and complicated, oddly enough. I had the idea for the global reset system ages ago when working on NPC mobs in towns, since it would be strange for them to find them sleeping in the middle of the day and they all suddenly wake up and go to work. The reset system moves them to appropriate areas and doing appropriate actions throughout the day, and is distributed over time so that it doesn't lag the game out by processing everything at once.
In addition, once per day, new items spawn in the various biome features (and old items are deleted). I also created a system that resets all lair encounters. This not only allows you to traverse lairs multiple times and experience new encounters, traps, loot, and monsters, but also amps up the difficulty as you progress since it generates multiple times in the playthrough. This is a new feature, and while planned for a while, hadn't really been added. Previously, everything was ad hoc, so in theory lairs could all be generated for a level 1 player and disposed of at leisure.
And finally I'm beginning work on the monster hunt quest. This means something I really didn't like doing: delving back into my elegant but persnickety conversation interface. To say that it was held together by duck tape and paper clips is an understatement; I will have to do a lot of tuning to get it back to an operational state what with the new quest system. I might even have to make a small utility to be able to create conversations faster. Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.