I apologize for the lack of communication over the past weeks, but life was happening, and this time it was moving locations for work. My wife and I are currently looking for houses, and the search is going well. It did take up a lot of my time, however, so I didn't have really enough to write about then.
But I did get some stuff done. I am still working on the "recover" quests. It turns out that a lot of the systems I had in place that I thought I could hijack for other purposes were not as robust as I had hoped. The main point of the recover quest is to recover some sort of shipment traveling from one town to another. Therefore there needs to be some sort of way to determine the path the goods would have traveled, so that the shipment item and the monsters who attacked it can be spawned. My idea was to use the signposts that already exist (and have a lot of behind-the-scenes information attached to them) to plot paths between towns.
However, it turned out signposts weren't really generating properly. The problem was, as usual, with the lairs. Unlike every other cave feature and town, they have an unusual exit paradigm, and there was some confusion here that caused some signposts to not generate. The problem with that was that if there wasn't a signpost, I couldn't use the signposts to find paths between towns.
But I managed to fix the problem and ran it a thousand times to stress test it, and I think it's working pretty well now. I am going to find an elegant way to implement the path into the quest log, but what I have so far is pretty decent as far as I'm concerned.
Better than Mapquest, that's for sure
I might be able to have a few workable things by next week, and will try to get an update out then. Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.