Just a quick one this week. I've been working relatively hard on conversations, and managed to fill out a bunch of them. In terms of progress, I have 24 large conversations and 30 mini ones left, which could be done in as early as three weeks from now, but more realistically will be done by Easter.
I've also been working on a few quality of life things. It seems the NPC movement is broken once again. Hopefully I can fix it for good. I'm relatively optimistic because it broke when adding the abbey behavior, but I liked how the abbey NPC behavior turned out, so it's just a matter of refactoring to the more modern code.
There also is some new conversation behavior. Previously, exiting (using escape) allowed you to resume the conversation at a later date. Now it refuses the quest. In addition refusing the quest (by any means) permanently disabled the quest. Now, the quest is reenabled each day at midnight.
My future plans, besides writing conversations and doing that a bit more efficiently, is to rework the encounters. I like the style and format of the encounters, but I want to modify the backend to more resemble the modular design of the conversations. With conversations, the backend has a token system which allows me to swap in words and phrases where they're needed, but also perform functions, including starting the quest, increasing or decreasing the reward, and so on. The new modular encounters would have a similar token system which activates the same encounter functionality, making it much easier for me to write them.
Ideally, this will lead to a large increase in encounter diversity and volume, and my master plan is to have them in caves, replacing a lot of the monster patrols. However for now I think I'm going to prioritize getting those conversations done. Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.