I have fixed a few minor bugs and made some minor improvements to the project.
These improvements were mostly related to the AI systems and item spawning.
I have also been working on some concept art for some new items for the project.
Vendors in the game now sell more items, and their stock is randomised, so they don’t all sell the same thing.
The fishing action is now done.
It is simple, but it worked out very well in the end.
I have balanced the chances of catching large and small fish with the time that the user is performing the action, etc.
Fishing now provides a realistic alternative to hunting for survival based life-paths.
I have also added the “Morale” stat to the game.
This was in place before, but the logic behind it was not wired up.
This is now done.
I have also fixed quite a few minor bugs, and made some minor cosmetic improvements to the guis, etc.
The art for the fishing rods and fish items is now basically done.
There is a simple, craftable, fishing rod, which can be made from items in the world, as well as a higher-quality fishing rod that can be manufactured (Or, eventually, bought).
There are also some fish types, that can be caught, and eaten raw (with a risk of contamination) or cooked.
I have also added in new traits, etc, for the fishing action.
The next step is to actually implement the logic for the fishing action.
I have used the recent changes to the water detection algorithm to improve the NPC ai in the the game.
AI will now not be spawned on water, even shallow water, and will avoid it when pathing.
There are some minor conditions where this causes issues (For example, if there are many puddles of water on the terrain, they can get stuck) but in general, this massively improves the AI behaviour near shorelines.
The AI used to run into water when moving, this no longer happens.
I am also planning to add a “fishing” action, to supplement the hunting actions that are already in the game. I am working on some art assets to support this now.
All of the tests that I wanted to run have been completed.
There were some bugs found, some minor, some more complex.
The most recent test set involved testing the precise placement of objects and characters across zones and at very long ranges. The core functionality does work, but there are some bugs in it that I haven’t tracked down yet.
I will need to leave this for the future.
Other than that, everything seems to work more or less ok.
I have also made some changes to the game balancing, and I have added some minor new features, such as allowing the player to drink and collect water from large bodies of water.
This was impossible before because I had no way of determining whether the player was raycasing against a water or a land tile, but I was able to figure out how to do this.
There are a few minor bugs left to fix, and then I can think about what to do for the next milestone.
I have finished debugging most of the bugs that I found during the first set of testing, and I have started on the next set of tests.
This mostly went ok, but there were quite a few smaller bugs and issues.
Most of these should be fixed quickly.
There were also some game design and balancing issues that need to be tweaked, such as the chances of certain resources dropping, or of finding certain items, etc.
There is just one more set of testing to go now, and that should be it for the time being.
I have finished the first set of tests that I was working on.
I did discover a few bugs, but there was nothing too serious.
There was an issue with the players inventory being “blanked” under certain conditions, as well as some issues with AI pathfinding, and navigation etc.
Most of the minor bugs were fixed. There are a few issues that I will need to take a look at in the future, but these are not too serious.
I am currently running through a very complex battery of tests that test most of the different aspects of the project.
I have uncovered quite a few bugs, almost all of which are with features and code changes that I have added recently.
There are some issues with paging, AI navigation/pathfinding, and long-range travel within systems, as well as issues with the enemy AI.
I am confident that I should be able to fix most of these issues in a week or so, but some problems may require some more work.
The basic concept for changing zones using jumpgates is now working.
I added a gui and support code to allow the user to select a zone, and travel to it.
I also needed to fix several bugs with the graphical effects for ftl transition, as well as other minor bugs.
The system is now working very well.
The only issue now though is that if the player has a capital ship and travels by shuttle to a different zone anyway, the capital ship will travel with them.
This is because only one zone position is currently stored, and this is used for the zone position of the current control object.
I will need to add a separate zone position for the players capital ship later.
The next feature that I have been working on is to allow players to travel through the world without having access to a capital ship.
This will be done using “jump gates”.
This will require some code changes, since the current system assumes that the player will always be changing zones in a capital ship.
Preliminary work into the new jump gate system seems to be going well, but there is a lot more to do.