I am still working on the tests and improvements for the introductory story.
All of the major bugs seem to have been fixed.
I have had to fix a few minor bugs related to procedural object placement, but these were not difficult.
There are some bugs that are related to the network-AI system that I will leave until next month, and there is one bug that I cannot reliably reproduce that has not been fixed yet, but everything else seems mostly done.
I have spent a substantial amount of time testing and improving the AI.
I believe that the system is now working much better, and much more reliably, than before.
There were several bugs found, both small, and large, but with these fixed, one of the most complex and error-prone systems in the game is much more stable.
There may be some very minor issues left with the AI, but the main issues that I was having seem to be mostly solved.
I have completed another complete re-test of the introductory quest of the game, and even though there were more bugs discovered, there were fewer of them, and they were much more minor, than the last run.
I am hoping to get all of the bugs with this storyline fixed either this month or next month, and then I can move on to the next step.
I have fixed a large number of additional issues with the project, focusing mostly on the main story.
There were issues with placing and deleting story items, and placing items persistently, etc.
There were also issues with navigation over large distances and high speeds, etc.
There were aa myriad of minor issues and improvement that I also made, which have contributed to making the project much more stable, but still more testing is needed.
I have begun another full retest of the story.
There was nothing major found in the first phase of testing, mostly minor placement offset issues, etc. These took some time to solve, but weren’t too complex.
I also made some improvements to NPC placement and interaction, and fixed some additional bugs with the movement of the capital ships, etc.
The main issues that I discovered were again related to AI pathfinding when the players ship is rotating rapidly, and an issue with the navigational radar that causes some objects to stop updating on the display.
The AI issue is the one that I am most concerned about, the AI navigation system needs to be extremely reliable.
The next objective with the debugging was to fix some issues with the player movement in zero and low gravity environments.
The players up vector and was slightly off. The problem was that the players upvec was always pointing toward the center of the object, which worked for large objects, such as planets, etc, but for small asteroids, (which are not perfectly round) the upvec was incorrect.
This is not fully fixed, a complete solution will take more time, but it is substantially improved from what it was, and movement in zero gravity environments is now a lot easier.
I am still focusing on the debugging for the main story sequence in the game.
I have added several quality of life improvements to the object spawning code, such as making sure that the height offset is always correct (so that the object isn’t beneath the terrain, or floating above it), etc.
I have also improved the paging system, to make sure that all colliders are disabled when the player moves away from the object.
I have also fixed a longstanding bug with the placement of AI in the world that resulted in their place position being wrong.
I have fixed several issues with the AI system, and there is certainly an improvement in reliability here, but I will need to do more testing to see if the issues are fully resolved.
I have also added a lot of quality of life improvements, and minor bug fixes, such as preventing the player from accidentally leaving vehicles when they are travelling at high speed, and greater feedback to the user if they enter an invalid destination ID, etc.
I have started another set of extensive testing.
I am testing with the build, in real-world conditions, and the results are generally good.
The biggest issue that I found is that the AI bug when returning to the players ship is still present. I will need to focus on this until it is fixed, since it is a serious issue.
There are also some minor issues with objects and NPC’s being placed above the terrain, and some issues with the space-combat AI, etc, but these are not critical.
There is also an issue with the build freezing, which doesn’t happen often, but is still serious.
Generally speaking though, the project works ok, and most of the bugs that I found are cosmetic.
It also looks great in 4k and at fullscreen.
I have made some more minor improvements to the crafting system, and the inventory system.
Originally, the player stored all of their items on their body, as physical objects. However, there was a limit to how many objects they could carry like this, so I added another inventory system which uses a conventional menu, rather than physical objects.
Up to now, any item that is picked up from the world is added to the “main” inventory first. This was awkward, because in most cases when a player picks up an item they want to store it, not use it.
I have changed this system so that items are now automatically sent to the bulk inventory first, and only added to the main inventory if the player equips them.
There are still more improvements to be made here, but I think that this system will work better.