Cleaning up the random missions is proving to be a bit more challenging that I expected… Due to the way STL maps work, if you try to access something that isn’t there (an entry for which there is no key), it will create a key for it, which screws up my iteration code which isn’t […]
The code for the delivery mission is done! The system correctly triggers cutscenes when you receive the item and when you drop it off correctly, just missing the mission cleanup code (the mission location can only disappear after the player leaves the place where the mission takes place). The cutscene has some procedural elements as […]
To avoid problems with missions conflicting with storyline, when a mission is accepted the game will create a new area for it… This was the theory, but in practice I found one million bugs in the process (that affected other parts of the game… For example, if you opened a new place in the storyline, […]
Finished the cost/reward system of the random missions… To accept a mission, you’ll have to do a down-payment, which you get back if you complete the mission… Besides that, you get the reward. The reward is computed based on the difficulty of the involved planets, distance between planets and who’s giving the mission. For other […]
Today I’ve mainly worked on fixing the small issues of the mission generator… For example, it would generate the text “get xxx from at coordinates (-1,1) on Puhtib”… that’s now fixed. It would also ask fro delivery (or pickup) of items in orbit of planets, from a dropship (which makes little sense)… It would also […]
Finally finished the text for the delivery mission… Still have some issues, regarding the way phrases are constructed in English: Not sure how to build a simple system to select the right pronoun, need to think about it… Anyway, next step is to actually add the code to do the missions (spawn/modify the areas when […]
Today I worked on the generation of packages (so that we have something to deliver). Since the game has a less-than-serious attitude, this was quite easy from a technical perspective: just associate an adjective with an object like this better review of phentermine. The hard and time-consuming part was creating a dictionary of words to […]
Today I worked on generating names… That’s way more work than it seems… I want the mission text to have some flavour to it, so I need to generate customer names, names for the objects to carry, in some cases, the reason to do something… This is generating natural text, which is not easy (and […]
Spend most of today working on the UI for the random missions… Of course, everything is temporary art, and everything is bound to change, but I need somewhere where I could see the descriptions, accept missions and play around with them in general… The UI isn’t even consistent with the other UIs in the game! […]
Today I started the random side missions system… This will be a very large component, from a technical perspective, especially the generation itself… The idea is that the player can go to a mission console aboard the Skydancer and get side missions, which will yield alloy when completed. All the missions will be generated on […]