27 Jul, 2010
Mission editor
While Nasrudin works on the Inventory and try to create new kind of weapon and other ship pieces, I have been (very) busy working on the mission editor, which will allow admins to create missions directly from the game interface without any coding.
Even if this part is a lot of work, it will quiet certainly pay off at the end as any admin will be able to work on the missions / quests. The tool is also fully dynamic which means, as soon as we create a new ship behavior for example, the tool will spot it and allow you to use it.
Soon I will add the ability to save / load those missions and then Retor will be able to work on them to create the actual story.
After which I will work on the NPC which will allow some dialogs and based on the dialogs some new missions.
8 Jul, 2010
More and more flesh
Things are going forward, and more and more tools are reaching what we could consider as usable tool. For example, the mission browser now will show past and current missions, allows to switch from one mission to the other and more. Also the target system (green arrow) will try to point you at the next thing you must do. New mission types have been implemented as well, and other small things are slowly improving too. Well overall I start to be really pleased with this project.
Now, as things are reaching some maturity we must choose how we will design the stories, either full coded, or via some admin tools. We didn't choose it yet, but we may end up having some sort of mix. What's clear is that players will not be able to create quests, and this for the simple reason that if we want to offer a good story we can't simply mix 200 or more different story lines. Sad news for those hoping to work like they was doing it in NEaB but as one main complain was the story quality we must do something better for this new game.
BTW just to give an impression of the code size, our code is growing slowly about 300 lines per day... and we have now 17131 lines of code.
Note: our ETA for the beta shifted a bit (due to personal holidays), count still 2 months before you will have some sort of playable game.
2 Jul, 2010
Success!
Game state does indeed save! That means this huge show stopper has been bypassed, and we can now basically work on both the story and continue the work on the server side support. I'm really pleased this serialization issue has been fixed, as it would have been a real shame to not be able to save the game state and therefore stop the game due to something like that.
To celebrate this, I worked on more funny things like "system voice" which gives you hints about what happens (shields down, enemy destroyed etc...) however even something that simple in theory took some time as I encountered unexpected issues like lack of support for some MP3 settings. So we MUST use 44kHz sounds and not some less resource demanding one. Too bad.