Time flies so fast.

So yesterday I said we’d make speech bubbles prettier. We worked on it and now they look more or less like this:

still needs a little bit of tweaking positioning/pixel ratio wise. But I think they’re far more bearable now.

We’ve also been working on NPCs, giving them new behaviors and making them all around much smarter and more interesting.

NPCs spawn really nicely now too. They spawn in packs that looks very natural. More importantly they know where they shouldn’t spawn.

We’ve also been working on getting the ship upgrades to work nice and seamlessly so you don’t need to reorder any of your decoration when upgrading.

Until tomorrow!

Hey again guys,

Been working on a whole bunch of different things today.

Everyone is working hard. Kyren is working on NPC pathing, making them a whole lot smarter.

There’s not too much I can show in a screenshot there, but it’s going to round off combat nicely.

After we’re done with the path finding and a few more tweaks we can really begin to show off the combat. It’s shaping up to be very interesting.

Bartwe has been working on speech bubbles, they’re currently very very ugly (as you can see), but the important thing is they work. Tomorrow we’ll be working on making them look much nicer.

Omni has been working on the finishing touches to the travel animation.

Here’s a little video of that:

Also apparently my ship supports skype.

The artists continue to work on their wonderful super secret stuff, but I don’t want to spoil too much! So I’ll let you find those yourselves.

Oh dear, apparently I’m doing the progress update today.  This should be interesting :D

So, most of the mob spawning bugs are worked out, finally.  NPCs spawn in clusters that are far apart, and don’t tend to spawn in undesirable spots anymore or on top of each other.  Mobs are de-spawned properly if no players are nearby, and mobs are spawned only if there is enough room in a given region to place them all.  There were some bugs left that caused NPCs to be de-spawned in certain cases while still on screen, and those have been fixed.  So that’s good!

The next stage for NPCs at this point, which I’m working on at the moment, is fixing some of the behavioral problems they have.  They tend to be a little too determined to try and reach their goal (to attack a player), and they need to have way better detection for when this is just not possible and they need to get bored and wander off a little faster.  There are also plenty of general navigation bugs and limitations that remain, and hopefully a good chunk of these can be fixed by tomorrow.  I’m hopeful!

Omni and Rho are working on a fun little UI animation  for ship travel that will give UI feedback for when the ship is currently flying and can’t be controlled, but more importantly looks really cool!  Hopefully we can post a video of it tomorrow, but for now here’s a pretty terrible screenshot of it:

Bart has finished some lighting changes for nametags and object highlighting that makes them a bit smarter about the surrounding light level, and it looks really nice now!

Another change we’re working on right now is putting the actual mod loading mechanics in!   This is the part of the code that will scan additional asset directories and handle the load order for them, and load assets from them instead of the base assets directory.  This also includes the addition of “packed” asset files, which should make startup times on real distributed versions of the game much much faster than the in-dev versions, because packing the assets folder means a whole lot less filesystem access, and we can add indexes that make everything much easier to load.  Also it’s a lot simpler for people to manage.

In non-starbound related news, I have just recently recovered from what I can only assume to be the flu, and I do not recommend it.  However, good news is that I finally have new glasses to replace my broken ones!   I can see the text on my monitor again!  BEHOLD:

Now that I can see again, coding should be slightly less challenging!

Kyren Out.