Hello there!

So we’re going to have a few missions in Starbound and here’s just a glimpse of another one. This is a Floran mission where… bad things happen. Staying true to myself I’ll barely say anything and let you wonder…

So as Kyren mentioned, yesterday I arrived in the UK! I said I’d write a post, but then immediately got distracted by a bunch of other discussions… sorry!

My main activities yesterday were discussing plans and priorities, getting my desk set up, and being a zombie from lack of sleep! Kyren and I talked a lot about her progress on the new status system, which is sounding awesome. The biggest feature is the conversion of all complex status effects to Lua scripts. Aside from massively improving the engine code and cleaning out a ton of unused hard coded stuff, this will allow us to easily implement some very interesting status effects, so we spent awhile coming up with ideas for possible scripted statuses. I also talked with GeorgeV and Armagon about how to implement features they need for the missions they’re designing. More traps, logic/wiring bits, and scripted/triggered events for NPCs are all in the works. More on that later; time for me to write some code!

Oh, and a small note for modders: Kyren added Lua bindings for getting and setting arbitrary world properties, so we now have access to world-level storage to communicate between script contexts and store persistent world data. I’m sure people will come up with some great uses for this!

Howdy guys!

Since I”m waiting on Metadept’s arrival at the office later this week before proceeding further on the missions, I spent my time today continuing one of my side tasks, which is to convert all existing lights over to the new flickering light code I discussed a few weeks ago. There’s a lot of lights that used the old flickering code, but I’m almost done with the conversion, and many lights (particularly fire-based ones) are being adjusted to look a bit more natural.

Working on this stuff isn’t terribly exciting in and of itself, but it makes for a welcome change of pace from all the mission work, and really it’s so gosh-darn nice to be able to make the lights pulse in time with their object’s animations!