Issue #37/T2D Adventure Core Update #3.

Hello again. The adventure core has made a little more progress this week, but still has a decent way to go.

Item selection has become relatively stable mostly due to ActionSequence objects. A stream of actions can occur from any one single action, and it's beautiful in its simplicity. The player can't actually pick up the objects just yet (the inventory system has yet to be started), but any item can have any number of interactions with the player (we plan on only using 3 for most objects in Issue #37).

I've begun the process of level transitions, and I must say that Simsets are wonderful things. Any character/item/level can be referenced at any time with

character("grandma");
item("book");
level("meetingRoom");

with no effort from the end user, allowing even easier ways to call occasionally complex objects.

Pathfinding still has a few kinks in it, but it gets the job done. It will find a path 99 times out of 100, but sometimes it gets really twitchy in the avoidence code around obstructions. It's not worth using too complex of an algorithm (A*) in script as that creates too much overhead for how little "real" pathfinding the characters need to make.

Finally, the more subtle but nice addition of the week: dynamic dialog box resizing. If the character says a mouthful, the dialog box will never be too small to be able to handle the text.

As for the game itself, our writer is becoming intimidated at the size of the project and doesn't think she'll be able to meet deadlines. We're going to have a team meeting soon to discuss what we can do to help, but I also need to figure out what I should do as a team leader. I don't want to press too hard and have her back out under pressure, but I also can't let her work at any pace she wants or else the writing will slip behind, leaving a bottleneck in the development cycle. Hopefully the meeting will come up with a solution.

Here is the screenshot of the week(or so). You can see the action boxes for the object. They actually rotate around the cursor (by accident, but it looks interesting) when the player holds down RMB, then dissapear when either an action is selected or RMB is let go.


Ancient history awaits me in 7 hours, so time for bed.
/Jared