We have released build 2 of Space Crusade 0.5A. See the description for important details.
What Has Been Tested:
Saving the game
Loading the game
Locating planets
Initial Hailing
Planet Battle
Locating and interacting with stations (the docks and leaving were all I tested though)
Weapon Spread System (accessible from the dock)
What Has Not Been Tested:
Ship battles (these are currently disabled)
Actually winning a planet battle
Anything else in the station not mentioned above
What To Expect:
This version of the game has more stuff to do in it. You can now attack planets successfully for the most part. I have not actually won a battle yet, so be on the lookout of problems there. A note on battling, planetary defenses can attack you while shields are up; I have implemented a temporary system where defenses have a chance to not attack and then also to miss if the attack roll is made.
There are still some major problems I am trying to track down and areas I have yet to test but more of the game is open now, which was the goal.
Installation:
The install process is quite easy. Just run in included sc_0.5a_installer.exe and follow the on-screen prompts.
If you choose the "Patch" option from the installer be aware that any changes made to the database will be over written as will your log file.
Extra Notes on Installation:
In order to assure that your save game is compatible, open up your save file and in the PShip_WHPVect table change all uppercase weapon types to lower case.
Bug Fixes:
-Fixed 27 different crashes related to the planet battle loop or something in the battle processing class. Most of these crashes were from indices on vectors going out of bounds. Some were caused by faulty comparison logic.
-During defense battle some text ended up garbled and generally messed up. This was due to a setprecision call in another class to limit the number of decimals in the float output. For some reason this call set the format for the output to scientific and this messed up the float calculations and output.
-Planets, defenses, and shields all had messed up values at some point during the debugging process. These were caused by various "max" value variables not being set; these are set temporarily for the moment until I can make them more permanent.
-Found another 9 crashes due to invalid index errors in the station scanning/creation process.
-Due to issues in getting certain station information written, I changed the order in which the stations are actually generated. This resulted in a further 2 crashes due to out of bounds index values.
-There was a crash in the E-Med lab portion of the station code because I was attempting to call for a weapon name instead of item names and then there was also a problem with a for loop in the database code to retrieve the data from the item_table.
-I have fully fleshed out the weapon spread system. The previous method was causing problems and was not actually even functional. The new code came with errors of its own. I fixed 6 bugs related to issues with it ranging from out of range index values to wrong weapon types being used.
-I noticed shortly after starting the work on build 2 that all of the messages related to planet hailing were missing from the database. Added those back in.
-Found many issues with the Damage class. New code added also gave me troubles for a while. Due to how I was passing defenses and shields none of the damage done to them was permanent. Had to recode them as pointers instead of references. Still working on the planet damage formula; at present it can still take a long time to knock off a planet.
For a full list of bugs found see the bug tracker or our forums.
