TAR Update: New Buildings, NPC progress, & Video news - The Arcane Relics™

Hello all! An update: before we get to the video, here's the last 3 week’s progress:

The building includes:

• 3 floors above ground, 1 below (basement)
• Dining room (shown), kitchen, balcony (outside), & many rooms to rent*

* Not yet coded :(

This is another building added to the Town (removing another one of those distracting white placeholder buildings). These are the last buildings for the public demo!

For the past few weeks Jon has been working on numerous improvements to NPC characters – primarily a more flexible goal system. Some notables so far:

• NPC pushing now works correctly! Previously, pushing an NPC would cause them to play an animation, however they would not actually move…
• Made a more flexible system for determining what an NPC says in dialog. We began by adding a condition check for whether the player is wearing pants. Right now, it’s a simple check for pants, which doesn’t account for robes or other items that would cover enough.

Additionally, he has also gotten behaviors from the previous NPC system working with the new, with a few minor issues. We plan to add additional goodies such as NPCs using ranged weapons or picking up nearby weapons if they are unarmed.

• First pass of some new props: hanging sheet/cloth, flour sacks
• New ability: Fireball
• Setup the ability for a player to join the game using mouse and keyboard in combination with other players using controllers! The UI popup will display a mouse icon as opposed to the gamepad icon when joining with desktop input.
• Since the overhaul of the player setup screen a while back, using only keyboard & mouse would not allow you to add a player and select a saved character profile – this has been resolved.
• Dialog can now be exited with the ‘menu button.’
• Abilities can no longer be learned twice.
• Books now fit more properly on bookshelves.
• Screen fades! The screen now fades in/out when sleeping or entering/exiting an arena match.
• A revised highlight system (the highlight around an object when looking at something operable). We’re going to try switching from deferred rendering to forward because of issues with transparent rendering (and this new highlight system from working properly). We were using deferred due to being able to utilize more light sources in a scene at once.
• Bartering: when confirming a transaction, you’ll no longer hear the sounds of every bought & sold item, all at once. Now, you’ll hear just the gold jingle.

Some magical abilities shown in this video (besides “incandesce weapon”):

• Force
• Fireball
• Teleroll, a tentative title: where you seemingly warp a short distance and avoid nearly all damage (besides bomb blasts/etc).

Until next time.