*This is a pre-update. Info may be updated post-posting.
Another good month, and it's good to be staying fairly productive.
Here's what went down:
-Quest system taken from "nothing" to "nearly finalized"... this is huge. We have a basic demo for this, but a better demo will be released sometime soon (hopefully)
What you, the people, want to know about the quest system:
*It is incredibly dynamic and easily tracked. It's powerful, optimized, and very user friendly.
*NPCs that offer quests will have the quests quadrant enabled or "sensitive" as is sometimes said in UnrealScript.
*NPC windows and persona screens (like inventory, augs, and health screens) both exist for Quest management. They list quests in a tiled system. Clicking on a quest's name and icon will provide the full info off to the right, including quest description, objectives, and rewards.
*Rewards can include items, scrap metal (our official currency, by the way), and of course player experience in any combination. Item rewards can contain up to 4 different bits, and XP scale is not relative to player level, meaning quests provide finite XP and there will be higher progression quests for higher doses of XP, like most RPGs.
*Quests may in turn unlock new things in the environment, such as sidestory progressions, the setting, or even just other quests or opportunities.
*Quests provide an icon to stay crystal clear on who gave the quest, and will provide other information such as quest locations or real time objective tracking.
*Quests are tracked in 3 ways, including in-persona for objective completion (if, say, it's not your current tracked quest but you want to know what's up), in a small area of the HUD that provides a text description of all active objectives, and finally some very informative on-screen tracking sprites. These sprites have been done with the utmost precision (interesting example: they work flawlessly even in behind view, on that wasn't even on our minds at the time.), provide very clear indicators for objective locations (including both singular objectives or area-wide objectives), come in 6 colors relative to the objective's nature, and even have a small area that displays the distance to the objective or objective "epicenter".
-Debugged and expanded new potential happenings in the ammo pool once again.
-Added a rare chance to acquire recipes for crafting parts on breakdown, if not already had. This wasn't originally planned, but we realized that this is both a nice touch for the player's aid and recently made very possibly by the conversion from recipes to recipe book. Complex nature, but all you need to know is renovating weapons or replacing parts may come a little early as a nice surprise.
-As this is being written, I'm crunching away at the ground-level code needed to setup interactive NPC shops. This IS a pre-update, so depending more info may or not be posted relative to the topic.
-Debugged a really weird happening with the HUD. A bad Super Call vs Super(HUDBaseWindow) Call and a lack of HUD transparency later, it was discovered HUDs were double-layering potentially conflicting belt item info, which was only visible with translucent HUD. This was fixed in a nothingth of a second, but we're keeping our eyes peeled and testing menu settings more fully in the future for anything else clever that pops up.
-Work was done with windows to improve consistency of color schemes. We've had some issues with Persona VS HUD color schemes appearing in the same window, and these are rapidly being solved and made consistent.
-Craptons and craptons of work done with pawns and similar items for their sub-components and properties. This has been prepping for everything from quests and their tracking to shops to combat related stuff. I thought I'd list this just because it has been in relation to cleaning up code and refining things to a point for Hatchet.
-Added ambient cricket sounds to the still unfinished RevBow. Trying to pull together morale as the main modeler and animator an seeing if I can get myself flowing on the topic, but I've had a really... interesting past couple of months in my personal life, so making a comeback in morale has been sometimes easier said than done.
UPDATES:
-Debugged the most elusive of quirks with the Quest window for NPCs. It has yet to see a persona version still, but now that it's dumbest bugs have been defeated, it is more likely to see an adaptation soon.
-Made shop. Like holy crap, you can buy and sell anything with practical value to persons who run shops. Medkits, Lockpicks, Weapons, Ammos, Crafting Parts and Materials, almost anything will do for either direction of trade.
-Debugged shop considerably. This includes "..." cutoffs for when item names and prefixes exceed "practical" character limits, custom ammos now producing effects properly, buy/sell and their confirm versions working properly, and clearing item info that may sometimes linger.
-Forgot to mention that the M460 had its weird bug with sights not updating properly post-drop on low and medium versions. A tricky thing to track down, but it's fixed now.
-Fixed a property setting with the Slugger GL that made it look for nonexistant anims, even if the system was properly equipped to cycle to the existent anims instead. bHasEmptyAnim can be a sneaky thing.
-Fixed a 3 piece set of typos in item descriptions. .308 rounds referenced 7.62x55 and x57 in the same desc, but x59 was right all along. The slugger had a typo for "targets" vs "targtes" in its description, and the TrenchKat had a cutoff/incomplete description. Oops. I would like to thank the infamous Box Trader for helping me discover these bugs while reading descriptions on his gear.
-More bug fixes related to various things. Shop had an issue with non weapon/ammo items that would inherit accidentally duplicated modifiers. No more Hollowpoint-High Velocity PAS Recipes.
-Fixed a bug with parsing ammo effects that added an excess space on the end.
-Shops now charge double and provide double amounts for ammo purchases. This doubled charge is simply 2x base price, and double mags was chosen over single and triple because triple ruined the "dirt cheap" aspect that made ammo shopping lax, and single just didn't provide a sufficient amount.
-Melee weapons now read whether they are able to parry and for how much they parry in item stat screens. Yay.
