STORAGE AREAS AND CONTAINERS
Today Aaron is working on the Storage Area functionality. He’s made it so the storage area can be moved, and is currently working on the ability to remove it entirely. The idea is that when a storage area is removed, the contents remain on the ground and will tagged for hauling to a new storage area by your units.
The same thing should happen if a refrigerator gets destroyed. You don’t want to necessarily destroy its contents, just the fridge itself. So the contents will have to spawn on the ground and get hauled to the highest-level storage area.
Once this is done, we will have paved the way for storage areas and containers to have filters on them, allowing the player to choose which types of resources allowed into each container and storage area.
FEELINGS AND RELATIONSHIPS
I am working on the relationships and feelings that the units have for one another. We’ve built a test-mode where we can simulate various deeds and actions done by and to different units to explore the ramifications of each deed.
For example:
Pearline attacks Erasmo a bunch of times, so Erasmo strongly dislikes Pearline. Pearline then flatters Marion 4 times in a row, so Marion loves Pearline.
Something weird happens when I have Pearline then commit a negative deed to herself. When I have Pearline kill Pearline, Erasmo, who hated her before, suddenly had a positive opinion of Pearline. Then Marion, who loved Pearline, suddenly mildly dislikes Pearline.
The reason for this is that units will have negative feelings for someone who does something bad to someone they love, even if it is something the person does to themself.
We will either have to avoid having units commit deeds to themselves, or I will have to put a check into the Love/Hate evaluation function to do something else if both the actor and target of the deed are the same unit.
I’m also adding delegate events into the Love/Hate plugin to cleanly send data to the UI so that we can show the player the current status of the relationships between units. These will also allow us to show the various factors influencing the units’ happiness/unhappiness levels, so that they can do something to keep the units happy.
Eventually, we will make it so that a unit who is extremely unhappy and has a negative opinion of the colony will choose to leave it. Also, if a unit hates another, they may get into a physical brawl, or engage in other nefarious deeds against the loathsome one.
Next steps are to get the Gossip functions working properly to share information about each other and sway each others opinions about each other. I’m hoping I can also use this to initiate general conversation amongst the units while they are near each other.
