A month of struggles, things needing attention, and inconveniences.
Here's what got done:
-Fixed a couple of elusive bugs, most notably one with crafting parts, where dropping one of a stack of parts with a special material prefix would drop a no-prefix part.
-Added a quantity selector for dropping items in bulk. SUPER handy, has controls one will find familiar to quantity selectors in shops and containers.
-Concept art and blockades galore. Ugh. We posted some concept art and dropped some story info for you guys, but blockades were hit and we're redrawing some concepts. Not good for morale, so delays ahoy.
-Added a skill indicator and skill requirement for crafting ammos. Special munitions are now VERY hard to make yourself with all the bells and whistles. Good stuff.
BITS I PREVIOUSLY FORGOT:
-Fixed inventory system's ability to hold way too many damn items. Over a certain threshold of items, the game crashes because the engine shuts down, assuming the giant iterator it's running is running indefinitely. Now even with the encumbrance based inventory, players are barred from picking up more items with related messages. This way, even though we can't fix how the game responds to a freeform iterator, we can limit the additions to the iterator.
-Fittingly, parallels of picking up items are also barred when necessary, including shop transactions, taking items from container menus, looting corpses, getting quest rewards, and performing certain actions in the workbench that would lead to breaking the inv limit with the processed action.
-To stay intelligent, we've added a slight modifier to the way some actions look for item threshold. Steps 1 and 2 for assembly have -2 and -1 to threshold limit, as does step 2 of disassembly. This means if you use your last craftable item on one step, it'll be sure to leave enough room in your pockets to process the next actions and so forth, up until your new actions are finished and the transition of the items through crafting keeps that space clear. In short: no unexpected road bumps related to item quantity, especially when you want to do actions in series, and said actions use different item amounts.
SUBEDIT: FYI, buttons for taking from containers and buying from shops will be noticeably grayed out. Items acquired past the limit for quest rewards and corpse looting will simply sit on the floor, for acquisition later. This is key in corpses so you can take crap off a corpse and move it, regardless of space available. Finally, workbench actions that bar from processing for the sake of inv space provide both a relevant message and a prominent "error sound" from the workbench screen.
With all these tiny touches mentioned in the edit, players encountering this ceiling for the first time will be given sufficient information in multiple forms to recognize they have too much crap, or at least heavily imply it if nothing else.
Because of the sets of changes above, Hatchet no longer has any known game breaking bugs. This one is, admittedly, mostly the result of crap that was let happen in Deus Ex by the original devs. But we're glad to say we fix it with a smile and deliver a stable, reliable product (which outside of Hatchet, I'm not always known for. Guess that's the difference when you take ALL the elements under your control.) that the fans will love and new players will find agreeable.
-Fixed a bug with picking up melee weapons. It appears that every new melee weapon from Hatchet would run a "HatchetWeapon & HatchetAmmo" sort of check for whether or not the ammo is owned. AmmoNone, used by even Hatchet melee weapons, is NOT a hatchet ammo class. What this equated to was that every next weapon would assume its ammo didn't exist, and spawn yet ANOTHER AmmoNone EVERY single time a new melee weapon was acquired. This was extremely elusive to track down, as you might imagine, and it was a major saboteur for this whole inventory chain limit ordeal. A real sense of unneeded entropy in the system.
-Fixed yet further prefix issues with weapons. Unique weapons kept concluding their -1 or 0 (I forget) value part qualities were less than 1.0, and hence you end up with things like "Poor Hatchet" or "Poor USD Mach"... really funny, but a must-fix of course.
-Fixed further issues with being able to acquire vanilla Deus Ex gear (which doesn't always play nice) in Hatchet. In particular: Ammos, Images, and other elusive bits. Useless as hell considering we don't have an images screen and you already cannot pickup non-hatchet weapons. Once again, unneeded entropy and useless functions we're cleaning up for SQUEAKY clean stability. Hatchet runs so well within its bounds now, for both the obvious and in-obvious, I could almost cry.
Update Style Edits:
-Fixed an elusive bug related to both player hands and picking up corpses. As a guy that doesn't pick up corpses often, it's no wonder it took me a while to find this one. It takes 1 second to lower hands and draw an in hand item of any sort. If the in-hand item was a corpse (that over-shoulder model guy) and you attempted to drop the corpse before the 1 second transition finished, it would set the corpse to no longer appear over-shoulder, but it'd be in your pocket. This also makes picking up NEW corpses impossible, in addition to spawning an error actor.
The hands now do a check for transition and POV corpses, and if you're switching to a corpse, then it skips the transition. This is both convenient for nail-biting body hiding and necessary as it completely resolves the bug.
-Added a "dump all" button on corpse looting, with an appropriate hot key. This way you can quickly jettison the items of a corpse while keeping your inventory clear of crap you simply don't want. This should likely make me move corpses more often, amongst the raw convenience and utility it already presents. Suffice to say, I doubt any more corpse bugs will slip past my view in the future.
-Fixed a bug relating to dropping weapons in certain circumstances.
-Fixed new medkit usage system sometimes reading negative number for secondary heal count.
-Fixed a stability issues with container menus. When placed under large amounts of strain, hitting escape to exit a window could rarely invoke crashes related to the "return speed" of the VirtualKeyPressed functions. It now does a swift Return False after invoking a boolean value related to reading whether a deco is being used. Another obscure, but intensity related bug put to rest.
-Fixed TrenchKat and RevKat hilts attempting to be generated in crates with steel material instead of plastic, when spawned at intermediate quality level.
-Fixed a bizarre and rare bug that could allow weapon parts' condition to exceed their maximum. A limit is now placed for not exceeding the roof of the part's condition when degrading the weapon.
