It was quiet since the last development status posting. I was working on several stuff and some of this stuff was global changes – it was just expansive in time.
So what has changed after being quiet that long time? Better take a coffee and something to eat before you continue reading!
– created a starting screen with english/german language menu
– created infoscreen 1 & 2 to guide new players
– disabled development light and created the GlowBall
Lightgames
In the future version of 6thousend you will start in complete darkness – what else when everything was destroyed after the second bang! There will be no athmospheric lightsources from outside, so it’s players turn to bring some light in the game to see something.
6thousend screenshot 0009 / Unity 3D / Startsituation with Light/Ambient Test / 2012*October*09
Info Cube System
Next one was to enbed the Info Cube System. This little red cubes will be placed in the game to give informations to the player. The player could make the cubes invisible. Later invisible cubes will be shown in a list. The player will have the overview this way.
I’m thinking about doing a quest/tutorial chain with this cubes, maybe there will be several coloured cubes for different topics like maybe orange qubes for a questline, red ones for a tutorial chain… We’ll see – that’s the fun developing something:
You could do whatever you want!
Every cube again is unique and could have completely different actions, behaviours, maybe changing playerstats…
– restarting the playing field closes active windows, also deactivate buildmode
– buildmode window could be closed now (there was a big technical problem)
That was a big act finding a way out of this problem. Any open/close actions are done in a seperate script. Normally I need a static variable to call the open/close action for the buildingmode window. Doing it static, the complete placement of objects wasn’t working again. Again I did it the dirty way and just added a second variable that could be static.
– the top menu “Buildmode” button is working now after placing a building
Minimap with interaction!
I really don’t know why minimaps are not interactive. First of all it was the most simple way to show the whole content in a seperate window. The more fun is you could act in the minimap like ingame. Means you could use buildmode, click the InfoCubes, interact with buildings in the minimap!
The harder part later will be to scroll in the minimap, but I’ve maybe 5 solutions for it, of course dirty stuff any programmer would cry, but one of it will work and that’s the most important thing for me.
I hope players will love the ability to work in the minimap and I think it gives the player a really good overview when building his new area he will live in.
It is possible to set the minimap camera to different views – guess I’ll try to do a switch to hand out a more flexible minimap to the player.
Open/Close Logic
I spend much time on testing this. The reason is to avoid problems now. I don’t want the player to have 5 or 10 open windows. Nobody need it, because when the player work with the inventory he don’t need the guide for example.
Disabled plate placing in the whole existing project when open windows exist
This one needed more time than the stuff above. The problem was to find a simple way to disable the plate placing action. I made it easy and just work with a 0/1 flag to set the mode on and of. The player should not be confused, so when a window is open or the player is doing any other stuff, it’s not possible to place a plate in this time.
Of course when you play the game later, you will see you maybe are able to place a plate once a week or month (depends on how good you play, how long and some about luck), but I like to avoid problems BEFORE they start. So I made the decision to disable the plate placing whenever it is not “clever” to activate it.
Inventory System
It’s a mixture out of not being a programmer and logic:
I don’t like dynamic inventorys!
6thousend will not have thousends of items. Any item will have a fixed place in the inventory in a classified area.
The more I dislike undetailed or missing informations about what items does, how to use, what stuff is needed to craft something. For this reason the player have an area for informations on top of inventory. This one will be flexible and controlled over normal- and doubleclicks. Sure I will check for empty places in inventory – it should not look like a cheese with holes.
Crafting
Well… As I said above… I really, really dislike the whole disinformation about crafting items in mmorpgs. Sorry to say but when someone does hundreds or thousands of crafting items, then do homeworks and guide the player. I’m really tiered of guessing and asking other players about that stuff.
It’s not up to other players to do developers work!
In 6thousend every stuff will be inactive as long as the conditions don’t meet the requirements. We speak about buildingmode, cellformingmode, crafting. I hope to do it better and guide the player.
– fixed the last counters (Splendor Point Single Counter) of details window
I think that’s it for now… I wanna do a short list for you to avoid some questions. Sure there is some known things and errors I’m aware of:
1) It is possible to walk outside of the visible plates.
2) The inventory/building mode is not linked together at the moment.
3) It’s still possible to place plates with open windows of building modifying and spore mutation.
4) Restart doesn’t reset actual data.
5) German version translation is behind the english version.
