Recharging
After the last major update (the Serbule graphics update), I was planning to take some time off to recharge. But immediately after the update we had a mad scramble to fix lots of crashing bugs, so my break had to be delayed. But after all that, I was pretty exhausted, so I took a full week off.
I pretty much just slept and lounged around, and it was nice, but I was pretty excited to get back in the saddle this week. So let's take a look at some of the stuff going on around here.
New GUI: Not Quite Yet, But Soon
As I mentioned in the last update, Jon (the GUI programmer) has finished initial coding of the new GUI.
Now it's important to understand just how big a deal this is. The "new GUI" isn't just a new skin. It's actually a 100% rewrite of our existing user interface -- changing over from my old home-brew GUI system to the new Unity GUI system. These two systems work entirely differently. (For the technically-minded: the current one's an immediate-mode GUI and the new one is a traditional event-driven GUI.) So this involves a LOT of new code, and there's a lot of details to figure out. But the new GUI is much easier to work with and will let us add lots of new features.
Not all of those new features will be available immediately, though. In the first version, the only critical goal we have is for the new GUI to have all the functionality of the existing GUI, so we can leave the old GUI behind without losing any features. But we do already have a lot of nice quality-of-life improvements ready to go. The chat window has gotten a lot more feature-rich, and there's a bunch of new options (such as letting you see players' names over their heads). And that's just a taste of what we'll be able to add in future iterations, because we'll have a more robust framework to build on!
Sounds great, right? But when WILL it be ready? At this point we're in internal bug-fixing and polishing mode. There's a lot to do before the new GUI is ready for the real world, but I expect that we'll have it up for testing - at least on the special test server - by the end of June.
Silvonis has been spearheading the new GUI, coordinating art and code, so I'll ask him give you some more insights into it soon.
Storage Search
One of the things that I want the new GUI to do is give you better storage-management features. We've talked about this some before: managing your storage may never be the simplest thing in Project: Gorgon, but I definitely intend for it to be more manageable than it is now.
Although new storage features aren't in the initial version of the new GUI, there is still plenty of back-end functionality that's necessary for that. And since I've just finished some of that back-end work, there's no reason at all that we can't expose some of these features with good old-fashioned chat commands! Someone on the forums ("Worm"!) recently mentioned Final Fantasy IV's "/isearch" feature, so it was in the back of my head when I realized we now have the server tech to support that command, and it'll appear in the next snapshot.
The /itemsearch command (or /isearch for short) searches all your storage chests, NPC storage, and even your own carried inventory to find items with a certain word or phrase in the name.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DA6QHH9XUAA-x-E.jpg
Where did you put all the pumpkin seeds? '/isearch seed' can tell you!
Storage Desk
Another important storage feature that will eventually be in the new GUI (not the first version, but soon after) is easy access to all nearby storage. You'll run up to any storage-providing NPC (such as, say, Marna), and there will be tabs to let you interact with all the nearby storage. In Marna's case, for example, there'd also be tabs for Tadion, Joeh, Ivyn's chest, maybe Charles Thompson too. This way, you don't have to run back and forth and back and forth just to store your stuff.
Although the new GUI isn't ready yet, the server functionality is, so I don't want to keep people waiting unnecessarily. I'm working on prototyping this feature with the old GUI, using a temporary NPC shaped like a desk. For now, you run up to a desk in Hulon's shop, and you'll be able to access any of the storage in Serbule. It only works for Serbule right now (because it's a prototype), but eventually this feature will be everywhere -- and built into the interface.
The /isearch command and the storage desk are just the start. We have a slew of new item-management features planned for the future. The new GUI system will give us a lot more flexibility, and I'm excited about what we'll be able to accomplish soon!
Weather & Weather Witching
Here's something else we've been working on behind the scenes: weather. The new Serbule sky has been designed with dynamic weather in mind, and I'm working hard on getting rain and snow that has low performance impact -- that is, it doesn't kill your FPS.
http://i.imgur.com/0UMBo3M.png
Prototyping the rain in Serbule - a work in progress! Too much ground-fog and not enough visible rain. But it's getting there.
Unfortunately we can't really launch the new weather until all the outdoor areas have been renovated to use the new sky system, so it'll be a while. But I'm already working on the game mechanics, such as figuring out how NPCs react to getting wet, and determining what effects it has on monsters and items in the landscape.
And, of course, when we finally have dynamic weather, we'll be able to introduce the magic known as Weather Witching. These secretive mages live on the outskirts of society. It's very illegal to alter the weather in most countries -- Council Lands included -- and druids often hunt them down for "crimes against nature's balance", but nevertheless, weather witches still exist. They probably manage to survive all that persecution because they can fly on clouds, control lightning, and drop hailstones on their enemies. It's sort of a mixed bag, being a weather witch.
What Else?
It's still hard to tell exactly what other features will be in the next snapshot. There's a lot of stuff that's mostly-ready-to-go, but it's blocked by some difficult and un-sexy internal issue, like new art or server code.
But we do have a lot of stuff that will show up soon. The South Serbule area is seeing major renovations to be more interesting, more pretty, and to have a lot more caves in it. That might be in the next update or the one after.
We also have some new armor shaders in the works. The current armor (and players' skin!) can look a bit "plasticy" in certain light. New shaders will really bring out a lot of detail in our armor that isn't visible right now. That might be ready for the next update, too.
I also binge-watched the Great British Bake-Off on Netflix during my week off, and now I'm planning out a cruelly detailed and intricate new Baking skill -- a sub-skill of Cooking for high-level players. (Cheese isn't the only luxury food!) Baking might be in the next update, or it might get shelved for a bit.
I don't have a lot of concrete time lines for anything yet, but I wanted to give you some insights into what we're working on back here! The pace of development has been heating up lately -- and I thought it was already going super fast, so now it's incredibly fast! You can expect a whole lot of changes in a relatively small time window, as we push to get the game ready for Steam early access. Stay tuned next week, when I'll have more solid details of what'll be in the next snapshot.
