Improved startup speed, cut the time in half, or better! Several keyboard related fixes. Building wooden signs and writing messages on them for all to see! Added a vote button. Grass seeds! Fixed a persistence bug.

Hopefully fixing some crashing bugs on the client from strange draw orders. Escape key now cancels out of text entry. Improved the help command. Various quest fixes. Ability to plant grass and oak trees. New quest that gives you magical oak tree seeds. Eating and using a variety of items from the inventory page. Fixed an AI issue with the monk. We can now persist quests and some AI settings.

Crushed the images and prepped things for final release! I added another quest for a recall stone, it teleports you home.

A handful of last minute stuff! I added some status bar stuff that probably won’t be terribly useful to anyone. I cleaned up a bunch of tile images and added channeling out pits to the game. i changed a bunch of stuff with creating new characters, so the process should be smooth and have clear error messages. You can now pick your gender and level of desired help… although the in game help is non-existant at the moment, unfortunately. Another test for some tiles. I added music that I made up last night. I made an icon for the app.

Added a new channel command, which allows you to dig a pit or a channel. Added a new sprite for that as well, although it’s not quite finished. I did major cleanup on the UI, and fixed issues where some buttons did not work. This also makes it so you can scroll properly.

I added some basic combat stuff. The turn system is in, so you might get confused if you fight with another player. It doens’t present everything quite right, but the basics are there. I upgraded the AI system to handle combat a bit, although the mobs won’t attack you. I added a combat indicator and a hp bar.

Last update for tonight. Fixed a minor bug with the who command. I added a little bit of story to the game, and did another build and some testing. I cleaned up some of the disconnect code. It now works very nicely and always keeps your character safe and saved.

I started finalizing the new character screen. It offers gender selection and asks for your experience with games like Reclaimed. That way I can provide the appropriate amount of help- a thing a lot of other games do poorly, imo.

I wrote a quick start guide to playing, since people have been asking:

http://kortham.net/temp/quickstart.txt

I had a very productive testing session, a big thanks to Neil, Robin, Matt, Hayden, and Tyler for their testing help. I tracked down and fixed 16 mostly minor issues. That should clean things up quite a bit. A few of the major ones:

Escape no longer quits the game. You can’t crash the game by attacking a inanimate object like a rock. Better handling of a few large lists, building tiles now takes items (bricks and rocks). Items no longer spawn on other items or trees. Marble walls are implemented. Things like chopping down trees and many other actions now are shown to people near you (Archiel chops down a tree). The who command shows position of each person (maybe a griefing issue in the future, but not right now). The get command works on all screens now, since it’s a common one. A array index out of bounds error was fixed on the quest page. Players auto save. Updated credits. Completely rehandled how tile change events are sent to nearby players. It should be use 1/4096th of the data to transfer such a change, and no longer can cause visual artifacts near area borders. Ongoing work handling players who disconnect without logging out.

Quests are working! I have two great quests…. well, at least one of them is awesome. This guy’s wife packed him a green apple, but he likes the red ones! So, if you bring him a red apple, he’ll trade it in for that green one he has. It’s kind of linear in that you can’t track down the wife or whatever, but it’s a very solid and easily extendable foundation.

I also added a very cool notice board. It will have a list of quests on it that players can post to.

Quests are working pretty well. I made some changes to how quests are given out. A sign or a mob, for example, can have a list of quests. You can view and select quests from the list and embark upon them. Your active quests are saved, but not yet completable.

So there were some new UI things done, like being able to provide a selectable list of items. This will also be potentially useful for something like cooking, where you could choose an item out of a list to cook.

Finished a nice dialog system that looks pretty decent. It allows popup dialogs with text, a title, and customizable buttons. The buttons can have different actions. I’m currently using this in the quest system, so you can accept and decline quests from there. I pulled out the code for actions, and added actions to build chairs, table, statues, and the carpenter’s shop. Fixed a problem with the statue.

Did some work on the Quest system, including the start of quest persistence. Basics for accepting a quest, but it doesn’t keep track of the quests you are currently on.

I am going to take a break for a few hours, make some food, and maybe play Animal Crossing.

Completely finished the skirting, by the looks of it. I fixed up some issues that occured when digging in mountain tiles. Also some improvements to my bounding box code, and, as always, some input tweaks. Fixed digging up stone blocks. There wre a few other minor things too, I think, but I have since forgotton them.

Fixed a bug where quantities were incorrect on items loaded from file. Fixed a spawning issue around item quantities. Chopping down trees no longer make logs the size of the tree. Rewrote the drawing code so it does a nicer job with z-ordering on large sprites. Started a quest system, where you create a quest with a set of requirements and a set of rewards. Started some in game dialog boxes and responses so you can see quest text. Added Ai script for stationary quest mobs. Grammatical changes on handling plural items, both manually and automatically. Bug fix around pluralization of nouns. Adjusted the names of several items, due to popular request. Added about a dozen new monsters. Added a carpentry shop and a few related items, but they aren’t hooked up all the way yet. Ability to spawn a quest mob, as desired for testing purposes. New mountain tiles, which are in game, and new desert tiles, which are not (probably pending some biome changes).

Big updates to the crafting system and some timing stuff. I now have a general “reaction” system, which allows a variety of contextual commands, like chopping trees, gathering grass, and making bricks. I call it a reaction system because it provide options to a player to react to the ground they are on or the thing that is in front of them. I also updated a clock system for timed events. When you put mud in brick molds, after a little while it will dry into bricks which may be used for construction. I also cleaned up some a bug where the socket would stay bound when you killed the server.

Back on track a little today. Set up cats so they move around! Heck Yeah! You can kill em too. Fixed a bug with large inventories. Simple AI for the cats.

Ouch. :|

Look forward to seeing your game; good luck!