Weekly update MS04x01

As you can see, MS3 is finished. I haven't started anything for MS4 and I will describe plans for it in a separate post, as well as different subsystems that were created, what went good and what went wrong with them.

First, quick list of things done during last week:

• fixed some AI BASIC bugs:
• behaviour related functions not working properly
• incorrect loading of message command which treated reciepent as parameter of random operator
• fixed stats stack not being setup (which resulted in not affecting damage done by or to wizard)
• fixed regional checks for projectiles shot by player (to have same behaviour as in original game)
• fixed missing relative dir in relateive direction state machine rule
• added error message when loaded type is not recognised (I spent some minutes on looking for a bug in code that wasn't there because I named few objects incorrectly in xml file)
• projectiles deal damage to objects just one time and should not hit someone who fired them
• fixed default height
• added "vanish" animation (used by wisp and wrath now)
• simplified some AI behaviours code

I noticed one thing when I created video for MS3. I haven't paid much attention to it, while I was working on that. I just had a feeling that something is wrong. Scale. All characters are too small (or rooms are too big). So one of the things for this week is work out better scale. This problem reminds me of one Jet Set Willy remake which was way off with movement and jumping. And everything seemed to look very small. And while I think that movement that I've done for characters in game has feeling of Dragontorc, scale is definetly wrong. Fixing scale will also introduce with other issues - it will be much harder to enter door, so I will have to do something now, although I planned to do it later - some little code that will assist characters while entering door (for player, when they're approaching door, for AI when they want to go through door).

And game is now... ugly? It has original graphics for some objects, but you can notice many problems with displaying them correctly. I want to create proper rendering system during MS4 - and again, I will share some thoughts on that as well. I should start working on it during this week.

One more thing - I want to track how many weeks have passed since beginning of MS. As I have more than 10 MS planned (but they should be shorter than MS3 :) ), MS number has two digits. And I expect that some MS may take less than 10 weeks but some will be longer, that's why week number has also two digits.