Developer's Log

[CraigStern]

Posted Part 18 and Part 19 of the tutorial for making a Telepath Tactics campaign, explaining how to create new destructible objects and how to assign script triggers to them, respectively.

[CraigStern]

--I was able to steal some time away from moving nonsense this morning to test out a longer battle using a profiler to see what's causing slowdown. From my end, it looks a lot like it's caused by AIR constantly calling the garbage collector with greater frequency as the battle progresses. I've added in some code to force garbage collection whenever a player's turn starts (while that "Player's Turn" splash is displayed onscreen), and whenever an attack sequence ends.

[CraigStern]

I moved to a new apartment yesterday--and so did my girlfriend. I basically had to move two apartments' worth of furniture into one, and I feel a bit like collapsing into a ball and not moving for a week. Regardless, I am now going to resume plugging away at to-do items for Telepath Tactics!

First up:

--fixed a bug in which the game would get stuck in a loop in the conversation preceding the caravan battle if Louise Legerdemain is dead.

--fixed a bug in which the game was not applying the tag to reduce the Energy cost for certain attacks (as with the promoted psy classes in the main campaign).

--Annel Stormhunter now has a bit of dialogue when he leaves the group after the battle in Coria's streets (assuming you talked to him and he survived the battle).

--removed the "Promotable" tag from Sarn Kamina (as there is no promotion class for Gasul).

--fixed a bug in which Oliver Spenks would not be added to the player's roster of useable characters after landing on Kovit.

[CraigStern]

--fixed a showstopper bug in the game that would occur if playing in Windows and you had no audio device enabled for playing sounds on your machine.

[CraigStern]

I spent some more time analyzing telemetry data for Telepath Tactics. A frankly ridiculous portion of the game's processing power (we're talking upwards of 33%) seems to be wasted on hit testing for button objects--objects which I don't even use in the game!

Based on some quick Googling, this seems to be an issue with Flash itself once the game has a certain number of objects onscreen, and not something I can actually fix short of reducing the number of characters and destructible objects onscreen. I have some ideas to help with the issue, but suffice it to say that I am very, very displeased about having to do this, as having a large number of independent, interactive objects and large-scale battles are a core part of the appeal of Telepath Tactics.

[CraigStern]

--fixed a bug in the basement of the bandit fortress that permitted players to advance before recovering the map to the mines.

[CraigStern]

--fixed a bug wherein Siripent had the wrong class name (Lizardman instead of Barudit), which in turn glitched out his class promotion.

--fixed a bug where Malcolm Eichan's name and portrait were mistakenly shown instead of Harriet Glaive's during the final line of Malcolm Eichan's death scene.

[CraigStern]

I've begun work on allowing modders to nest custom assets right within a custom campaign folder, such that end users don't need to place them within the Data subfolder of the install directory.

--you can now include custom character portraits within a custom campaign folder: stick them in the subdirectory Data/Characters/_Portraits, just as if it were an asset in the install directory.

--you can now include custom character sprites and animations within a custom campaign folder: stick them in the subdirectory Data/Characters/Whatever The Animation is Called, just as if it were an asset in the install directory.

(Note: nesting custom animations is all-or-nothing. If you make custom animations for a character and you put them in your custom campaign folder, you need to put all of the character's animations in there. When a character is loaded, the game will autodetect whether a character's rest sprite resides in Data/Characters/Rest of your custom campaign folder. If it doesn't find that there--or if it finds an identically named rest sprite in the game's normal install directory--it'll assume that all of this character's sprites reside in the normal install directory instead of your custom campaign folder!)

[CraigStern]

--in the single player campaign, dropped the backstab multiplier for Knife from 2.25X to 2X, for Stab from 3X to 2.25X, and Mega Stab from 3X to 2.5X. Increased the sidestab multiplier for Mega Stab from 1.5X to 1.75X.

[CraigStern]

--you can now include custom objects within a custom campaign folder: stick them in the subdirectory Data/Objects, just as if it were an asset in the install directory.

[CraigStern]

--put in a process to clear listeners from inventory slot boxes after they load, which should help optimize the game a smidge.

--you can now include custom item graphics within a custom campaign folder: stick each one in the subdirectory Data/UI/Item Icons, just as if it were an asset in the install directory.

--you can now include custom attack icons within a custom campaign folder: stick each one in the subdirectory Data/UI/Button Icons, just as if it were an asset in the install directory.

[CraigStern]

Released version 1.033.

[CraigStern]

--caught and fixed a bug unique to version 1.033 that made character portraits not show up on the battlefield during deployment.

--put in a check during the process of loading a saved game for detecting when the wrong campaign has been saved to a slot, then finding the right one and automatically correcting the issue.

[CraigStern]

- released version 1.034 http://sinisterdesign.net/telepath-tactics-v-1-034-patch/

[CraigStern]

--fixed portraits not appearing in the reserve supplies screen

--fixed portraits not appearing in the detailed info screen when right-clicking deployment tiles