A new engine!

[CraigStern]

-- tweaked a bunch of little UI things to make sure text shows up correctly on different displays.

-- fixed a bug where the game would incorrectly save a character's skills used mid-battle.

-- fixed the ID[] tag not working right on destructible objects as the target of script actions bug again after unintentionally breaking the previous fix.

[CraigStern]

-- reduced the movement speed of all characters in the game by 1. This will make it easier for players to gauge who can move where, will increase the importance of movement skills, will make it easier for me (and others) to design maps, and will reduce strain on the AI when calculating possible moves.

-- the Move Bonus status effect now grants +50% speed instead of +40% speed.

-- new script action: MoveCam. Two parameters: y coordinate and x coordinate. Moves the camera over to a point centered on the provided coordinates.

-- new script action: EndTurn. No parameters. Clears the script action queue, ends the conversation, and immediately ends the turn for the current player.

-- used the new OnVictory trigger to update the battle progression system such that the player progresses to the next fight only when he or she wins the last one.

-- units can now take fall damage from being dropped a single level of elevation (equal to 20% of their maximum health). Reduced the minimum fall damage from 5 to 4.

-- added tutorials on elevation effects and hazard tiles to the Dry Mounds and Oasis battles.

-- made it so the "no tutorials" choice from the qualifier battle carries over to subsequent fights.

-- received, integrated new backgrounds: arena night variant, town sunset and night variants, and dese palace night variant.

-- fixed a bug in which Jokester characters would sometimes take totally inappropriate actions during camp activities.

[CraigStern]

-- received tiles for existing tile sets with cave transitions.

-- created directional variants for cave tile transitions from every other tileset (except for castle).

-- created tile data for all of the new tile variants.

-- created a new beginner-level fight: Battle at the Overgrown Garden.

[CraigStern]

Gave a bunch of artist feedback on tiles, backgrounds, portraits, and new destructible object images. Also:

-- created a new UI feature in battle: the icon for the active status effect on a character is automatically displayed over that character's shoulder. If the character has multiple active status effects, then then icon continuously rotates through them all at a rate of one per second.

-- finished up the directional cave transition variants with the castle tileset, then created the corresponding tile data.

-- fixed a couple of mis-formatted new tiles.

[CraigStern]

Happy new year! :)

-- received new desert-themed destructible objects; created stat data for them all, integrated them into the game.

-- made edits to the Dry Mounds and Qualifier battles, including swapping in new destructible objects.

-- status effects displayed over characters in-battle now actively blink, making them more noticeable.

-- fixed a couple of bugs in the game's cliff-generating algorithm.

-- fixed a bug in which the game would freeze mid-attack if a) the player used a skill (like Feint) which always does 0 damage and b) the skill's associated status effect failed to take hold on the target.

[CraigStern]

Gave artist feedback.

-- added the "equipped" symbol to item buttons. Equipped items now display the symbol, and others do not. Equipping and unequipping toggles the symbol on and off.

-- the character screen in the Character Creator now takes account of the effects from the current character's equipped items.

-- added sound effects to the title screen interface.

-- increased the amount of experience characters get from the Practice camp activity.

-- created new surname beginnings and endings; reduced the likelihood of a character being generated with a one-part last name.

-- fixed a bug where the game wasn't saving the script IDs for units during mid-battle saves.

-- the character creator now recognizes when a character wth a unique portrait has been loaded for editing, and will block off the individual feature selectors in the portrait editor. To create a new, custom portrait for a character who has a unique portrait, you can hit the randomize button.

-- fixed a bug where the character creator would overwrite the portrait name for characters with a unique portrait with an improperly formatted custom portrait upon saving the character.

-- fixed a bug where the game would consistently generate units 1 level higher than they were supposed to be.

-- fixed a bug where inspecting an enemy's character screen during deployment would cause the screen to show up below the deployment window, and would open the actions bar upon closing.

-- fixed an AI bug where psy healers would choose to heal allies who had not been damaged.

-- fixed multiple AI bugs that negatively impacted the game's decision-making when determining which way to rotate units at the end of the turn to minimize potential danger.

[CraigStern]

-- received, implemented new nighttime variant for the Castle background.

-- you can now specify species on GENERATE: and UNIQUE: characters (avoiding situations where the game randomly creates a shadowling for a psy user class when you wanted a human, and vice versa). The "force species" parameter now goes between name and sex--if you want the game to just pick one for you, leave it blank.

This will generate a psy healer that can be any species supporting the class:

Code Select Expand

<Unit>0,1,Generate:Psy Healer/RANDOM//Either//1,3,11,Left,None</Unit>

This will generate a human psy healer, specifically:

Code Select Expand

<Unit>0,1,Generate:Psy Healer/RANDOM/Human/Either//1,3,11,Left,None</Unit>

-- added a "force species" parameter to the GenerateUnique and GenerateUnit script actions, right between the name and sex parameters.

-- added a couple more surname beginnings and endings.

[CraigStern]

Yesterday was dedicated to True Messiah stuff and giving more artist feedback.

-- it is now possible to have a text input field show up on a branch of dialogue! The field has a 24-character limit; as soon as the player clicks any reply, the text entered in the field will be saved under the custom string _INPUT. (If the player clicks a reply with no text entered, however, the game will ignore the click and wait for text to be entered.)

The attribute to make the text input field show up on a given dialogue branch is inputText; set it to true, a la:

Code Select Expand

<Branch num="3" name="Registration" inputText="true">

-- used the new input text field in-game to let the player name their team.

-- added an eyedropper tool to the map editor. This puts the map editor into eyedropper mode--the next tile you click on will made the clicked-upon tileset the select terrain type to paint and automatically put you into paint mode.

-- added new hotkeys to the map editor: Alt enters eyedropper mode, Shift+P opens the paint palette and enters paint mode, and Shift + F opens the paint palette and enters fill mode. The new hotkeys are displayed with tooltips upon mousing over their respective buttons.

-- got rid of the "Fill Cliffs" button from the map editor. (Cliffs are now filled in automatically with every elevation change, rendering the button pointless.)

[CraigStern]

-- created a new status effect: Talkable. It doesn't have any actual effect on the character, but rather, can be used as a visual cue (via the AddStatus script action) to indicate that the character can be talked to.

-- the map editor and cut scene editor now both successfully load and save dialogue while preserving the inputText attribute.

-- added more tutorial guidance to Battle at the Overgrown Garden.

-- tweaked the Insomniac's Practice camp activity to grant more experience from staying up late practicing, but to also sap the character's Energy going into the next day.

-- added the sunset Castle background variant to the game.

-- spent time trying to get a Mac test build working.

-- took a stab at fixing a weird palette-swapping bug that affects the character selection circles (but only on specific computers); not totally sure yet if I succeeded!

[CraigStern]

-- received, created data for, and implemented new portraits: traveling Dese merchant, Mechanic, and Dese royal guard. (For those counting, this brings the game up to 127 distinct portraits, including generics but not including procedurally generated portraits!)

-- during a mid-battle save, the game now saves all dialogue that has been removed from the scene, whether because of RemoveConv or because it's non-repeatable and it was triggered; and upon reloading the save file, those dialogue trees are removed. (Thus, the game will remember which dialogue not to repeat upon reloading the file.)

-- during a mid-battle save, the game now saves all current objectives; and upon reloading the save file, only those objectives are loaded. (Thus, mid-battle changes to objectives are preserved.)

-- during a mid-battle save, the game now saves all active conditions present on the battlefield; and upon reloading, only the active conditions are loaded. (Thus, mid-battle changes to weather, lighting, and win/lose conditions are preserved.)

-- added a third dummy to the qualifier tutorial battle.

[CraigStern]

-- some AI changes to prevent healers from placing themselves in danger for no reason. Healers now weight the danger from enemy units way more heavily when they have no one to heal and are calculating a move simply advancing up the battlefield--and if they have no offensive skills, they will never move toward a space within move-and-melee range of an enemy.

-- for healers determining moves when at low health, the AI no longer counts the healer itself when determining proximity to healers.

-- the AI now weights danger more heavily for units in general when calculating short-term moves, by default.

-- the AI now has units face toward the enemy even if every enemy unit is seemingly out of range to attack them.

-- the AI now affords a much lower score to defensive facing that relies on placing one's back against non-wall objects, allies, and fly-only spaces if it detects enemies with ranged attacks in range.

-- scripts run via script actions and Run-type replies in dialogue now inherit dialogue tree data, allowing the scripts to correctly employ a variety of special characters relating to the current dialogue tree (such as BRANCH[] and -NAME-).

-- scripted the Recruitment scene so that on the first day of recruitment, if being played on the easier difficulty setting, the game's more complicated classes (e.g. engineers, bowmen, cavaliers, kineticists...) are excluded from showing up in favor of classes that are easier for new players to learn how to use.

-- coded a failsafe for edge cases where the only available classes for a character being generated happen to be on the excluded classes list; the game will simply assign the character a default class for that species (with a preference for utility classes so they aren't so hampered by inappropriate stat growths).

-- if generated units are placed into a map without the correct number of attributes, the game will now simply not load them in lieu of crashing.

-- fixed a map editor bug that would paint objects onto the battlefield with facing other than None.

[CraigStern]

-- when you load a scene, the map editor and cut scene editor play the music for whatever scene you're now editing; if you create a new scene, it will stop playing whatever music was playing previously. If you change the scene's music in the map/scene settings, it will start playing the new music as soon as you confirm the changes.

-- fixed: the game will no longer throw an error if it loads a scene with a music attribute that does not correspond to a track existing in the game.

-- added a new parameter to Generate: and Unique:, as well as to the GenerateUnit and GenerateUnique script actions--a boolean value telling the game whether you want the unit to be generated with any equipment you didn't specify. Generic units will have this set to false by default; unique units, to true. In each instance, the new parameter goes right before the salary parameters.

-- for generated generic units (i.e. non-uniques), if you tell the game not to generate a weapon and they have no forced inventory equipped, the game will detect the fact that they have no weapon and will compensate for that by giving them a Strength bonus appropriate to weapons at their level as well as natural access to the granted base skill for their class.

-- updated the map editor to support the new force species, generate inventory, add to salary, and salary variance parameters when dealing with generated units.

-- the character generator now ignores the force species parameter when generating a unit of the parameter does not list a valid species.

-- fixed a map editor bug in which the game would ignore your chosen facing when painting FromPlayerRoster units onto the map.

-- fixed: the game will no longer throw an error if you use Either in the force gender field in the generate unit window in the map editor.

-- fixed: the game will no longer add empty tags to characters.

-- fixed a typo in the tile data affecting a particular grass-dirt transition.

[CraigStern]

-- created the first optional quest in the game.

-- laid groundwork for characters to have passive abilities with distinct names and images, viewable by the player in a unit's character screen.

-- gave Pessimistic characters an automatic +10% to their base Dodge to make them more worthwhile.

-- upped the number of deployment points in the first few battles to 6.

-- further improved the formatting of maps saved in the map editor for human readability.

-- fixed a bug in which the map editor would fail to paint transitions properly on maps with the majority tiles belonging to the wood or castle tile sets.

[CraigStern]

-- tested and dramatically improved the first optional quest.

-- new special character: -ARMY-. The game replaces it with the army number of the character that triggered the dialogue.

-- items with a useableWith attribute of "automatic" are now automatically used when grabbed from an item sack, just as in Telepath Tactics.

-- updated the scripts run by "coins" items to work with the new scripting engine. (They now use SetAura, but first check to make sure the grabbing character is on army 0.)

-- increased the damage threshold for successive wound levels when going below 0 health from 10% of max health to 10% of max health plus 2 (effectively setting the smallest possible wound level increment at 2, but more realistically at 3 or 4).

-- fixed a bug that was causing characters to spawn below bridges at the start of battle instead on top of them.

-- fixed a bug that was preventing the game from applying the LevelUp tag correctly at the start of battle.

-- fixed a bug that would sometimes cause the game to freeze when evaluating a knockback skill that would knock a character off the map.

-- fixed a bug that caused the game to ignore the forced delay parameter with SpawnFloatingText and SpawnFloatingTextAt.

[CraigStern]

-- the info bar now displays your projected total payroll costs for the end of the coming month.

-- tweaked the placement of a couple of objects in the first optional quest battle to make it safer and easier to break open the treasure chest.

-- fixed another bug affecting the timing of pop-up text.