Together in Battle Dev Log

[CraigStern]

-- caught and fixed some missing tooltip textures in the item and skill editors.

-- caught and fixed some missing cursor textures in some of the editors.

-- fixed: a null error when randomly generating a generic character in the character creator.

-- fixed: a null error in the cut scene editor.

-- fixed: the confirm and cancel buttons in the load scene menu in the cut scene editor had broken.

-- fixed: the confirm and cancel buttons in the load scene menu in the cut scene editor had been reset to load battles instead of cut scenes.

-- fixed: the title text overlapped the sub text in the "save before creating new character?" pop-up window in the character creator under certain circumstances.

[CraigStern]

-- added support for the player reference string to the character creator. The game can now successfully save that value to XML and will load it from XML when loading a premade unit.

-- caught and fixed a few remaining missing UI textures hidden in a few nooks and crannies of the character creator.

-- caught and fixed a few remaining missing UI textures among the map editor's army sub-editor's button tooltips.

-- added mouseover tooltips to the music selection submenus in the map and cut scene editors.

-- improved tooltip placement in the cut scene info bar.

-- improved tooltip scaling and placement in the army overview window.

-- the game now checks premade characters to see if they're lacking a default skill animation; if they are, the game now attempts to find and plug in the default skill animation for their class.

-- fixed: the game was accidentally deleting all of the item templates when generating characters for testing within the campaign creation suite, causing characters to all spawn without the items and equipment assigned to them in the character creator.

-- fixed: characters in the character creator were not having their default skill animations saved during the save process.

-- fixed: the character creator was failing to remember that randomly generated generic characters had generic portraits, and then therefore saved their portraits incorrectly.

[CraigStern]

-- the time that combat barks remain onscreen now changes based on the length of the bark. The longer it is, the longer it remains onscreen before disappearing.

-- fixed: changing the sound effects volume wasn't affecting the volume of currently playing sound loops.

-- fixed a typo in one of the camp narration variants for word games.

[CraigStern]

Sent out contracts to voice actors; gave feedback to artist and composer.

-- fixed: the space selector was remaining onscreen during combat exchanges.

[CraigStern]

I had to give myself a little break from development there--I didn't want to burn out after that big push for the summer Steam Game Fest event. But I'm back!

-- scripted a custom effect for Create Bridge and Create Barricade skills: the max health of the object created now depends upon the combined strength and psy of the character creating it. (Weapons are taken into account--an Engineer with a more powerful Wrench will build sturdier battlefield constructs.)

-- scripted a similar custom effect for Solid State Shield, but it only takes into account the character's Psy.

-- fixed a graphical blemish on the male engineer portrait background.

-- fixed: a seemingly innocuous change in code order had caused the game to cease respecting false Kill-All Victory conditions.

[CraigStern]

Gave my voice actors feedback. In the meantime:

-- incorporated six new cut scene backgrounds from Franklin Chan into the game; put the new daytime docks background into the introductory cut scene.

-- the AI now scores moves involving a character standing still and using a turn-ending Shield skill a lot lower to discourage enemies from wasting entire turns just buffing themselves.

-- fixed: the AI was weighting status effects way too heavily when scoring different moves.

[CraigStern]

-- created a new "drowning"  sound effect that triggers when a character takes drowning damage in water.

-- fixed: it was possible to click outside of yes/no screens in the reserve supplies screen without resolving the question posed.

-- fixed: null errors could result when characters died from status effect damage during an enemy turn on certain Death Rules settings.

[CraigStern]

-- fixed: the Axefighter ability animations weren't getting palette swapped.

-- fixed: you sometimes couldn't swap items in the reserve supplies screen during deployment in battle.

-- fixed: the AI would grab an item sack on the destination space after using Swim.

-- fixed: a range error could occur when the AI used Swim to self-target a unit on a water tile and the game checked for ice bridge creation.

[CraigStern]

Received the last of the "generic" voice over performances!

[CraigStern]

-- fixed: shoving a character into the edge of a map would sometimes throw a range error.

[CraigStern]

Hey folks! I'm back. If you've wondered where I've been, I've been struggling pretty hard with keeping up the motivation to continue developing games lately, what with American society teetering on the brink of complete collapse these past few months. I'm here now, though, and I'm working on procedural battle generation.

To that end:

-- I finished up the map editor's map generation window interface for generating enemy (and allied) armies.

-- the game now stores up to 3 groups of units for each army in the interface. It now remembers them and re-displays them when switching between armies in the interface.

[Sythion]

I'm glad to hear you're ok! Remember, personal well being matters more than this.

[CraigStern]

Thanks Sythion. :)

More progress:

-- the battle generator now successfully spawns one or more enemy armies onto the map. Unless the map is too small for all the units on it, all (or nearly all) enemies will be placed out of immediate move-and-attack distance of any human players.

-- a graphical improvement: lava tiles now have emissive materials (meaning they appear to be self-lit regardless of surrounding lighting conditions, and without you having to manually place lights over them). They also actually emit light and softly pulse.

-- the map editor now auto-adjusts the global lighting to either Night or Cave (depending on whether the cave tileset is being used) by default when lava tiles are used as the hazard tile to generate new terrain.

[CraigStern]

-- updated the map editor's map generation window interface for generating destructible objects on the battlefield.

-- the procedural battle generation algorithm can now spawn destructible objects around the battlefield, and can probabilistically place items within subsets of those objects (e.g. chests or barrels) to drop upon their destruction.

-- improved the army placement algorithm for proc gen battles featuring more than two armies. Armies now "clump" together more in their starting positions, and are now less likely to spawn scattered amongst enemy armies.

-- fixed: the game was ignoring other units spawned within the same group for purposes of determining available spaces.

-- found, fixed a couple of incorrect or missing dirt tile transitions in the snow tileset.

[CraigStern]

-- proc gen armies generated in the map editor are now formatted with extra data to allow them to be saved successfully into map files and loaded in-game with the same spread of levels and classes that were chosen in the map editor.

-- proc gen destructible objects generated in the map editor are now formatted with extra data to allow them to be saved successfully into map files and loaded in-game with the same spread of types and inventory that were chosen in the map editor.

-- tweaked the default map generation values to ensure that you can produce interesting maps easily without too much work.

-- fixed: the deployment space placer needed to be tweaked to account for the new proc gen destructible objects.

-- fixed: the Generate Map window wasn't auto-closing when opening a different menu in the map editor.

-- fixed a bunch of little null and range errors that can occur when attempting to load improperly formatted units into a battle.