This is continue work from the previous update, which can be read in the blog
Imagine a case scenario, where houses on the land plots are changing over the time. Wouldn't such a feature be cool? Living through the times, seeing old houses and later in a game same region becoming sort of a rich resort. Or small shacks becoming multi store apartments. Or perhaps things falling into ruins? That is of course long term planning and at the moment throwing more like ideas than actual gameplay. But with current development direction, something to be potentially possible in the future, yet with the help of Lua scripting as a modding feature.
However, stepping down on the Earth for now, this time development UMeFate endeavour added ability to save construct of the selected land plot, and allows to load it into another selected land plot. Additionally, the same construct can be loaded to all land plots at the same time. This is ultimately the direction of returning depreciated feature, of stacking structures, from the past prototype phase. More about in the link below.
Continuous playtesting, recording videos, as well as writing blog posts, allows us to spot various bugs. In fact, many-many bugs. Pushes development to fix critical ones and orient it toward improving features, with quality of work tools.
Current list of some obvious bugs are related to building tools and snapping features. Here alone tons of work will be required to handle them.
For example loading constructs are only able to load on the center of land plot. Well not exactly the center as it appears in the game, but what is called the bounding box. Which causes buildings that can be placed outside of the land plot borders. This will be fixed in the future. At the moment it is a nice shortcut, to test the feature functionality. Lot of code is already there, just need proper hook up.
Some features were temporarily disabled in the past, like floors and doorways, as major internal rework was done. Various code has been depreciated and replaced. Or it is still in the process of such. Currently the walls are already back.
Along with adding features, critical bugs hunting was also executed. One of these nasty bugs was the memory leak, causing continuous increase of memory usage. Leading eventually to the game crash. Major issue appears to be resolved now. At least until a new one is spotted. 😒
Some other code refactoring and internal improvement were made, which is typical for the project development, as it progresses.
Next Things On The Horizon
- There are some critical bugs to be resolved, related to loading and saving constructs.
- Need improving wall snapping features.
- Already working on some UI improvements.
- On the way to reimplement back doorways and floors.
- Fix to basics furniture placing.
- Testing gameplay with 1000 UMes and the map editor.
- Preparing for the AI development phase, with Lua integration.
Thats it for now 🤗