Weekly Update – September 16, 2022

The first half of the week was solid – new feature development for release readiness, lots of bug fixes, and no scope creep. The rest of the week was consumed by messy rework that slowed progress and, I fear, will produce many new bugs. Automated testing should catch most of the bugs, however.

• Stat Modifiers. Stat modifications caused by equipment, status effects, and terrain are now defined in lists instead of individual variables. This greatly simplifies the logic for calculating net stat values and displaying modifiers in an itemized fashion (which the Character Panel now does). Stat modifiers are either added or subtracted; multiplication and division aren’t used. This allows modifiers to be applied in any order.
• Separate visual effects for unavailable drag drop slots. The UI dims drag drop slots to inform users when slots are unavailable. This was initially used to indicate slots that couldn’t receive the dragged object, for example dragging leather armor into a hotbar slot. When ability resource consumption was recently added, the same dimming functionality was used to indicate abilities that couldn’t be used due to inadequate resources. This introduced some bugs because the dimming logic now needed to handle combination scenarios. For instance, if an ability was dimmed because of inadequate resources, it would undim after being dragged because the drag drop logic would reset it. Using the same dimming effect for two different reasons also made the effect ambiguous. I addressed these issues by adding a separate dimming effect for slots with abilities that couldn’t be used and separating the dimming logic for the two scenarios. One visual effect darkens the slot and the other displays the slot contents in greyscale.
• Many bug fixes

Next week, I’ll complete the remaining clean up for stat modifiers and add them to the character panel. Then, I need to get back to sound effects. The sound effects implementation has to be reworked somewhat. The varying sounds for physical material and item combinations are cumbersome to configure. There’s too much repetition; centralization is needed. I also want to create an in-game tool for understanding what the AI is doing. Much of the AI info is already logged but it’s difficult to wade through it.