Weekly progress #63

Hello, dear Greenfeet friends! May the grass be soft beneath your feet!

Sorry for this blog post coming out on a Saturday instead of a Friday. May is quite packed with public holidays in France, and I took advantage of yesterday's beautiful weather for a family outing!

As I mentioned in my last post, the stack of critical bugs has been completely dealt with. This finally allowed me to work on gameplay improvements, which I made available on the beta branch a few days ago.

One of the biggest changes is the addition of the Room system. Any enclosed space is now considered a room. The contents of a room determine its type. For example, a room with a bed is a bedroom, and with several beds, it's a dormitory. There are currently only three room types (Bedroom, Dormitory, and Other), but I plan to add more in the near future (like Workshop, Kitchen, etc.). From now on, the Shelter need of the Greenfeet will only be fulfilled if they are inside a room, and mood penalties for sleeping in a dormitory or an inappropriate place are now correctly calculated. You can visualize the rooms in your village using the brand-new overlay system.

The task priority system has been revised. It's not yet possible to manually define priorities (I'm working on it!), but the Greenfeet now tend to spread out less. They'll prefer to perform nearby tasks and favor tasks that are linked. For example, a Greenfeet who brings an ingredient to a workshop will proceed with crafting if all the ingredients are ready. This should greatly reduce the time lost wandering randomly between tasks.

And finally, one last bit of news for our Linux friends: a Linux build of the game is in the works. Actually, the build already exists, but I need to dig into the Steam settings to understand how publishing works. In fact, I've migrated my development environment to Ubuntu—result: compile times are now 3 to 5 times faster, which is a real game-changer for me! The project is slowly but surely heading toward 80,000 lines of code, so of course compilation is taking more and more time...

Next week, I'll focus on improving the progression system. There's been ongoing groundwork since the demo release, collecting your feedback and ideas. Last week, I began drafting a macro roadmap and overall plan; now I want to start experimenting directly in the game. There will also be a hotfix for the beta to fix some regressions introduced by the new AI system and performance optimizations.

Thank you for reading this post, and have a great week, everyone!

Version 0.1.45a791c1

Added:

• Added: Linux support, official Steam builds are not yet available.
• Added: New room system. Any enclosed area will now be considered as a room, and the rest as outside.

Changes:

• Changed: New AI algorithm for job, tool and activity lookup.
• Changed: Improved rendering performances with a 90% reduction of displayed sprites.
• Changed: New save format enabling migration support.
• Changed: Greenfeet will now stop working exactly when the workshift is over instead of finishing their current task.
• Changed: Added a preemption system for tasks: greenfeet will now lock a building job if they take care of bringing the items.
• Changed: All furnishings are now crossable.

Fixes:

• Fixed: Greenfeet working for an hour too long.
• Fixed: Wrong storage zone displayed when editing a zone-based craft order.
• Fixed: Move out tasks not performed if using custom zone jobs.
• Fixed: Greenfeet having incompatible traits like Lazy + Hard worker.
• Fixed: Exhausted greenfeet waking up right away.
• Fixed: Invisible greenfeet when returning from exploration.
• Fixed: Being able to build on water.
• Fixed: Collapsing roofs overriding water with dirt.
• Fixed: "Forever" settings on crafting zones not working.
• Fixed: Missing tool notification blinking when tools are picked up by greenfeet.