This week’s update is going to cover a few small feature additions as well as a whole load of bug fixing! Keep reading to find out more!
With the Alien Invasions changes and additions completed, I had a week were I was able to focus on a lot of smaller issues and make fixes and additions to resolve them. The first up was the issue with the lockout for the High Prophet in Temple Grounds. Since this is a unique encounter (in that you don’t actually kill the boss) we were having issues getting a lockout that would apply to the whole squad. To remedy this, I’ve added in a new bit of boss script that allows a boss AI to give a lockout to everyone in the galaxy automatically. This is being applied to the High Prophet to properly fix his lockout issues and going forward will make life easier if we want to do another boss that doesn’t actually die.
Another rather big change that I made concerns “special” galaxies. Special galaxies are point-of-interest locations in the universe that contain skill training, missions, etc. You may recall a while back I added in custom map coloring for the name of special galaxies. In order to help newer players even more, I’ve added to the functionality of being a “special” galaxy by ensuring they’ll always be revealed on the map for players. This is good for two reasons, firstly, new players will have less trouble finding galaxies for Paxian missions (so less WHERE IS XXXX in help chat) and secondly, it’s very convenient for existing players to find key locations after a universe reset.
Finally, what I spent most of my time on this week, fixing a lot of little bugs. All of our content (items, galaxies, enemy spawners, etc) is stored in XML files. Recently Jeff added in some error checking code to our XML loading functions to check for out-of-order XML tags for our content files. An out of order tag for spawner and galaxy files will lead to a skipped tag and a skipped tag means information about an object that is missing. The new error checking code revealed hundreds of small issues that needed tracked down. For the most part, these issues were little things that won’t noticeably affect a galaxy or spawner — but there are two noticeable fixes that took place.
Firstly, there were quite a few lower level spawners that were getting their treasure lists skipped by the parser. These mainly include Monochome Tints and Hues. With the tags in the proper order, they’ll once again drop all the loot they are meant to, not just Augmenters and Kromaticos. This also affected NCC-Bulk spawners in Beta Antares, BP Processing and East Vindia, who were getting their treasure lists replaced by their missile launcher drops. Secondly, the roaming Olympus AI that players need to kill for missions were getting their team definitions skipped. Ares Warriors, Stingrays, Cyclops, Rams and Zeus Pretenders were all meant to have individual teams and will properly have them next universe.
So that’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!
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