Neo Scavenger - Game Development Updates

Blue Bottle Games has a few more updates for Neo Scavenger. I found the following two the most important ones this week so let's get started with the updates.

The first update is about the new Beta Update.

 Beta Build Now 0.9922b

Since it has been relatively stable, I've just finished updating the default builds to 0.9922b on all sites. The "test" links are no longer necessary, and have been removed for now. The major changes to watch out for include:

• Loot frequency changes.
• New t-shirt design winners and duffle bag items.
• New item sound effects.
• New Game Over screen.
• ATN now more strict with its services.
• Mod-merging is supported (see included readme.txt and modding forum)
• Several bug fixes in both modding system and vanilla game.

As always, if there are any issues with the new build, let me know on the forums!

The second update is about gas masks, immunity, poison, and sound effects.

I've already mentioned gas masks, and I finally got those working today. One of the trickier things about gas masks is that they don't take electricity or other discrete items as charges. Rather, they slowly wear down a charge over time and use. I.e. their filters get worn out, and eventually need replacing.

This required a change to the discharge system, so I added a new charge profile field called "bDegrade." Items using a charge profile with this set to true will deduct item durability from the charges, rather than whole charges. Hence, the air filters in the gas mask will gradually approach 0%, and once they do, the gas mask stops providing benefit.

Related to this feature is the concept of immunity. For the gas mask to be useful, it needs to stop certain conditions from being applied. This is pretty easy to simulate in encounters, but almost impossible in regular gameplay. Since exploring hostile environments can be done on the map, and combat may include disease or toxins, I needed to add a special way to block conditions.

This turned out to be pretty easy, fortunately. I just added a new creature field called "SetImmunity," and conditions can add/remove IDs to the list the creature should be immune to. For example, the nanorobotic medkit not only removes gastroenteritis, but it can prevent the virus from incubating while the dosage is still active.

I also started working on another hazard which ties together the new gas mask with the existing Great Black Swamp area. Since the swamp is meant to be doused in toxic exfoliant, it makes sense that areas of that region should have dangerous atmospheric conditions. I'm hoping to make the gas mask useful in these cases, as well as in protecting against airborne diseases (which some creatures may be carrying in the future).

I think I've got the toxic fume effects figured out, and I've started codifying them. As part of this change, I separated the abdominal pains from poisoning so that other conditions could share the symptom. And as a result, poison is now a hidden condition. Players can still see the visible symptoms (abdominal pains, diarrhea), but it won't say "you have poison stage 2" anymore. Similarly, this new airborne toxin is likely to cause variable symptoms, but won't warn the player "you have exfoliant poisoning." The player will have to recognize that the headaches, vomiting, and other symptoms are an issue.

Finally, I took inventory of the remaining sound effects that were missing on items today, and organized that for Paul. He recently sent a new batch of sounds for some plastic items, berries, mushrooms, and such, and I hope to have those hooked up soon.