Noxico

A unique NPC that might show up. Shunned from her clan for challenging their leader, even though there’s so few of them left, she has all but embraced the darkness that has come to the land of Nox.

For a playable character type, I need the following things, where applicable, for the Look function:

Facial descriptions, with variants for different skin types (skin, fur, rubber, scales, slime). Placeholders are the color of the skin and hair.
Example: “[His] face is almost entirely equine in appearance, even having {0} fur.” – horse face with fur.

Ears, with variants for having hair and being bald. The single placeholder is a description of the hair, unavailable for the bald variant.
Example: “[His] {0} is parted by a pair of cat ears.” – cat ears with hair.

Wings, with small and large variants. No placeholders.

Tails, with placeholders for skin color, hair color, butt description, and tentacle tips.
Example: “A thick tentacle extends from [his] {2}, ending in a {3}.” – obvious.

Legs, no placeholders.

For a bodytype (making it a possible encounter, and allowing automorphs), a prose description will do.

For a unique NPC, which can have custom Look descriptions, write that description as it should appear.

Post your suggestions on the board.

Did some minor presentational work. You can now specify a cell size instead of letting the game figure it out, which makes Fixedsys Excelsior look pretty good, without overly huge cells and such.

It’d probably look even better if it weren’t cleartyped…

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Imagine you’re playing Noxico. The PC is standing in a wild board full of opponents. You decide you want to have sex with one of them, but you can’t get close to them on fear of death, because your target isn’t hot and bothered enough to change their intention.

So I consider having an opponent drop to their knees (figuratively speaking) when sufficiently low on health, or even when at zero or lower health, and making only the next strike fatal. This would of course depend on the weapon used. While the opponent is on their knees, you would have free reign.

But! While you’re having your way with the defeated opponent, there’s still a board full of others! So I in turn consider not allowing anything but a killshot or leaving them behind unless there’s nobody else in sight, and carrying the downed opponentalong when there are. Perhaps even to a totally different board.

Sounds okay to me, really. But what about you?

Press A to aim a thrown weapon or firearm… if you have one. I don’t. Of course, at this precise moment? You couldn’t shoot even if you did have a suitable weapon.

This shot also demonstrates the totally frivolous color filters I implemented – this one takes a PspPalette file (a plaintext format used by Paintshop Pro 8 and later), and basically makes it look like you’re playing on a limited color depth. Try it with the standard EGA colors. It’s a way of life. This screenshot uses a palette I ripped from the QNX operating system.

Does this look better?

Next up: integrating this into the game proper, slotting in the town generator, making said town generator better, and adding different types of world. Think Minecraft.

Finally stopped procrastinating and reworked the savegame format. It’s a bit more like Minecraft now.

Instead of a single world.bin containing every board and their respective entities, there’s now a world.bin that only contains some meta information on the region and the player data, and a series of Board###.brd files with each board and their entities.

Instead of loading the entire region in memory, only recently active boards are loaded, and flushed to disk after a period of not having Update() called. So in the corner of the world, only four boards are in memory plus the recently seen, at the sides only six, and anywhere else nine. And in dungeons, only the recently seen are in memory.

If an NPC moves from one board to another, they’ll physically move from one file to another – but only when both boards are flushed.

Not only is this somewhat more memory efficient, and does it cut down on loading and saving times, but it also opens the door to region switching ala Minecraft, letting the player travel to an entire new region in the same game world, to be generated when the player actually gets to that point, all by adding another level of folders! Noxico\Save name\Region name. BAM.

And dungeons. Can’t forget the dungeons. I can just scatter entrances all over the region now and just mark them as “ungenerated” or something. At the current world size (which is 8) I have 64 board files. This number would increase as I try to enter more dungeons.