Noxico 0.1.14 was released with some pretty bad bugs, such as for example a broken filter check in the scenes subsystem, which was actually very easy to fix as all the parts were already there. Still, there’s a new build up, still 0.1.14, at the same place as before.

What happened to 0.1.13?

I ate it.

New stuff in this release:

• Redid the Look At description
• Prefix mobs, as long planned
• Worldsave compatibility checks
• HP popup notification in the corner
• Split head equipment slot into mask, glasses, hat, and neck
• In-game time
• Doors – a work in progress, but they’re there
• Lots of other stuff
• Various bugfixes and probably a bunch of new ones

What’s not in here is the new Villager Task Scheduler. I’m in the middle of that but thought it’d be nice to finally release an update, so I dummied that out real quick.

Graphical mode, or tiles mode as it can also be called, has been on my mind lately as a possible direction to take Noxico in.

And I’m not going to. It’s just too damn much effort.

You’d expect the problem to be the highly dynamic and variable physical attributes of the characters. And you’d be right. But that’s a solved problem. At a tile size of 32 by 32 pixels, there’s not enough room for details, so a lot of attributes can be merged or left out – cat ears and dog ears can share a single image, and you’d either show tits or not, but not care about their size. Stuff like that.

There’s a bunch of other problems, though.

For example, a single board is currently 80 by 25 tiles. As an imitation of text mode, this works nicely with the tiles being very much rectangular and not square. Expect a resolution like 640×400. But if each tile were 32×32, you’d end up with a whopping 2560x800 pixels for just a single board. Even with board size changes (which have a lower limit) I’d need to make it scroll. Not too bad on the face of it, but there’s more.

The UI is drawn with the same method calls as the board and characters, on the same grid, and on the same screen. I could make the UI classes draw with other methods, in fact I would have to, but all their coordinates would need to be adjusted. If not, the entire UI would be sqooshed into the top-left corner, the controls would have immense margins, or would be absolutely huge. Again, adjusting every single subscreen to use a grid smaller than 32 pixels, or even per-pixel coordinates is not too bad. But things add up.

As the kicker, there have been suggestions of having both text and graphics modes. It doesn’t matter if I do so with two separate executables, or a single one with a startup switch; I’d have to maintain two radically different systems that ultimately do the same thing (“be Noxico”?) and I just don’t feel up to that task!

So yeah. If you read all this and feel like voicing your opinion, be my guest. Please.

Exposing my human adventurer to an infectious wild dog. For science!

Paragon/Renegade meters! Oh no!

Regular, random NPCs get these too, to influence their dialogue and such.

New feature time!

Each BoardChar now has a few scripts:

• OnTick
• OnLoad
• OnPlayerBump
• OnHurt
• OnPathFinish

In this test, we pick out a BoardChar on load and give them two scripts:

OnPlayerBump

if (!this.Character.HasToken("hiding"))
{
  corner("Eep!");
  this.MoveTo(1, 1, "hide");
}
else
  message("Please stop following and touching me...");

OnPathFinish

if (target == "hide")
  this.Character.AddToken("hiding");

The result can be seen in the photoset up top. The victim is the black felinoid just down the center.

It’s called being creative. Also, trying to user friendly.

• In the set of all .cs and .xml files used in Noxico, the total word count according to Word 2010 is 86250.
• The amount of characters in the same, including spaces, is 687566.
• There are 26003 lines, spread out over 483 pages at the default margin and font for .txt files.
• The first file in the merged set is Achievements.cs, and the last is mix\uniques.xml.
• The total size of the main code, including the FMOD wrapper, is 944231 bytes.
• The source directory for the main MIX file, not counting the PspImage files, is 231656 bytes.
• The sound files are 105150 bytes in total, and the largest MIX is the music at 2420986 bytes. Together, that amounts to 3702023 bytes, 3615,25 KiB, or 3,53 MiB.
• A fully playable debug redistributable with sound and music clocks in at 5239958 bytes, 4,99 MiB. This includes all required DLL files, be they regular or .Net assembly.
• Removing the sound and music reduces this to only 2710206 bytes, or 2,58 MiB.

One tick later, I pushed her out of her bed and got in there myself. She woke up where I left her the following morning, none the wiser.