Disruption Week

A brief and more hastily thrown together Thursdoid this week I’m afraid, as we’re currently at a messy but exciting turning point in b42’s development which will be setting us up for the remainder of development, and rather than try to scrape together content for this week’s blog while we’re in the guts of it, we would rather save what we have for a much more exciting Thursdoid down the line when things are also a little less hectic.

However, we’ll explain the situation this week to give people a better idea of what’s happening.

Firstly, months of multiplayer reworking has made its way into the main development build, which is our efforts toward moving a lot more of the codebase to being server authoritative, particularly with a completely server side inventory system, to aid in making future PZ builds a lot more hack proof.

Secondly, the core systems of the massive crafting rework are also being merged into trunk, ready for the wider team to start building on it for the much anticipated deep crafting trees and new post-apocalypse professions for our overhauled crafting systems.

The crafting overhaul is quite huge, changing how recipes and items work on a fundamental level, and will require some work to port over existing items, along with any that have been added elsewhere during the course of the new system’s development, and as such touches on many areas of the codebase and is a difficult one to integrate.

As such, things on the main branch are in a bit of temporary disarray as these big systems get integrated into the main line, it’s going to be a busy week as the team bugfixes and gets the development build ship shape to start pushing forward with all the integrated code toward getting it to a point we can start looking to push it out for public testing.

This new systems allows for:

• Multi tile ‘machines’ and crafting stations

• Support for networks of items, power, liquids or gases (ultimately a building’s power, heating and plumbing will use these systems for example)

• For items both crafted and looted that have varied statistics and unique properties that alter how they function beyond the simplistic ‘condition’ of existing versions of the game, and providing much more deep variety to gameplay to crafted and looted items.

• The recipe system has become much more in-depth and customizable allowing for much more interesting crafting processes and possibilities.

Unfortunately this also means some work in getting all this cool functionality pushed from its branch into the mainline, but this has to be done and once it is the situation going forward will be a lot more exciting.

Once this is done, and we have a large portion of the code team contributing to building out the vast crafting trees that have been designed, we should start to have some exceptionally cool stuff to show off in future Thursdoids as we start to feature the crafting overhaul (something quite a lot of people are most excited about) a lot more on the run up to build 42.

We’re aware that on the whole this aspect of b42 has been shown off in Thursdoids the least, mainly because the work done (outside the cool fluid systems and the crafting station vid shown a while back) has been mainly code for foundational systems to allow the crafting overhaul to reach the heights we are aiming for, which in itself facilitates extremely cool stuff but is rather hard to blog about