Beta 10 Life (Patreon)

Well I can at least say that for Cogmind progress it sure is a good thing summer will be coming to an end soon enough :P

The summer months are especially tough on development since my son is out of school, meaning more activities and trips, and I also help out with the annual r/RoguelikeDev tutorial. This year there have been some additional speedbumps as well, including that REXPaint 1.50 release I recently did (which ate up way more time than I expected but it was worth it since the last one was two years ago and it now has support for C:DDA art!), spending a lot of time streaming and talking about 7DRLs since the official reviews came out, and an unexpected tooth issue which has me spending plenty of quality time with my dentist every week xD. On the bright side, at least I finally decided to switch to a dentist who isn't across town, after having moved to this part of town over ten years ago now, ha...

The End(s)

Anyway, last month I talked about Cogmind's two new endings, so the main thrust of the remaining dev cycle has been focused on completing those. As of this writing, both now have associated animations, and content for one of the two paths is implemented. The more involved one I haven't yet added to the game--that's easily the biggest thing left before an official release.

The animations actually ended up taking a massive amount of time. Not because they are especially long ones (they're not), but because after finally refamiliarizing myself with the animation system for wins, and attempting to build the actual animations, I started finding a bunch of issues that kept getting in my way (since these are designed somewhat differently)--basically bugs that never mattered before, even as low as the engine level! Debugging this stuff was a real hassle, something I haven't had to deal with for a while, so that was kinda demoralizing xD

See super minimized ending animation excerpt from back when it was WIP:

Glad that's over with, and another plus that came out of that period is a new debug tool, one that I probably could've used many times over the years to speed things up but never wanted to put the time into actually building... It's a way to dynamically show the data for a given cell in every console stacked behind the cursor, including z-layer, font, colors, relative coordinates, and any active particles. Very useful when in the past I was basically just guessing and making assumptions left and right while debugging (especially when it came to particles), and hoped I was guessing right :P

There's Always Time for QoL

I've still got a few other little things on my finalized Beta 10 list, and since I haven't yet had a single chunk of time big enough to tackle the next/last big Beta 10 goal, over the past couple days I've been picking at the easier list to get that out of the way. Thus we get...

Custom log notes!

Write anything you want to the log using the new interface. It's been requested a few times in the past, and can be useful as a way to record something to the log that happened in your run, or leave a comment about what you were doing before taking a break/saving and exiting, for example.

The next logical extension of this kind of feature would be adding location-based notes directly on the map as well, but that will be a much more complicated affair overall, so not something I can just throw together like this. It might happen one day, though.

Non-FOV waypoint recall!

So in my most recent stream we got hold of several Gui. EMP Blasters and were using them a lot in the quest to earn the Magneto achievement. I don't normally make much use of guided launchers, though players that do have brought up before, and I can really see now, that it's pretty annoying that you can't recall waypoints that were set outside your FOV. This is of course especially noticeable with guided weapons since you're usually setting waypoints outside view, because... duh. (And it was even more noticeable with the EMPs because it takes quite a few repeat shots to actually take things down with one :P)

Anyway, there were definitely reasons I put that restriction in place to begin with, but I can't "recall" any good ones anymore, so whatever now we can recall those waypoints as well ;). I've tested it under various weird scenarios and it seems to work okay, so hopefully I didn't just miss something. Guess we'll see!

And last but not least... visible Mines reward encounters!

So this is referring specifically to the Exp. Sensor Array find,  technically along with two other rare item encounters in the Mines that behaved the same way: essentially you had to step on or near a specific static location to trigger these rewarding events, which for the people who figured that out meant a more tedious Mines experience as you walked everywhere to make sure it was or wasn't around. Obviously not good, and although I knew this back in 2015 when first adding these encounters, the idea was to come up with a better approach "if and when players figured it out" :P

Now that more people know, it's important to get rid of this tedium, so the new solution is to use the Scrap item ($ in ASCII) to basically make these encounters visible.

This just required implementing a new script trigger that can override the normal Scrap behavior and do any number of other things the scripting system can, like adding unique messages and spawning other specific stuff. (Scrap didn't exist back in 2015.) Also while at it I technically included in the system another "autocollected/autointeraction" type of item, Data Cores, so we could theoretically have a special one that triggers special effects via scripts as well...

No more wandering around looking for this invisible event! It turns out there were only three such events in the game, too--all in the Mines.

Beta 10 Leaders

Before Beta 10 there's one other thing that needs to happen: Leaderboards. The whole delay on that has been one of the other reasons I didn't want to do a major release before and instead did a bunch of lesser Beta 9 updates. But it's gone on too long and so I'm going to have to rewrite the original leaderboards from scratch to support the new scoresheet system. It'll be merged with the current system in that the leaderboard page will link to run data on the new server (rather than on gridsagegames.com where the old leaderboards stored text files), but otherwise it'll pretty much look like the old boards. Though I guess for now we won't have similarly easy access to all scoresheets at once...

I'll have to work a final solution on this later, but Beta 10 shouldn't be delayed for it so we'll be taking shortcuts there.

In the end, based on the current schedule and remaining work this means Beta 10 won't make an August release. I can say that it should be out in September, though!