HL new build in progress... (Patreon)

Cleaning up the encounter/combat preparation... some inconsistencies are blocking encounters from loading in new areas.

Once that is fixed, we will have non-NPC encounters using the species table in the gym, school, and prison, as well as daytime in the park. Nothing too fancy, they're all humans, but their stats, age, etc. are optimized for what/where they are.

It doesn't mean much yet, but I've added in a small chance for xz, zy, and zz chromosomes... later we'll be able to expand more on that.

I have numerous bugfixes and enhancements ready, but I'm still trying to get enough content together to ship a new build out.

Once the above areas are stable, I'll go back and add encounters for the gas-station and diner so that Cindy and Tammi will have semi-functional areas they can visit too. (Like Sue will have with RVH and 'Ona with the prison.)

We'll go back in later and worry about the logic/story of how you can come and go at will and without scheduled attendance- from prison, high-school, and a diner-job... for now I just want to get these in and tested. Not to mention room navigation and security checkpoints... that kind of stuff will likely be held off until the new UI and room-navigation system are ready.

Back on adjustments to existing content, it seems that vampires were proc'ing powers far more often than intended, and to far higher degrees. The formulas in the species table have been revised to bring them into the expected range. Older vampires can still be quite dangerous, but young ones should be only about as powerful as 2-3 men.

Qi Energies are now linear instead of squared, and similar adjustments are underway on Karma. Damage and lifts are mostly in line with this new rate... among other things this greatly reduces the time to recover from near-fatal damage after a bad encounter.

Combat no longer aborts on player dazed; and will continue on player knock-out as long as your opponent is also incapacitated... the first one to recover can win by knocking the other out. It will, however, end if the player is sent comatose, or is (still) unconscious while the opponent can take actions. A 'WAIT' action, for lack of a better name, has been added with the spacebar hotkey, allowing for rapid skipping. The WAIT action only exists while the player is dazed, or both fighters are incapacitated but the player is not comatose/dead; so you can skip ahead without worrying about missed actions.

This also addresses an issue where you overexert yourself trying to feed from or heal a more powerful opponent... and it adds a strategic component to risking said strain while an opponent is close to recovering.

Enemy encounters no longer trigger while you don't have any enemies, thus avoiding the UI jitter as it hid/showed the sidebar. Also, non-NPCs no longer get added to enemies.

The issue affecting stat printouts in some locales has also been fixed. This one was a royal pain to do in javascript, particularly since the language doesn't support parsing localized numbers AND also doesn't even offer to report the digit-grouping or decimal separators for the current locale. Using regex I was able to get it to support a wide range of locales, provided the numbers are written left-to-right and use the Post-Renaissance Latin/Western-Arabic decimal number set/symbols. [0-9]

For locales that use other numeric symbols, there is an option to disable the 'pretty decimal' formatting that caused this issue. (all of this was to allow the fractional portion of a real number to be displayed in a smaller/de-emphasized font for easier reading, kind of like 12<small>.35</small>)

The other reason this was difficult, besides the regex/string approach, yet related to the inability to get the separator characters in the localization API (or severe lack thereof), is of course the generally unreliable nature of floats.

2.3 - 2 should not equal 0.2999999998 or 0.300000000001

(I can understand a loss of precision on VERY LARGE or VERY SMALL numbers, but anything in the range of 0.001-10.000 should be FUNCTIONAL within 3 decimal places at the very least)

Stat-minimums are now equal to Magnitude rather than 1.0; so, for a level 21.0 character, stats cannot drop below 3.0.

The Oils from Parkhaven have been revised: price has been reduced 90%, potency has been doubled, and bottle-size/uses increased 57%. I am working on a way to indicate when an area is maxed/minned out. (ADHD side question, I get the reason we are using 2 N's for minned vs mined, but why the hell don't we use 2 X's so that maxed isn't pronounced as maeksd? Fucking inconsistent language.)

Finally, we get to what might be some of the most exciting news of this update...

Taking the TAUNT action (for the current turn), where you flex your abs and give your opponent a free shot, now awards significantly more Endurance, and it is of the Training/Exercise type rather than the Evolve/Fighting type (which you still get from taking damage in general).

So, after a bit more debugging, refactoring, and writing, I'll release the next version.