With 3.7 wrapped up and bug-squashed it was time to start work on 3.8. In fact work started a bit earlier than the 3.7 launch, so there's plenty of interesting stuff to show by now. 3.8 has, for now, no major content theme. It's meant to be a version that adds a lot of small missing features and fixes some others. Our small and medium feature backlog has gotten quite long and it's better to finish it now than to continue adding major blocks of content, and to prototype and test some new ideas.

Filtering door system

Doors can now filter which entities they allow to pass through:
This is a very often requested feature, and it's finally here. Keep in mind the notes in the UI: enemies don't care about which sign is hanging on a door.

Path finding display

Selected entities will now display an overlay line over the map in case they are in the middle of a pathfind walk. Very useful to see where those pesky enemies are going or to figure out why your officers are ignoring certain route.

Multiselection with rectangular area

The game finally has proper multiselection:
Just drag with the left mouse button and a rectangle will appear, changing the selection live as you drag the rectangle corner. Multiselection is only enabled for officer entities. The idea is that there's rarely a need to issue mass orders to any other kind of entities, with the exception of robots. I will look into adding robots to multiselection later on. This is how the right column looks when using multiselection:
All buttons are live with item cooldowns too. The role grouping reflects the currently equipped item by the officer, not their spec. Actions still work as usual. If you issue a walk order with 30 officers selected, all 30 of them will make a formation around the position you click on. For target orders I'm still deciding what to do, and I will probably introduce 4 separate target actions for each role. For players who want to micromanage their units this will give combat a very RTS flavor, and I believe it's a better fit that my previous designs. Squads and the squad bar are no more, and combat mode is pending a redesign or a removal too.

RTS-like grouping

In the same vein it's possible to make ad-hoc groups like in any RTS-like game. First make a group, then press Ctrl-1 to store the group. From that point on pressing 1 will select again the same group of entities. Keys 1 to 6 are available for this.

One more thing...

Could it be true?! This is just a prototype implementation for now, I'm gathering feedback about this in the forums in this thread: http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1471966894883588413/

[ 2017-07-31 22:00:27 CET ] [ Original post ]