Weekly Update - Mushroom Forest, Caves, Hammers & Staves This week I worked on the Mushroom Forest area (Moivalau Forest), the caves under Gajoi's Claw, and added decorative Hammers, Maces, and Staves

Programming Tasks

First up, here is a quick update on programming tasks this week, and then we'll get to the new content.

• Network Refactoring - I continued work on the network refactoring this week, addressing some packets related to receiving scene updates. (This task will continue to move along slowly - it is fairly tedious yet requires a lot of focus to get this done right.)
  
• "Ghost Collisions" Bug Fixed - In the past few developer's meetings I have encountered a bug that involved colliding with invisible geometry while walking in an open area. This bug has been high on my priority list, but difficult to reproduce for testing. I was finally able to find the cause of this bug and resolve it. After doing so I discovered there is a second scenario (this time limited specifically to world page boundaries) that can also cause strange collision behaviors such as jumping camera positions and the character "stepping up" slightly. I have yet to research that bug, but so far it has been less severe.
  

World Building

Here are a few things I also worked on this week after I'd had enough programming for the day:

Mushroom Forest

Some of you may remember this region by it's name in the MMO - Moivalau Forest.

The giant mushrooms are back with a new layout for the region.

It's changed quite a bit from it's initial conception. This isn't the final pass, as it doesn't have any nighttime lighting and atmosphere yet, but I think it is coming along nicely.

Caves Surrounding Gajoi's Claw

Included in the changes is a bit of space reserved for our first Reisuii output, close to a Taipii village and harbor. I'm still a ways off from introducing the Reisuii to the game, but I may start thinking about Reisuii outposts and architectural styles.

The large harbor cave. On the lower plane to the left I will be placing a small Taipii village, while the upper plane in the top right will house a small Reisuii outpost.

A map of the expanded cave system (Red areas are inaccessible). An underground stream now runs from near the top of Mt Gajoi down to the waterfalls across the island.

New Path-finding Data

The path-finding in Wei Garden was out-of-date after the recent layout change, so I've updated path-finding data in the area primarily focusing on the roads for now. I then continued along the road south through the Mushroom Forest, through the caves, across the columns... all the way to the takadynn in Maulei Beach. Characters are finally able to path-find (only along the areas served by the roads) from one side of the Isle of Kasau around to the other.

For some time now I've been wanting to see more of the Isle of Kasau come to life with characters moving around and interesting with the world, and this was a good step toward that.

Taipii Delivery Service

With a road established between the four Tapii villages, this week I set up a simple "delivery service" as a test. For now this is just a set of crates in Tasii Garden and Maulei Beach, a pair on both ends for sending and receiving.

A simple delivery point. Place items in the box on the right and an NPC will come along and move them to a receiving box at Maulei Beach!

There is currently a single NPC that runs back and forth between them moving items it finds in the "Send To ..." crates. It currently takes 15 minutes of real-world time for the NPC to run from one side of the map to the other for delivery. I plan to expand on this with more crates to the other villages, and then get resources (like wood from the logging camp) flowing to all the villages. Eventually this system will be upgraded to use merchant NPCs, but for now it's a fun exercise to see the simulation grow a bit more.

Decorative Weapons

I've also added more temporary "decorative" weapons for NPCs to carry around and players to collect. With these in place only three more sets remain.

Hammers & Maces

A collection of about 20 hammers and maces have been added.

A sampling of the added hammers and maces.

I call this one the "backscratcher". It's also good for pulling mats out of fur...

Staves

A collection of about 20 staves were also added! I had a bit of fun giving the staves names, descriptions, and for some lighting and sound effects.

A sampling of the added staves.

That's all for this week, thanks for reading!