Weekly Update - Eggs are Hatching, Clothing This week I finished up work on the creature nests with eggs now incubating, and hatching. Jidou and iichii now hatch, grow, and then die. I also spent a little time on the side working on clothing and equipment.

Creature Lifecycle

The behavior and lifecycle of creatures in Antilia continues to become more complete this week. This week I got the eggs hatching, creatures growing, and eventually dying.

Timelapse of multiple creature nests spawning eggs, the eggs hatching into Jidou, the Jidou growing, and despawning.

Antilia now has five variations of  Jidou, and currently three variations of  Iichii, each with their own nests and eggs.

In the upcoming week I can switch gears back to the AI Behaviors side of things and start defining the behavior of the Jidou and Iichii.

Clothing and Equipment

Whist working on the eggs and hatching I also poked at clothing and equipment a bit, and was able to create our first basic clothing items. There are still some tasks to complete before everything is fully working, but the basic functionality is now in place.

Equipping and unequipping clothing items individually or all at once with trays.

Productivity Improvements

Over time the size of ToiEngine and Antilia's code base has grow significantly, and continues to grow with each week of development. Each time I make even a small single-file change to Antilia the build time (specifically code generation and linking) averages around 10 minutes now. After waiting for that I then have to update, restart the server, join the game, wait for the loading screen, select a character, wait some more.... Even the smallest change takes at least 10-15 minutes now, which dramatically limits how much I can get done per hour (basically 3-4 changes per hour max). It has become a painful crawl. This isn't the first time I've had this problem, it seems to happen every few years. In the past I solved it by upgrading my PC, and I'm past due to do so again - but that'll take some time and research.

In the meantime, to help bring productivity back up a little I tried a number of things this week. Some of it was technical, but the best thing it seems I can do right now is to pack more changes into each build. Sometimes that can be tricky, especially if I am in the process of debugging or wrapping up a feature, but that's why we ended up with clothing this week. I needed something unrelated to creatures and behaviors that I could pack in that wouldn't cause confusion or conflicts.

It seemed to work out, so I'll try to continue doing so - at least until I can get those PC upgrades done.

Well, that's all for this week. Thanks for reading!