Easing back into development

So after about a week’s break, I’m venturing back into code again.

I’ve mostly been starting slow, with  minor improvements to the code, before starting on the big ticket items that lead toward finishing milestone 1.  First up, I’ve improved the placing of roads.  For anybody who played with version 1.1, you’ll recall that if you started a road in the middle of nowhere, the first click got you a little diamond-shaped “road node”, and you had to click again to actually start drawing a road from that position.  I’ve now fixed that so that you can simply click and drag to make a road, even if you’re not click-and-dragging from an existing point.  This change works for roads, bridges, and terrain strokes.

Incidentally, I’m not really convinced by the terrain strokes system right now.  They just don’t feel right, in my opinion.  But I’ve spent way too much time on terrain editing, and so I’m not going to touch them again until after milestone one;  I want to get hands-on feedback from you guys about how best to fix terrain editing, before I do anything more with it.

I’ve also changed the MMORPG simulation to not have “online” and “offline” modes any longer;  now the game is always considered to be “online” (except when a server has crashed due to being overpopulated.  Though I’ll confess I’ve never actually seen that happen in version 2.  I think that’s mostly because I’ve removed the “speed up time” buttons, and never let the game run for long enough to really build up hundreds of players within one server.  I also changed the simulation such that monsters don’t count toward the server limit any longer, which makes it even less likely to have server crashes at the moment — eventually I’ll need to adjust the server limits to compensate so that it’ll still be something that players will have to consider while designing their worlds.  Though again, that won’t be until after milestone 1.)

And incidentally, I’ve fixed a crash bug which would occur when the MMORPG was online (which is now always), when there wasn’t a spawn point available.  This makes v2 work like v1 and v1.1 did;  if you have a spawn point active, new subscribers will create new toons that will spawn there.  If there is no spawn point active, then no new subscribers will be able to join.  Also a few other esoteric crash bugs.

Also:  fixed the drawing of outlines on the graveship.  Still need to fix the drawing of outlines on buildings when you’re about to draw a road to or from them.