Objectives, dialog and missions.

In the beginning of the week I re-factored the “objectives” code into “mission” code. The goal was that a “mission” could have multiple “objectives”. Objectives being test conditions for events – object destroyed, one object going near another, etc. So missions now can have multiple test conditions for success, eventually they’ll also have test conditions for failure as well.

Then I re-worked the text info for the player, lots of improvements leading into a dialog system. Basic stuff – in terms of – you’ve probably seen it before in other games. You see a portrait of a “speaker” and their dialog scrolls, and the player’s “avatar” responds. Some HUD mission info work was done, and I’m fairly happy with it.

This weekend I polished up the dialog as well as working on the first mission for the player which meant new triggers, objectives and cutscenes. Its going well, I’m almost done with the first leg of the intro, there’s even a few “hidden” missions for the player to stumble upon.

The rough goal is this – finish up the intro mission, polish, then release iteration 15. Then add in key mapping and then we enter the “beta” stage, and proceed from there.

Looking over the post above – a lot of interesting things (though whether they are interesting to anyone besides me is debatable) tend to happen, but then they drift away from my recollection so I might not end up writing about them. For example when I added a trigger for launching ships out of bases/stations. Previously the turrets (on a ship) would “pop in” right as the ship fully exited – whatever it was being launched out of. I scripted this “launch ship” trigger into a cut scene and so I thought – man – I’m showing this so early on and showing a odd turret pop in so early on, I have to fix it, and so I did. Just one of those somewhat unexpected/interesting things. Maybe its a good thing I don’t mention more things, kind of getting rambling here.