Hi,
more than month after previous development build posted by Warmonger [forum.vcmi.eu/t/vcmi-0-85b-development-version-r2260/394/1) ] I finally present 0.85c build.
As always, the goal is to improve stability and fix most annoying bugs before “big” release.
If there are any significant issues or things that I might’ve overlooked, please write and I’ll look into them ASAP.
The most significant feature added since 0.85b is music support. I’ve also just rewrote creature growth code, so it should now correctly follow OH3. Please check if it actually does!
I’ve also added (or restored, since it was once done but got utterly broken) support for Statue of Legion — the last artifact that was missing. Now we have all SoD artifacts handled.
Many thanks to all contributors and players for their constant support.
PS.
As for the long-awaited adventure AI, it’s still not stable enough to be officially released. Many little nasty issues arouse and I have to do some restructuring in the engine that can’t be done by 0.86 intended release.
However, if you want sneak-preview of adventure AI (pretty trivial ATM), replace “GeniusAI” with “VCAI” in config/settings.txt file. Will likely crash pretty soon, but it’s nice to see AI actually moving.
I’ll finally get the chance to do some VCMI testing today. Sorry I wasn’t around lately. Still rebuilding the house… still no internet (and will not have for a couple of more months I think). Today I’m free by chance and staying at a friend with internet, so I’ll be able to test for a few hours. Hopefully I’ll catch some bugs which (again) hopefully would be easy for you to fix in time for tomorrow’s release.
Given the little time I have, I’ll do various random tests, but if there’s anything specific you’d like tested urgently, let me know.
One question here: are we still going to have at least 2 game mods (i.e.: OH3, WoG3.58f and maybe Custom combinations with other mods)? I can understand that given the slow progress, that may be sacrificed. But otherwise, if we go for 3.58f directly, it may get confusing for some testers to have things working differently than expected. Especially because most WoG tweaks were optional, so some may not have used them and would be tempted to report as bugs. Of course, the main downside is perhaps just more “bureaucratic” for us, in closing such reports and giving explanations… which may be still less of an effort than keeping double behaviors (for each element tweaked by WoG) in the code, and implementing a menu option to turn WoG on or off… Probably something you already thought about, but I’m curious if you reached a decision on how to tackle this.
For the rest, congrats on the progress and thanks for the new release! I hope I’ll be ready with the works at the house and have internet before the following release in the winter, to be of more help then.
Yes, I still want there to be eventually a switch in VCMI that allows selecting a ruleset (something like: SoD/WoG/even-more-fun). However it’ll be best if it’s done as a part of more general system of support for various rulesets (which is part of mod support conception).
If we indeed start getting such reports (non-standard extension treated as bug)… then probably, we’ll devise some provisional solution. But for now I don’t consider this to be an urgent thing to be done.
