The village lives its day
Seventeen villagers each have a day: the smith at the forge and the fountain, one on the verge, one at the brook, one on her step, one in her flowers and at her cart at night. People are no longer standing in front of their houses all day.
Where anyone is comes from the clock alone, so nothing about the schedule is saved. That means a load, or passing time, cannot leave anyone in the wrong place. They snap into position behind a fade.
- They walk real streets, using the navigation grid built over the village, and fade through doors.
- They stop and face you to talk.
- In the evening the alehouse fills. People walk in the door, sit at the tables, and walk out at bedtime.
- Shopkeepers keep their counters' hours, then come to the alehouse off duty with off-duty lines.
All characters are solid now: the hero, villagers and enemies cannot walk through each other. Walking villagers give way to each other, to people standing, and to the hero, and enemies keep out of each other.
Three tests cover the routines. Every stop is on open ground and reachable from home. At noon the village is out, and at 20:45 the alehouse holds exactly the people the clock says. One villager walks out of the door at bedtime, and talking stops a walker.
One test band had to move. A shopkeeper's walk from the new houses is longer than the one the test was written against, so its allowed window widened to 8 through 26 clock units. EditMode passes 678 of 678.
112,796 pixels of black
The two companions' sheets had black outlines. They lose them without a re-render or a re-bake: only the outline pixels on the two sheets the game already had were changed, and the file metadata is untouched.
| outline pixels changed | |
|---|---|
| Blade | 54,044 |
| Razor | 58,752 |
Blade's near-black brown outline became a dark tan of his own fur. Razor's flames and pale face took the same pass as the enemies. His fur is so dark a navy (17, 19, 46) that the enemy rule left his body outline black, so a second pass gives that edge his own navy. Pupils stay black.
The script refuses to write if any changed pixel was not near-black before, or if any transparency changed. That is what makes it safe to run on finished art: it can only ever remove black. The baker applies the same step on every rebake, so the black cannot come back.
A copy that would have replaced its original
A map editor now round-trips the whole game. Every area exports with its ground levels, water, woods, roads, fences, stairs, buildings, enemies, villagers, chests and exits, and a piece library of 2,298 pieces covers every tile, building, enemy and villager. The village area alone is 1,480 objects, and it opens and draws whole.
The round trip has to be exact: an area that goes out and comes back unchanged is identical, and an edit comes back as an edit. Two bugs showed up under that test:
- A map drawn from scratch took the default region id.
- A copy saved under a new name kept the original's id, so importing it would have replaced the original area. It is a new area now, with its own enemy instances.
The export stamp no longer carries a time, so a rebuild only changes the maps when the game itself changed. Five round-trip tests cover every area, edits and a map drawn from scratch.
A strip of cliff across the doorway
Cliffs draw in bands four rows tall, and each band sorts at its own foot. A prop placed at the back of a cliff nook was cut across by the band for the rows in front of it. Moving it to the nook's front line, where it sorts correctly, fixed it. An explicit probe now lists every renderer over a point with its sorting.
A related find, on a hillside that could not be climbed: the ground probe showed the gully through the shelf was one tile wide and had been filled in as a notch, and the rocks' faces buried the rest.
Smaller things
- A secret cave that was a painting is real terrain now. The map is read a tile at a time into void, rock, floor, water and waterfall, and the walls draw as cliff face at the village's scale.
- The weapon sheet cache no longer loses its sprites when Play mode ends. That had made 10 EditMode tests fail after any PlayMode run.
- A Sound Editor lists every one of the game's 442 sounds with where it plays, and can replace one (keeping the old file), revert, and export it.