Skeletony (the short reply),
I'm pretty much there myself. I'll be damned if I'm going to type in another 52 point, 101 triangle model by hand. There are limits to what I will endure. The editor will be enhancimified.
Zonk (the long reply),
You should probably hold off on cladeograms -- they are going to be fully implemented for the ecosystems release. I didn't get a chance to do rabbits or anything else. These things will come with the next major version (not the fix release I'm putting up tomorrow).
Why didn't the internal organs get resized? If you just take the human, then go down to the bottom of the Caste page, there's a place where it says "Goal Size" and "Resize". Humans are roughly 5500-6000. This will handle all of the internal organs and body parts simultaneously. Then you can resize individually to give things different proportions.
Indeed, a size multiplier would be good.
And copy/paste... that has come up before. I would have liked it when I had to give the humans all those toes... <shudder>
I've written all of the bugs down...
I'm not sure if I changed it everywhere, but the descriptions of sizes should be fixed. That will be put up tomorrow.
Weights are tricky... before creatures used to weigh a lot because their hair was overweighted. Now it is messed up again. It will take some time to get it right... the calculations are nasty. I think the material densities are correct.
The durability settings work, they just don't seem to affect combat damage as much as they should. It is a matter of more tweaking, but things made fully out of steel (including the internal organs) are fairly hard to kill.
Scales should grow back (I think?) HAIR should definitely grow back. Right now, the game treats a severed hair like a severed arm, and it will be gone forever.
The 10.0 material limit is definitely on the way out. I don't know why I put that in in the first place.
I haven't really sorted out alloys and chemical reactions (combustion, etc.) and all of that. It would probably be preferable if alloys were created from their base components, so that critters could make them instead of mining "bronze" and "steel".
You can edit grasps in the editor. They are under interactions. They are called "contacts" (which makes more sense in the game than in the editor, since in the actual game they are more general than grasps).
The full screen texture bug is fixed now.
When you change a sac to an appendage, the "length to width" variable comes into play. For instance, if you have ANY appendage, and the length to width is set to "3", then it will stretch out the Z coordinate of the model by 3 times (and rescale so that the overall volume is unchanged). Is that what's going on? Whenever a model changes shape, the game automatically recalculates the postures.
I'll be making more models as I need them... I'll need quite a few for the next release. Models for growths? If you have a claw large enough to require a model, you should make it an adjunct body part, or a full body part... for dragons this might require changing things around, by making the toes full body parts, then making claws adjuncts on those. I guess I'll eventually need to model growths, to do things like long hair, so maybe the claw should remain a growth...
I can only do so much at once -- I was thinking that water creatures would wait for water. Amphibians (TOADS!) and crabs might come earlier.
He he he. I didn't add any support for "no soul" or "no body" at all. I didn't even test them. Body parts should have tissues. When I make the editor crash-proof, I'll fix that.
Posture is a little tricky. Basically, Armok looks at the creature and assigns it an initial stance. Every body part in this initial stance is considered to be pointing "up", no matter how it actual looks. This means they get the vector (0,0,1) -- that points up (in the positive Z direction). When you assign a direction to a body part, you give it a new vector, relative to its old "up" vector. Once I put the preview picture in, this should be easier to manage.
He he. I couldn't decide whether to make goblins green or gray, so they are both... and sometimes mottled!
I don't know why I keep putting off human ribs. I'm just a big loser that way.
You can make hair display by increasing its density. If you have more than density 5000, and the hair is "global", it will show the hair color instead of the skin.
Okay...
Biomes:
First we lay out altitude. Then we lay out temperature and weather. Then any other weird world-specific things (areas of evil, etc.). Then the game decides what kind of vegetation lives there (trees? grass? cacti?). This is based mainly on temperature, rainfall, and soil quality, although I should read more in my books to refresh my memory. Those will be biomes to Armok. Basically how the vegetation is set up.
With biomes, there will be many new terrain types. The only thing missing will be actual water, and "sharp" features like canyons, cliffs and caves.
Ecosystems:
These will be the critters in the vegetation. Ecosystems will exist in each biome (so the Western Forest will have one, and the adjoining Great Plains will have another). There can be sub-ecosystems -- for instance, suppose there is a lake in the forest. It would have its own ecosystem, but the larger forest ecosystem would also contribute creatures.
Technically, ecosystems will be made up of clades. Each clade will have a population, and a vague place in the food web. As you encounter particular species from the clades, the seeds that generate them will be stored. Aside from generating the creature itself, these seeds will also create its place in the food web, and so on.
Yeah, plants will be almost everywhere. My goal for the ecosystems release is to make the world feel alive, and to make you feel lost and helpless and subject to being devoured by large beasts.
There are no diets now, so ecosystems will be set up in a general manner for now. That is, clades will be assigned a place on the food web, but particular creatures will be ignored. Unless I actually decide to put that in now.
Abstract creature clusters will NOT be a species file. They will simply point to a clade from the ecosystem. If the character were to walk over to an ant colony, for instance, and pick up one of the ants, the particular ant itself would be generated fully, and the whole colony would be given that species seed. So at that point, if the ant excreted a poisonous substance from its flesh, the player would get sick and die. By storing the species seed, the game would allow the player to meet these ants later on, perhaps when he or she has a torch.
If you wanted to, you could create a small ant with the creature editor. If it were set to not have actual civilizations (something I'll do later), then it could be incorporated into ecosystems and creature clusters.
The healing rate is fine -- it is just labeled poorly. I just relabeled it "Healing Time". Smaller numbers are faster. The number is basically how many one second intervals it takes for the part to heal one degree of damage. So if healing rate is set at 1, your wounds will close very quickly.
Yeah, I haven't updated the plan for the magic release, because I haven't finished the vegetation release. There are many things planned for the release that might not have made it into the Plan yet. Temperature effects will be done there. I'm adding temperature now for the vegetation release, but not the actual effects.
I am quite aware of the clean up. There are more things than appear on that list...
I have 137 clean up items remaining, and 83 code optimizations. From your list, I've done only these already (as well as about 15 other things):
Missing Messages for Weapon Breakage
Missing Messages for Certain Weapon Drops
I'll get to the others in time. There's just a lot to do.
Anyway, a fix release is coming up this Sunday. I'm doing math this weekend, so I'm just about done with what is going into it. There aren't many editor fixes (just some important ones with the tracts). I mostly focused on general problems (for some strange reason). Here is the log:
LOG