Alpha 36 Build Notes

Character Screen
* (Change) The ESC key will now close the window.
* (Change) Removing the two “Description” controls in the Character window. They were the cause of most of the slowness of opening and closing the character window.
* (Fix) The above change fixed a gpf that would occur when you clicked on an “empty” equipment slot which was active (Chest, Legs, Tools, Weapons, Hands, Head, Light Source).
* (Add) Simple text description controls for the Equipment/Inventory page and the Recipes page. These are TEMPORARY .. They don’t look nearly as nice as the html controls.
* (Change) The 49 Inventory square controls have been replaced with one. It’s beautiful.

HUD
* (Add) Popups now give a description of what the HUD panels are.
* (Change) Health and Experience popups no longer follow mouse. Same standard as the other HUD popups.

Clock
* (Change) The Game Clock started at year 1024. This was relative to the story .. But for the moment, changed to “0”. So that when you see the time string on the new HUD popup for the Day/Night cycle, it shows the actual time your character has been in the game. Also, you start everything on 0, rather than 1, except for the hour, which is 6 (am, so you start at the first morning).

Liquids
* (Update) When a block is harvested next to Water or Lava there is a chance it will flow into the newly harvested space.

Alpha 35 Build Notes

Interface
* (Change) Removed the “Maximise” attribute for the main frame, for the moment.
* (Change) HUD now within the Game window.
* (Change) Experience bar moved up the top right.
* (Change) The Character window now appears in the middle of the game screen, and Pauses the Game while open.
* (Add) New “Welcome” screen. From here you can play the game. Exiting a game comes back to here.
* (Change) Help icon changed.
* (Change) Location of some messages changed. — this is temporary, as the messaging system needs an overhaul.
* (Add) Ballikin icon added to the various dialog windows.
* (Update) Text added to Waypoint window.

Alpha 34 Build Notes

Character Window
* (Fix) It was possible to try setting values in the Inventory with a zero-value ID lookup.

Terrain Generation
* (Fix) A lot of the terrain generation (particularly in Caves) was not properly checking to see if the block could be placed (that is, checking Player placed stuff, etc).
* (Update) When clearing the area around the player, player-placed things won’t be removed.
* (Update) Order of generation adjusted. Most things happen before player history is processed, but Trees happen after.

Campfires
* (Fix) Campfires were not being displayed correctly when _inside_ the Player sight radius.
* (Add) Campfires now have their own light radius.

Player Placement
* (Change) I had turned off the ability to “keep placing” holding the right mouse button down. This was a silly decision. It’s now back, more intelligent hopefully (doesn’t continually open and close chests).

Alpha 33 Build Notes

Installer
* (Change) Embedded a UAC Manifest into the ballikin.exe file from the SetupBuilder installer NOT the app itself.

Start Windows (Player, World)
* (Change) Various changes, wording, pictures etc.
* (Update) If exited (key press ESC) then the main window will now close automatically.

Initialising
* (Update) Logged added to the Audio init (sends to DebugView if any audio files do not exist).

System
* (Update) Incremented the file versions, hopefully help with the “errorcode 47” error people are experiencing.
* (Change) Images and Audio location changed from APPDATA to COMMON_APPDATA (again). Data (save games) kept in APPDATA (logged in user).

Help
* (Add) Added an “Intro” page on the help window, which is a breakdown of the Ballikin screen (basic).

Alpha 32 Build Notes

Interface
* (Change) Removed the “ThisWindow.Reset(1)” calls when the Game window notifies the Character window for refreshing the Totals and the Character tab info. Refreshing takes place on a field level.

Character Window
* (Fix) The background color of the equipment slots would alternate between gray and white. Made white for the now.
* (Change) “1” and “2” in the equipment slot titles have been changed to “Right” and “Left”.
* (Change) “Legs” and “Feet” equipment slots have swapped with the Tool slots.

Memory
* Started working on reducing the memory footprint. Cleared about 40-50 meg by making the Object / Block architecture leaner. The Block class used to have “Item” as a parent. Item has “Object” as a parent. Set the Block parent to “Object”, and created a new PlayerBlock class to handle the blocks that need more info than what the Block class gives.

Mobs
* (Update) Min/Max numbers for a region decreased overall for Sheep, Pinkeyes and Bad Snails. This is because of speed. So once we get better code for pathfinding etc, then I can increase this number .. Maybe.

Day/Night Cycle
* (Update) Sheep are now removed at night-time (when it changes to night, and on loading a game where it is nighttime.

Sound
* (Update) AND WHAT AN UPDATE! Instead of “PlaySound”, and thanks to the most excellent MG (you know who you are), Ballikin is now using the MCI interface.
* (Add) New sounds: Player Hurt, Recipe Create, Tool Break.
* (Change) “Pickup” sound changed (was too loud).

Drawing
* (Fix) Wowza. Removed a line of code that was supposed to be drawing black squares for the blocks outside of the sight-range .. when this was already being done elsewhere. HUGE speed increase. Lag gone.

Alpha 31 Build Notes

Chests
* (Add) Wooden Chests are in the game. They are fairly inexpensive to make, but do require Stone, so will need to get beyond the first “suburb”. They don’t do anything except open and close at the moment. There is no “inventory” display/functionality.

Non Block Blocks
* (Change) So there used to be a queue that held “blocks” like Doors and Chests. As with the GameItems queue, GPFs could occur because there wasn’t any synch logic (accessing, reading/writing queue from multiple threads at same time). So it’s now a memory file. AND what is really cool is that using a LONG field in the file record, I can now store the address of the class instance.

Interface
* (Change) BIG CHANGE. All main windows (Game, Character, HUD) are now found within the one MDI frame. They are always open. Other windows like the Map and the Menu are still popups.

Terrain Generation
* (Update) Trees should no longer spawn near any Player-placed blocks. Pretty lame logic really, but will do for the moment (trying to stop trees from growing in your houses).
* (Update) Water has undergone a similar logic (but not exactly the same) as Trees.

Character
* (Update) Info next to each of the character attributes (STR, DEX, CON).

Alpha 30 Build Notes

Recipes
* (Fix) “Make All” button would not, in fact, make all. It would make, for all intents and purposes, none. This was happening for stackable items.

Sentient
* (Change) “Add Inventory GUID” function was doing too much. Leaned and cleaned it. That is, removed the check for “stackable”, as we are able to assume that with the GUID passed, it either exists in the Inventory (is stackable) or it doesn’t exist (not stackable).

Item Drops
* (Add) When more than one item drops onto a block, you see a “Treasure” image, rather than the top-most item image.

Alpha 29 Build Notes

Steel Armor
* (Add) Steel armor has been added to the game (recipes). Helmet, Boots, Chest, Hands and Legs. Five pieces, as opposed to three for the Copper armor, and two for the Leaf armor.

Recipes
* (Change) Some changes:
– Brick ingredient is 1 Dirt (down from 5).
– Steel ingredients are now 1 Iron and 1 Coal.
– Wooden Pickaxe no longer requires any Copper Coins.
– Wooden Pickaxe ingredients have been adjusted, 2 Trunks (down from 3), 5 Leaves (down from 10).
– Tree Trunk ingredient in “Wooden Block” is now 1 (down from 2).
* (Fix) In the Make Recipe code there was a possibility of using the old “qItems.GUID” field, without the queue record being retrieved.

Saving
* (Update) “Save” button enabled in the menu and now calls the “SaveGame” function. So you can save the game and IF (planning to fail) the game GPFs, your progress is saved.
* (Add) The standard quick-save “F5” key now saves the game.
* (Update) “SaveGame” function now lets you know the game was saved by putting a message on the game screen.

Interface
* (Update) Messages that were previously at the bottom left of the screen moved up to accommodate for the XP bar.
* (Fix) When a Tool is unequipped, the HUD is now notified correctly.

Game Items (Including Items)
* (Change) Removed the Items queue from the World class. Replaced with a series of Groups in the Game class AND a memory file for the “Game Items”. Game Items are made up of Armor, Weapons, Items, Trinkets and Tools. MASSIVE CHANGE. REALLY COOL. COOL BANANAS EVEN! UPPERCASE!

Item Pickup
* (Change) Removed the check on whether you were doing something else (and so were not allowed to “pickup” because of the GPF that would happen, because of the global items queue – which has been replaced with the memory file).