We have been working full throttle in order to get everything in ASAP, this has caused some unannounced, bugs as well as forgotten communication, which isn't good nor bad. We have come together today and spent a large deal of time going over everything that has been modified updated and than some foreseen, bugs. Both for myself with the AI and the other Alex, with overall game-states. First there has been some clamping on the angle modification for node by node, for all projectiles and each is different. For the Nuke, it causes very specific situations where it nukes itself. Although it is very hard to predict when or how often it is a "feature" that needs to be fixed and removed. I have played the game in speed mode about 50 times, and it has only happened approx 3-5 out of about 200 nukes. However one of those ended the game because it blew up it's own shield followed by a command center hit in the following turn from one of my nukes.
This also causes problems with the faction based upgrades to which I was not expecting or had the time to fix after everything else today. Their caps are extremely small which means instead of being able to be launched from any situation I will need to figure out a degree that can be launched and than based on what can be launched a degree of targets for each location. Therefore centers towards the other planet will be the best location to launch from and moving up and down reduces the amount of space's I could actually hit.
As well the upgrade for the radiation tower of the Ruskies faction is in. This is the current faction the AI has originally been designed for and swapping out for specific faction upgrades will be consolidate to new classes with specific functions. The radiation tower upgrade is a projectile you launch, but hope misses the enemy planet and shields, but you follow up with a nuke that hits it and causes a large explosion. So next week getting that to work is my overall goal followed by timed events, that have a charge. Since these are both similar turns later they will be best to be done in a generic way that the set-up is the same and by ending different upgrades in the future will be easy. For example just to add the Radiation drill to launch, was extremely easy. I just added the specific faction upgrade and the upgrade building function took care of the rest for me even when I wanted to launch it generically it took care of it. Where it launches the specific event I will need the check, so that it doesn't do a generic launch event. I have it set to a launch for generic's before they are added just for ease and most of the special upgrades are just launching events that can and will be used by both sides no matter who launched them so it is up to the prediction to figure it out.
Overall we have also come to a UI finalization after one more go at getting feedback. However testers are thoroughly confusing on their responses. They had a ton of complaints about one and said it would never work for x, y, z and more. Yet when asked which their favorite was they chose it. So it won't work and we can't use it, yet we want it in the game. From people who are looking forward to playing the game it seems weird to want something they know and can predict will not be useful at all.
As well this week has been dedicated to AI bugs and updates. I have gone through and found a lot of mistakes, by just watching the AI play those 50 or so games. None of them were actually game breaking, and were never noticed by testers in any of the last 15 or so testing sessions. This means personally, it was pretty efficient I feel but it could and is better. There were random times for example where it wouldn't fully use the resources, they were extremely weird and situational. The same side it would refuse to build buildings if certain chain effects happen. Although their wasn't any logical errors almost different checks. However if you blew up the buildings it caused no problems at all and rebuilt appropriately. The bug was actually if it built in a very specific order it would leave two building slots wide open. This was because it was accidentally being saved as full slots that read as a full empty slot. The check for all of the adding wasn't being caught and switching a couple orders fixed this bug. As well the upgrade bug was figuring that it could upgrade and wanted to, yet it chose not to which was a bit fishy, but of a similar problem. When it was upgrading one, it would sometimes believe that by doing one it did them all and said everything had an upgrade. Although it was also very situational and in 10 games played it could happen at random times or never at all. Sometimes you got all buildings upgraded and sometimes just the first one it chose to do. Even though each building type, and building itself was being checked by itself it had some weird problems with lists and set them all to true accidentally even when the check for if the building type. Happily though all of these were fixed today atleast in my testing. I will be having people running QA for our team watching for weird situations in the building and upgrades because since this all seems to be weird situations, even though I wrote it with what I thought no specific situations in mind and tried to keep it as abstract as Alex and I thought would be cohesive compared to coupling, it still needed certain weird situations where it broke just to fix itself. Remove the full empty slots, and the upgraded non-upgraded spots.
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