The interesting thing about this murder mystery timeline generation is just how many special cases there are.

Things like making sure that if (for example) I need to find a guest who can witness an event, I need to make sure that where I’m moving them to isn’t where they were fifteen minutes earlier or later, or else it becomes quite obvious that they’re being yanked around by the gears of the plot, instead of moving of their own accord.

Similarly, I’m running into all sorts of interesting little gotchas.  For example, when someone is lying to you about where they were at a particular time, they claim to have been alone in the location where they say they were.  Unfortunately, due to the way I’ve implemented this, they act completely blind for the whole period that they’re lying about, including the walk from their previous (true) location to their claimed (false) location.  So the easy way to tell when someone’s lying to you right now, is just to notice that he forgets about all the people who were in the room he started in, as soon as he starts to walk toward the room’s doorway.

(I don’t know how well I explained that.  Hopefully it’s not too convoluted!)

Anyhow, long story short:  I’ve been spending the last couple of days fixing bugs in the murder mystery timeline, and trying to figure out the best way to present that timeline to the player.   I’m getting closer.  And I’m beginning to realise that I need to have all room doors be closed, instead of open;  there are just too many brief “Oh, and I saw those guys over in there” events when the doors are left open.  This is kind of too bad, since I’ve done the work required to make vision and everything work through opened doors.  But it’s just making the timeline harder for the end-user to work with.

Hopefully I’ll have a screenshot tomorrow or the next day.  There aren’t really a lot of changes, though;  the changes so far are almost entirely under the hood.