Finally made it! I was hoping to be at this point a month ago, but some contract work came up and I failed to structure my time in such a way that allowed me to continue being productive on non-contract work. But I’m finally figuring that out and getting back on track, and the first step of that is this new milestone build, which is all about AI.

• OSX Build (Requires OSX 10.10 or later)
• Win32 Build

Like the earlier builds, this is a “work-in-progress” build, not yet a proper game. To test the build, you probably want to follow these steps:

1. Open the game.
2. After a few seconds, the world will be generated. Use WASD to move the camera, right-click and drag the mouse to rotate the view, and use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out.
3. While zoomed out, pick an interesting region and left-click on it to select it. In the context buttons that appear (top middle of the screen), select ‘Activate’ to activate that region. Once activated, you can place buildings, roads, etc. in that region.
4. From the action bar at the bottom of the screen, select the ‘Terrain’ tab, and click on the (terribly named) ‘Town On’ button, then click somewhere inside the region to build your first town. If you wish, instead of simply clicking you may click-and-drag to set the town’s orientation.
5. From the action bar at the bottom of the screen, select the ‘Buildings’ tab, and click on the ‘Build Inn’ button. Click somewhere inside the town to place the inn. Note that the inn (like all buildings) must be placed on relatively level ground, so you may need to try multiple locations to find somewhere flat enough for it. (This needs to be fixed in a future build)
6. Note that while you do now have a town with an inn inside it, there’s no way to reach the inn — the town walls completely encircle the town. To fix this, go to the ‘Roads’ tab and build a road to or from one of the intersections on the town wall; building a road to the wall will open up an entrance to the town on that side.
7. Next, build a Respawn somewhere near the town. PCs will respawn here if they die, and AI Developers and GMs will use these as their entry points into the game world. If you have widely spaced buildings throughout the region, you may want to have a few different respawn points scattered around the region.
8. Next, build a few Grinding Zones and/or Landmarks around the town (from the “Buildings” tab), so that your subscribers will have something to do.
9. Next, create a few Quest-Givers (from the “NPCs” tab). If you wish, you can edit the quests that they’ll give PCs by selecting them and clicking on the ‘Info’ button in their context matrix (top middle of the screen), but the AI developers will create quests for you, if you’d rather not bother doing it yourself.
10. When you’re ready, place a Starting Point (“Buildings” tab) to let subscribers join your game and start playing. While they’re playing, you can select them to see their stats and what they’re doing (with more information in their ‘Info’ pane). If you wish, you can drag them around, raise/lower their level, ban them, etc.

Please give it a try and let me know how well it works for you! I’m particularly interested in any severe graphical glitches you might notice; triangles that appear to be in completely the wrong places, etc.

Here’s what’s new since the MS5 build, in no particular order:

• Completely new PC AI system, based upon a Sims-style “Needs” system. Check the ‘Info’ pane for a PC to see his needs values. (TODO: Make these more visible!)
• Fixed auto-generated magic attacks. (They now use mana, and do damage!)
• NPCs are no longer buildings. They’re now full entities in the world, with statistics and the potential to be attacked/killed.
• Monsters now have models (programmer art), instead of being simple blocks.
• PCs, Monsters, and NPCs now animate (programmer animation).
• Regions fill out information in the ‘Info’ panel
• Add support for “cancelling” setting a quest destination, during quest editing. (<esc> key)
• Monsters now use different ‘classes’ than PCs.
• Multibuffer rendering, fixes a lot of glow bugs.
• Fix issue where a moved PC gets stuck and never moves again.
• Buildings fill out information in the ‘Info’ panel
• NPCs walk around a little.
• Different models are now used for different PC classes.
• PCs don’t consider resting if they’re being attacked.
• Better waypoint target selection while travelling.
• Buildings now have an “entrance”; PCs move in and out of buildings through the entrance, instead of through walls. This includes buildings which don’t look like they have solid walls, such as grinding zones and graveyards. Sorry about that. :) Also, entrances look like large brown blocks. Sorry about that too — programmer art.
• PCs now walk around buildings, instead of through them.
• Towns may now be rotated while being placed, just like buildings.
• Towns now begin with all walls closed. Place a road running to one of their edge intersections to open up the wall on that side.
• Roads can no longer intersect towns.
• Added taverns. Taverns encourage socialising.
• Added landmarks. PCs will go to Landmarks when they want to see nice scenery.
• Placing a town now destroys everything previously within the town area.
• Pathfinding now understands region borders.
• Pathfinding now understands chasms.
• Pathfinding now calculates road lengths correctly. (Previously, assumed that all roads were straight lines from start to end)
• PCs now gather in groups to socialise, when they want human interaction.
• Simple particle effects for melee and missile combat.