This Week in the Forest! #58

YO FOLKS! Sorry for the delay on these updates, shits been a lil crazy on my end Dx!

Enjoy a lil WIP of some of the holiday shenanigans Mabel got up to :> I've been writing up the sequence for this, and ALBEIT A LIL UNECESSARILY COMPLEX, it's lookin' fun and spicy - so I can't complain x)

Aside from holiday shenanigans, here's what we've been up to, Starting with A Word from Vixel!

1/3 weekly report:

Happy 2022! :} Last week I kept steady at under-the-hood code improvements and bringing old scripts into our upgrade project.

I added a Dialogue Service to make it easier for other scripts to play dialogue and track things about ongoing conversations. In Act 2 all our scripts for movies, cutscenes, interactions with critters, portraits, nameplates, triggers and more were individually responsible for communicating with the dialogue plugin we use. The dialogue plugin has some quirks and making each TFOL script talk to it directly caused occasional timing bugs and made TFOL scripts more complex than they needed to be. The new Dialogue Service is the middleman that handles everything related to dialogue, and gives the other TFOL scripts a streamlined way to start and stop conversations, know who's talking, see what text is played, etc.

This upgrade paves the way for cleaning up the dialogue-related bits of a bunch of other scripts. It also gives me just one place to make future upgrades like being able to skip any conversation (including the unskippable ones from Act 2), and adding future debug tools like a menu to browse dialogue and play it on-demand to quickly test portraits and formatting.

I'm excited to see these upgrades coming together, but there's still a ton left to do in January. :O This week I'll continue bringing old scripts into the upgrade project and adapting them to use the new Dialogue Service. I estimate I'm about 70% done with the Quest Manager redesign now, and hoping to finish that by the weekend. Staying lean and mean to close the gap so we can get into Act 3 content ASAP. See you next week! ^^

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I've still been bouncing between that holiday event and working on Act 3 stuff. Things are coming, but it's been a bit slow. I've gone almost 2 months now with non-optimal vision and I think it's really getting to me now xD! Fortunately I was able to order my glasses a few days ago, and they are on their way. Probably another week or so, but GAWD I can't wait to fully be able to see again ;o;

Till then I've been plugging away where I can on some of this content! Got a fun sequence planned with lil ole Mabel here :>

OK! That's it for us! Y'all take care :>