I’ve had a pretty busy last month (and some weather drama), but luckily I did get some meaty things done on Auto Fire.

Controls

Many people have lamented that it is difficult to control Auto Fire because the “forward” key also accelerates. Responding to feedback, the new controls are thus: If you press forward, your speed is capped at 40 MPH (that is, 2 actions per second). This way you can manage most maneuvers without crashing into everything around you (previously a popular activity in urban areas).

Speed is still king however, especially out in the badlands! A separate Boost key is used to accelerate beyond 40, up to your vehicle maximum.

Citadels

A citadel is a civilized city where you can take a break, get repairs, and buy/sell items. Eventually different citadels will have their own specific functions, depending on which corporation owns it.

The cool thing is that you can now load up courier missions at a loading dock, giving you a non-combat way to earn more cash.

Cool Stuff

Gaw’bless Unity. It took like a half hour to put ragdolls on the soldiers.

I’ve also got some transition improvements, added new features in the overworld and improved the entrance/exit of areas.

We now save out fog of war between maps. (Whew that was annoying).

Quests work better! They’re improving all the time… but in this case I needed to create a quest on the fly when the player had to deliver cargo. This way I can use all the quest features like lists of rewards, player tracking, unique generated descriptions, and hooking into triggers such as arriving at a destination and showing quest markers.

Lame Stuff

Some significant bugs were also dealt with… I had previously been very diligent about properly and safely deleting entities, so that I wasn’t deleting them from a list I was parsing through. Unfortunately I wasn’t doing so when adding entities to the list. Thus C# was complaining at me nonstop, and it was nice to deal with that.

I also had a few remaining Entity pointers that I was saving across frames, which was not safe. I had changed everything over to a unique token method of tracking entities, but I had missed a few things previously. Again, good to get that out of the way and run some stress tests!