I’ve had a pretty busy last month (and some weather drama), but luckily I did get some meaty things done on Auto Fire.
![](https://www.patricklipo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Download-Badge.jpg)
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.
![](https://www.patricklipo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/AutoSellScreen-1024x637.jpg)
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.
![](https://www.patricklipo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/AutoDockScreen-1024x636.png)
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!
![](https://www.patricklipo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/AutoStressTest.gif)