2010-11-19 Jaana in Moonglow

Hail and well met,

Unfortunately, this past week has been fairly busy and next week will be worse, but I’ve got something pretty awesome to show you guys.  First, I’ll refer back to the first Awesome screen I released.  You will notice that Jaana is actually standing in the court of Yew as a result of a proximity trigger going off.  This serves more as a proof of concept that we can make these kinds of changes rather then a solution to the Jaana problem.  Actually, I must admit, it was fairly easy to do.  Jaana had an empty teleport “activity sequence” (a series of activity commands that do different things like teleport, patrol, loiter) labeled “To Yew,” which I filled with a teleport target ID.  Next I had to have it activated, so I used Vasagralem’s trigger sequence and changed the activity sequence reference in the trigger to point toward Jaana’s “To Yew” sequence.  

Now I’ll point you to Awesome screen #3, where Jaana is now standing in Moonglow.  What is significant about this is that I actually placed new objects into the game world, gave them the correct properties and flags to function, and created a completely new trigger sequence to call Jaana’s activity sequence.  So now whenever I approach Mariah’s house, a trigger gets called to activate Jaana’s “To Yew” teleport activity sequence, which takes her to the teleport target I placed at Mariah’s house.  Another aspect in this image that you should note is that Jaana is sitting.  She actually did this automatically, and in fact, we found that at times she would go inside the house and sit on a bench there.  We know that this occurred because this activity sequence we used also included an “activate activity sequence” command that pointed back to Jaana’s “Loiter” activity sequence (a simple, one command sequence).  So apparently, loitering is a very comprehensive activity, which is great as this just makes our job easier.

I suppose you might be wondering why I was working on getting Jaana to Moonglow.  Well unlike Jaana, Mariah doesn’t have any empty activity sequences I could use, and we currently don’t have the tools to add new activity sequences or commands.  Also, the court at Yew is very packed in and the high concentration of additional triggers makes testing rather difficult – and there was a lot of testing needed to get this working properly.   Luckily, it shouldn’t take me long to take what I did at Mariah’s and repeat it for the Court of Yew.  I will admit here that Jaana will be reincorporated and ready to go within a few weeks (depending on how busy I’ll be).  Mariah, however, will slow down a new patch drastically unless of course a Delphi/Pascal coder joins the team.

That is all for this week.  Be sure to return in a week to see more Awesome.

– Iceblade