2023 is Off to a Good Start!
Hey everyone! Here's the latest and greatest in the wonderful world of Hazordhu development!
With version 0.9.22 coming ever closer to a release there is a lot of cleanup going on in the source right now. The sweeping changes to the core of the game that needed to be done in order to lay the groundwork for different game modes mean that saves will no longer be compatible with previous versions. This led me down a rabbit hole of killing two peeks with one stone, so to speak. Development on Hazordhu started way back in 2005 when I didn't know the first thing about how to write code, which meant that some ugly things from that time are still in the games source code today. There are these things called "type paths" which the engine that Hazordhu is built on uses to define different types of objects (like a hatchet or a tree). Suffice to say that there has previously not been any rhyme or reason to how these type paths were named, which has annoyed me to no end.
Being a building game, Hazordhu has a few hundred different type paths defined and a few tens of thousands of references to them, so with the help of some tools to make this easier, I've been going through and renaming all of them to align with a proper, unified naming convention. These type paths are the way the game saves and loads things, so by changing all of these it means saves wouldn't be compatible, so I decided to make this happen in this version in order to get all of the savefile compatibility stuff done at once and prevent another incompatible update down the line.
Aside from that, I've been hard at work finishing up the buff system and transitioning things over to it like hunger and thirst. Some other effects like bleeding and resting have been implemented as well, and I have some pretty fun plans in store to add a few more status effects to the buff system, like fear, drunkenness, and a few other things. It's an exciting time for sure!
Once the aforementioned refactoring is completed I'll be setting my sights on finishing the main menu stuff, namely the server listing and making sure that's all working properly, before finishing the update with a brand new resting and camping mechanic to make adventures more... adventury!
Overall I'm really excited with how this version is coming together. I apologize for the long wait time on this, but rest assured that it will be worth it! We've got bug fixes and new features to play with and explore coming sooner rather than later!
Thank you to everyone who has supported me on Patreon over the last year. The deep dives have really taken off and I'm going to get back to posting more Hazordhu related content on there soon. Most of all, thank you for your continued love and support and as always, Happy Roleplaying!