Hey everyone, welcome to a new blog! This one is going to be a short blog due to the uninteresting nature of bugs.
So for the past 2 weeks, I've been working on allowing multiple stories for your base, finishing up the firefighting system and started to fix bugs.
Regarding multiple stories: You'll now be able to build a staircase. I opted to go with a staircase instead of a classic ladder to allow AI to also be able to reach higher levels. The way it should work is like this: You build your flooring, then a staircase, pillars and then your ceilings just as you'd expect. Then on top of the ceilings, you have to build some more flooring and voila, you have a new level to build on! Most, if not all, foundation structures are invincible, so as to avoid cases where a level would remain floating in the air without any pillar support. I also added a new check where the game will prevent you from manually destroying a structure that has other structures depend on it. For example, if you have an assembler built on top of a basic floor, attempting to remove the basic floor will fail and it will tell you why. You'd have to remove the assembler first and then the flooring.
I've also finished the firefighting feature. As per our last dev blog, there's a new firestation that has 4 drones on it which can extinguish fires completely automatically. Fire will now spread on a much bigger area, but at a slower speed. Instead of a 3x3 grid for fire tornadoes, we have a 10x10 grid of fire spawning. So if you see one of those spawn near your base, there's a much higher chance the fire will reach your structures than in the current alpha. However! Fire spreading will now perform a physics check so that it doesn't spread from one cell to the next on the grid if there's an object between them. For example, in the current alpha, if a fire tornado spawns right next to your defensive wall and then spawns a new grid, the grid will basically ignore the wall and the fire will spread through it on all cells and wreck any building that's on the other side of the wall and that is close enough. This won't happen anymore. So although defensive walls can provide a very effective means of protecting against fires, the firestation would still be advised. You never know if a monster will destroy one of your walls while a fire is raging nearby, or if a fire tornado randomly spawns inside your base. Note that the firestation won't work indoors and I don't have any plans to make indoors firefighting for now, especially since foundation items are invincible so fire should never be able to reach inside without player input.
Regarding bugs. So I started fixing up bugs last week and I've made quite a bit of progress. I've fixed all visual and audio bugs, as well as over half of gameplay bugs. Some days I make a lot of progress, others not so much. For example, I spent a whole Tuesday working only on 2 seemingly simple bugs: The mech flying off edges and the player getting stuck in a weird state after surfacing. So that was an extremely frustrating Tuesday. But other days I fix up around 10 bugs. Anyone with any kind of IT background knows how time consuming bug hunting can be right?
So with that being said, I think alpha 5 will be ready for public consumption in around 2 weeks. I won't be putting it on the Beta branch since I'll be testing it very in depth by myself and because I'm confident in my bug hunting skills!