Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!
Beta 3 is now live on the testbranch! The Land of Godon is completely playable, and you should be able to finish the Inner Sanctum questline!
A few things are still missing from this patch. Female models (and books) will be added over the next few hotfixes. This is actually related to the delay of this patch. I finally fixed my workflow for NPC dialogues.
I used to write all my dialogue trees in tables and adjusted scripting in-engine, because scripting referenced internal code. This made reiterating on dialogue graphs very cumbersome. Whenever I wanted to change a graph, I first had to adjust the structure (or text) in the table, transform the table(s) into the right format (I have talked about that step in an older update), reimport that format into the engine, and redo (!) the scripting on the new structure.
As you can imagine, I was never too keen on refitting dialogue trees. Branches, parallel trees, and complex structures (including skillchecks) would become extremely bothersome as well (and hard to debug).
Well, no more!
I finally found a proper node-based tool that can cover structure and text, and (more importantly) with a little bit of Python magic it can handle scripting as well.
Now all I have to do is save the output, chase it through a Python script, and reimport the result into the engine. Done.
Naturally, I want to use this new tool for the new NPCs as well, so I am still holding them back a bit.
Anyway, as I already mentioned in an earlier update, the new patch contains several new areas. The final area is still a little sparsely populated at the moment, but I included it for the Inner Sanctum quest. My last playtest took me several hours, so you should be busy for a bit.
More lore, quests, and all of that other fun stuff will be added over the next few hotfixes as well.
Until then!
Best wishes,
Michael