Pre-ALPHA 2.5 has been reached!

Hello all!

    It's been a long day of coding. I've actually been working for about 8 hours straight at this point, and I have Pre-ALPHA 2.5 to show for it! I'll list out all of the changes I've made for you so you can give me your opinions on it all! Let's start off with the boring things, as usual.

    First off, I decided that it was a little awkward trying to see what you had equipped, so I decided to make it stand out a bit more. As you can see here in the picture, equipped items will now appear in GREEN! (And yes, I added a new item to test out other slots!)

    So now, you can easily see and select what you're wearing to UNEQUIP it! Yes, I have also added the Unequip feature to the menu! If you select an item that you're wearing, it will remove it from your person. If you try to press the button on any other item, nothing will happen.

    Next up on my list is the introduction of HEALTH and EXP Curves! As demonstrated to the right, I have set up a simple curve system to control how much health you get each level and how many experience points each level needs to get to the next level up. These are both very simple and not very well thought out. At the moment, they're placeholders for when I figure out how it should be balanced, but the framework is there now!

    Also taking a look to the left, you'll see that someone has painstakingly added the phrase "Nothing Equipped!" to the picture. Well, there's a reason for this as well. As you're all well aware, I have included the ability to equip items. What you do NOT know is that I've now implemented them to modify your stats. That's right! Equipment now modifies your stats! Of course, there are not many stats to be modified just yet. Pretty much just health! But I was clever enough to hide the stat modifiers for the items in the above picture. ;)  The Socks of Sneaking add 20 health to the player, the the Helm of Questioning adds 50 health. here is a picture of the affected stats:

    The game also knows enough to fix your health when you unequip items. It scales your health and whatnot. So that's the first four of the eight things I've updated. Next up is something I had almost forgotten about since I had been spending so much time on equipment. If you're observant, you probably saw it in the images above. Items can now be used in the game! As you can indeed see above, the first item I created was a Weak Healing Potion. It restores 10 HP to a player when used. As you may have already seen as well, there is also a new USE button on the inventory screen:

    It only works if you do not have full health. If you do, it will tell you so and not allow you to use it. If you have less than 10 HP of damage, it will simply bring you up to full health. The STATS section still remains unaffected because I'm not sure which other stats I'll be using in the game. See my notes below about Pre-ALPHA 3 for more details on items!

    The next thing on my list was intended to be something so I could work easy for a little while, but it ended up being one of the more difficult things I've done. I've implemented temporary Player Skins. I'm sure you all remember that players in my game are simple white cubes. Well now, whenever I release a public version, you can play as colored cubes. When you start up the game, it asks you for your name, which color you want to use (Currently TEN to choose from, seen below) before asking for connection details. Here's a picture I took of all but the BROWN colored skin (I used it to take the picture!) :

    It's hard to see, even in the full-size version, but the players are made up of little squares, almost like mosaic tiles. I'll post better pictures later! The last three items all relate to the server console. If you recall, the server console has looked gray and depressing since I first created it. Just a gray box with a few lines of text. Well, I'll be honest. It isn't much better now, but it's an improvement. Here is the new and improved 0.0.0_2.5 server console!

     So, there are several new features here. As you can see, the Active Connections and Port fields have remained the same. There were two other lines under those, one of which I do not believe I ever got a chance to post pictures of. It was a field called "Connections Left". Previously, the server had 25 connections. Theoretically, a player could connect and disconnect 25 times, and then nobody else would be able to join.I used it to keep track of how many more times I could connect to test things before I had to make a new one. Well, that's gone now. I ended up rewriting almost the entirety of my networking code, which proved to be a MAJOR pain the you know what, and now the server has infinite connections. Well, almost infinite. It has 10,000 connections, but if anybody hits that ceiling in the near future, you're crazy. This does not mean, however, that you can have 10,000 people on your server. The Active Connections are now limited! This means that instead of being limited by a number of connections, you are now only limited by a number of clients active at once!

    The other field on the old console was "News", which would broadcast one line of updates. That has been replaced with the white box on the right of the screen! The console actually has a log now! This white box holds the most recent 19 lines of "News", and a text file in your game folder holds them in their entirety.

    The third and final update I have to speak of is, you guessed it, the other white box! The server now has a connected players list. When players connect, they are added to the bottom of the list. As people disconnect, the name list compensates, not leaving any gaps. Here's a picture of the console I took while I was taking that photo of all the skins above after I disconnected them all:

    So that's all of my updates! If you stuck around through this wall of text, congratulations, and thank you for your support. As a result of these steps forward, I decided to update to Pre-ALPHA 2.5. I was considering calling this version Pre-ALPHA 3, but there are a few things I'd like to finish up and get rid of before I declare it v3:

• My Bug List
• Fixing Player Rotation (Other people don't rotate properly when you look at them.)
• Stackable Inventory Items
• Player -> Player Trading System
• NPC System (For Quests!)
• Main Menu
• Options Menu
• Fix Mouse Rotation (You can currently turn 360 degrees backwards.)

    I know that seems like a lot, but some of them are fairly simple tweaks. I'd say that getting all of these things done will take another 2-3 days, but I'm not sure if I want to wait for them all to be done. So Pre-ALPHA 3 may arrive sooner than expected!

     One last thing I wanted to talk about was DONATION INCENTIVES! The poll is unanimous, so I will be coming up with some new ones very soon. It's possible I'll post them tomorrow, even. They are coming, and so is a new Poll soon!

    As always guys, THANK YOU for your continued support! If I was just designing this game on my own without anybody cheering me and helping out, I wouldn't be as far as I am now. Keep on wishing me luck!

-Dan