Yesterday I made a build that includes up to level 6. out of 10. The other 4 levels are in various stages of completion, but all are laid out physically and partly populated.

Tons of work since the last update, too many things to mention, but a partial list just to give those a feel of how much work a project like this is at the end. The work at the end, though, is as rewarding as the work at the beginning, but in a different way.

At the start of a project, everything is blue-sky and you can start from scratch and avoid all the mistakes from last time. In the middle, there's still time to re-do stuff, but mainly you are hooking things together, and redoing things as needed to make pieces work together. This is the unrewarding part when people give up or switch projects.

Near the end, or at least the end of a deliverable build, you get to polish things a bit, and directly see changes in the game rapidly, making things very satisfying indeed.

Perhaps that's another argument for frequent playable builds - more satisfying polishing things up. It also tends to rein in the designers somewhat when they realize that every cool new idea has to work with the old ideas as well.

So, the list :

Made guns have randomized colors, that match the shot, sight, and muzzle flash.
Then made all the guns have emissive parts that matched that color.
Then made sure the emissive showed up iwhen the weapon was n the char's hand, in the gui screen, and on the ground.

Re-did damage per second calc to take into account more of an advantage for splash damage.

Re-did skill system completely for char & npcs.

Re-did skill selection screen to show all skill levels, stats for each, and current skill level.

Fixed human talking animations.

Finished hooking up sublevels on giant PAW level.
Redid Lhithish encounter.
Made some lhithish on PAW 'no_reaction' = true so they would be there when player arrived.
Fixed prison & prisoners on warrens level.

Made build system able to note missing files in the manifest, and automatically copy them from the master directory as needed. Fixed bug where folder had to exist first. Fixed bug where multiple levels of folders had to be created.

Fixed bat vangaurd not moving. Made texture, bump & glow map for suicide trigger weapon.

Tested level transitions from 1-6.

Tons of creature & weapon tuning.

Added 'miss rate', the % of the time an NPC's shot will just go wide, irrespective of accuracy. This is very useful for tuning, and is more fun usually then getting shot by a low amount of damage all the time. More fun to be missed by a large amount of damage.

Last night added code to scale miss_rate based on how the player is doing.

Added reflective cubemap shininess to entities like guns and ship parts.

Added a super-fast preview lighting mode to speed up build testing & tuning.