Have you ever had one of those weeks where everything seems to go wrong? Work is being done. Oh yes, work is being done. But at every step, we are beset upon by mystery and woe! ARGH.

Loading doors! Mr. Triolo animated them. They are lovely:

Good, well-behaved shutters. (Seen in Maya.)

Let’s put them through the same process that we use for importing everything else into the game, la la…

IMPORTER WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS

AAAAAAAGHH HNNNNNNNNNNRGH GRRRRGGH HRPP

Seriously, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.

Fine! Fixed that. Micah put in a big cleanup of the AI state code this week which lets us more efficiently create new types of animals and things that need AI (turret guns, vehicles, fish people, etc.) that are not proper citizens. Things explode but we put them out. Now, finally, we can finish the chicken. What a nice chi-

WHAT ARE YOU DOING CHICKEN

AAAAAGH HRNNNRGH HRMPPH [And we really must do something about that cog. – dgb]

DO YOU NEED AN OLD PRIEST AND A YOUNG PRIEST

Fine! Fix the chicken. Fixed the chicken. Added a bunch more animals (foxes, frogs, The Tapir) and some special behaviours (egg laying, fox vomiting) Good! Let’s finish some UI.

We’re starting to plug away at getting a UI that is better than “a crude first pass, implemented by blind hedgehogs in a bag covered in dung.” David sent me a mockup for the Work Party dialog last week which looks like this:

David’s original mockup, replete with comments about old-timey lithographs. [Now let’s be fair — this was more an image for visual brainstorming, if you will, not intended as a mockup proper. Seems to have driven Nicholas half-mad, so there’s that. –dgb]

A more refined mockup of the work parties. Pip Pip and all that.

Fine, we can make something like that. After some poking and prodding, we end up with:

Still placeholder UI, but headed in the right direction, clearly.

with a jolly drag-and-drop interface so that people can be moved from work crew to work crew. This spawned a number of discussions about military units (anybody dropped into a military unit gets drafted), finding various work crews, classifications of work crews, and whether or not we need a large button labelled “MILITIA” (answer: Yes.) That’s all fine and dandy, and easy to add – but why won’t it scroll correctly to the bottom of the screen?

Short answer: apparently, I wrote the scrollbar code back in 2003. Yes, that’s how old some of our codebase is. Now imagine me back in 2003, as a nineteen year old. I don’t know what I was doing back when I was nineteen – today’s nineteen year olds all seemed to be obsessed with something called “twerking” and “The Skrillex”, but for some reason MY nineteen year old self decided that the scrollable range of a scrollbar should always be 32 units less than the *actual* range of a scrollbar. Why?! I don’t know.

ARGH BUILD TIME MACHINE GO BACK IN TIME FOR TIME STABS CRUSH BUTTERFLY UNDERFOOT —

Okay, fine. Calm down. We can work on… music. That’s good. Music is good! Ryan has new code, let’s add the title music.

… why are you loading the wrong DLL, music code?

… why are there *four* different OpenAL32.DLLs on this computer, including some in obscure Microsoft Directories, none of which are the DLL that actually contains the extension that the new audio code needs?! SET MICROSOFT ON FIRE —

Buildings! BUILDINGS! We can work on buildings. Barbers can now claim buildings and perform useful medical, dangerous live-saving medical treatments! (Somewhere in here, people also got the ability to claim beds and claimable modules – provided that they are of a sufficient rank in life to claim beds as their own rather than just being forced to sleep Wherever, as is the custom of those days) Hooray! Progress!

The next construction to appear: a jolly little pie shop. [I think we’re going to want to move that barbershop pole up a bit ‘eh. Yes, nothing can be okay this week. Nothing. – dgb]

The next construction to appear: a jolly little pie shop.  Let’s do clerks…

WHAT ARE YOU DOING AND WHERE IS THE REST OF YOUR BODY

NO STOP THAT

AAAAAAAAAAAGH

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

(Daniel here: we’ve sent Nicholas to bed with a small glass of whiskey and a pistol with a single bullet in it.)