Run little dodo, run! (Mr. Triolo was having fun animating this guy before he left for the holidays, as you can see.)

.. Hello? Anyone here? No?

Then I guess it’s just me on the job today. Everyone else is still on vacation.

I suppose I could be persuaded to share a couple tidbits in a short post. You guys have been terribly patient over the holidays so I guess you’ve earned it.

(And this is what I get for falling to The Plague and taking weirdly offset vacation time. On the up side, I used a pitcher of week-old coffee to  anoint myself lead programmer and used my new-found sense of intellectual invincibility to write some absolutely fascinating Lua script to convert our Lua entity definitions to XML readable by the UI system so that we can display commodities in UI widgets. I’m hyperventilating just writing about that one.)

(No, but seriously: Regular expressions! Oh man.)

What else? Oh, designing UI and creating UI assets. Management. Working on contracts. Not a lot you want to see just yet — but Micah did fix a longstanding bug that’s been confounding my development of forests, and I can show that!

Forests Oh Man

Here’s how to works: game objects in Clockwork Empires can be asked to wake(), which means their update function is called on every game cycle. You don’t want every tree, rock, and blade of grass in the game to do this because that bogs the game down with unneeded processing. You do want all characters, for example, to do this though because they’ve got interesting things to do, thoughts to have, and fellow colonists to get angry at.

The problem with wake() is that sleep() didn’t work (due, apparently to one misplaced logical operator a couple thousand lines deep in the codebase). So if you wake a tree, god help you if you wanted to put it back to sleep. This lead to sequences like this:

A lovely timber-harvesting operation, all going as planned.

That wretched tree has thrown its vicious, sappy young all around itself, trapping our poor lumberjacks! And it won’t stop! Why won’t you sleep, tree? Haven’t you done enough!?

And more trees join in to entomb our poor colonists who, under such pressure, have obviously snapped and are taking their anger out on one another in the grand tradition of survival horror turning a dark mirror upon the human social psyche. Clockwork Empires, folks!

So this doesn’t happen anymore. Thanks Micah!

With that done, we here at Gaslamp Games hope you have a safe & lovely New Year and a totally awesome 2014!

(And you can bloody well bet I’m taking tomorrow off. By which I mean today, the day this post appears, because I wrote this yesterday. Through time. It’s really a lot like that episode of Star Trek where they find Data’s head buried under San Francisco, except in this Nicholas is the alien with the soul stealing machine — and by soul stealing machine I mean Brian Hook’s massive collection of whisky. Which was awesome. Then Daniel is Worf or something.)

In conclusion, thanks for following us through 2013 — the next year is going to be exciting!