We almost forgot about the blog post today. There are a few possible explanations here. Either David went off to Thanksgiving-land and took with him a sizable portion of our scheduling acumen, or since we keep finding things that have slightly changed around the office that don’t make sense, we must have lost twenty-four hours of time like in that Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode, “Clues” (where the crew of the USS Enterprise keeps finding things that have slightly changed around the office that don’t make sense, leading them to believe that they have lost twenty-four hours of time).

MYSTERIOUS.

Anyhow, patch 45 went well. People seem generally pleased with the decision tree code and how it’s working; the military does their job perhaps too efficiently, to the point of starving to death if you leave them rallying for too long. (We’ll fix that.) Building decor has been a hit, and the main source of confusion that we are currently trying to track down involves food production, which seems to be fine for some people and occupying 50% of colonists in a colony for others. (We’re working on figuring out exactly what this second set of individuals is doing. Mr. Triolo is busy consulting a complicated series of charts and muttering “oh dearie dearie me” while nervously fiddling with an astrolabe.)

Today’s blog post, however, also falls in the inconvenient space between “we released a patch with all our new stuff” and “we have new stuff to blog about.” So while we are *just* getting started on new stuff for this month (military features on my plate, Daniel doing some UI stuff that he doesn’t want to talk about yet, Chris taking advantage of the fact that workshop jobs can now accept multiple, disjoint inputs to produce a single output), we don’t actually have any of that

This week’s blog post, therefore, will be “al fresco.”

Here, for people’s general interest, is a screenshot of the current version of the military decision tree that we shipped with. New military behaviours, one of my projects for this month, will be stuck on after the tree in the rallying section. All of this also needs some optimization to spend less time allocating and deallocating memory, which right now it does with agonizing slowness.

A note for future developers: you actually want to use bezier curves here. Don’t cheap out and use a different curve type. I still haven’t figured out quite what the best set of rules are for intelligently designating the in and out points of a graph node. You can now also collapse graph nodes when they’re not being edited, and scroll along the graph, because – as it turns out – these things get very, very large. In the process of doing this, we discovered we didn’t have horizontal scrollbars in the widget set yet, so I added those.

Future work on the military will basically be after “MT: Rally (run) and “Rally (idle)” – there will be a branch here depending on what military filters for that military crew are active. I think we put this shot up before, but here is my WIP mockup of the barracks interface from a couple of weeks ago, before I started tackling the horrifying flowchart-builder-and-runner you see up there. (I’m very satisfied with it, for what that’s worth.)

Left to right: train, patrol, man embarkations, build constructions, and assault. We’ll probably have some sort of toggle for “can the military respond to hunting requests” here as well.

Here is a *very* old picture from David of “everything going terribly wrong.jpg”, which I found attached to my ticket for “finish implementing fire in-game”, which I am doing before I finish the rest of the military stuff because, well, fire’s useful stuff. As you know, everything being set on fire is a requirement for colony builders and one that we have laboured without for too long:

Dealing with “I am on fire” will be on the TOP of the military decision tree flow chart.

Here is a cat photo:

Here are some Clockwork Empires Alpha 45 Let’s Play-Type Video Things:

and we made it! It’s a whole blog post!