Greetings readers, and welcome to August! The rain dance has returned to its regularly scheduled performance for me, which is... Well, expected, I suppose. That does give me a chance to check up on how my favorite developers have been doing, though! The latest updates primarily feature random dungeon generation, so if that suits your fancy, grab a drink, sit back, and allow me to show you the fruits of these developers' labor!
BYOND
BYOND Developer Lummox JR has been fighting nasty particle bugs and trying to get independent particles working, the latter of which is proving to be much more difficult than initially anticipated. Lummox JR also tentatively put in some new var observer code, which was a bit finnicky and, in Lummox's words, painful - but they're a necessary step if getters and setters (however limited) are going to make their debut. Following a release that featured a couple of crashes that have since been repaired, Lummox is turning his focus forward, leaving the independent particle work at its current completion state and pushing 514 to stable while looking towards 515 items, which includes the almighty renderer. Got a feature request you've been sitting on? Post it! Happen to know of an older feature request that you'd like implemented? Bump it! Lummox is actively looking for stuff to pack into 515, and loves great ideas with detailed use-cases that have since evaded implementation.
BYOND Games
Devourer of Souls delivers some dungeon-delving action in Sigrogana Legend 2! Randomized floors in randomized dungeons, each floor containing an objective to progress, have been added. A new Kaelensia race, the Heron, has also been added - a race of naturally-born singers. Devourer of Souls also posted on Patreon, mentioning that profiles have received some serious love, and some folks (like the character Sarah to the left) have been able to create some impressive profiles using the latest changes. Lookin' good!
It's been a bit since we've checked in with a Space Station 13 codebase, and Beestation is just about to introduce randomly generated ruins. Each ruin has 4 different decorations and multiple different objectives to complete. Also added were alien "artifacts" that have secret functionality, which should give you a leg up on the competition. Getting them might prove to be difficult, though! A multitude of job changes and role adjustments have also been made in the proposed changes, as well as some interesting changes to Research, including some very interesting specialized equipment. A mining scanner has been added for exploration crew, allowing them to scan for resources should their fuel run out. All in all, this massive changelist should be ready before too long, so prepare to go spelunking!
Crazah's drawing up property lines in trace/ALTER, creating 4 districts within the game that encapsulate predefined areas. Each district can be owned by a faction, which allows them to control and maintain that area. Factions that own districts can manage taxes, properties, the local guard, and modify their district's status. There are one-hour windows of time in which competing factions can challenge and overthrow factions that preside over these districts. Killing guards and player characters of presiding factions will reduce that faction's influence over the district until they lose power... Leaving a power void for you to take over! Also added were bounty boards, which allow players to post bounties against others, anonymously or publicly. trace/ALTER's world continues to become saturated with interesting systems that you can immerse yourself in, so if you'd like to join testing, be sure to drop by the official trace/ALTER Discord server and tell Crazah that I sent ya!
