Hey everyone,

Just another hotfix here with some added goodies. I've done my best to fix the issues brought up by those on the forums. Many thanks to all of you for reporting issues so I can get them fixed in a timely manner! There were some issues with quest resolutions upon moving NPCs to other screens. Now quests track their targets by ID. This also allows me to remove all spawned creatures, which helped resolve arena quests not failing gracefully. Please let me know if I missed anything. I do my best to reproduce all bugs. If I am unable to, it makes it very difficult to track down the culprit.

CHANGELOG:

• World Map generation is done on a separate thread. Added a loading animation.
• Faster FOV calculation. Much more permissible with single-tile blocking structures (like trees or pillars)
• Quests where you need to kill specific enemies in a location complete if you take the target NPC(s) out of the designated area.
• Arena quests properly fail on death for those who prefer to play without permadeath. The quest is given back to the arena master, all spawned enemies are destroyed, and the blocker removed.
• Ruins always have a stairway downwards. Solves an issue with a specific quest not being reachable in some circumstances.
• Level up traits can no longer be re-rolled by pressing Escape in the trait selection menu.
• Character panel now displays proficiencies in order of highest to lowest level.
• Implemented menu button object pooling to reduce CPU usage when entering and exiting menus frequently.
• You should no longer encounter Bandits when crossing over friendly settlements in the world map.
• Rivers and roads look a bit smoother.
• Random pools of water won't show up in settled areas.
• Tiles have a pathfinding cost associated with them. This can be modified by specific objects.
• Pathfinding now takes into account both a tile's cost to enter and the objects on that tile. Enemies will no longer walk through lava unless you are adjacent and move away, or they have no other choice.
• Areas can have variable radiation. There is a new icon indicating the level of ambient radiation surrounding you. (WIP)
• More hostile wildlife from an early stage.
• Enemies no longer save up action points when wandering into walls. This caused enemies' first actions to attack or move several times in a row when they should not have.
• During the powerplant quest, terminals cannot be interacted with more than once.New console commands.
• New console commands.
• New item icons.

I'm hoping this will be the final hotfix before I begin working on 0.7.1, but will certainly release another if any game-breaking bugs emerge. Going forward, I'm going to be focusing more on content than systems. I hope to finish the Ensis quest line soon, and have the rest follow shortly after. Having a win condition is a very big milestone, especially in a large game like Axu. Aside from the main goal, there are some other stuff I'd love to do, time willing (for the future, not 0.7.1 specifically):

1. Dialogue trees. Chatting to NPCs is pretty boring right now. I'd like to fix that by allowing the player to ask questions, or respond to something said.
2. Cybernetics. More limb alterations!
3. Larger local map. The 45x30 map is very small for the screen size. I'd love to increase its size. The faster FOV calculations were still quite fast with a 100x100 map, though I don't think I'll go that crazy.
4. Workers at your base. Hire a merchant, blacksmith, doctor, etc to your base after performing deeds for them.
5. Merchant reputation. Buying items consistently from one shop will increase your reputation with them. Higher level items will appear in their wares, and be cheaper over time.
6. Butchery and equipment. Like the Monster Hunter series, I'd love for some creatures to have body parts usable as weapons/armor after their corpse is butchered.
7. Food/Hunger. This one is more of a question for you guys. Do you believe hunger is important for Axu? I've been thinking of removing it in favor of some other system. Perhaps food can give you temporary buffs? I'm very on the fence about this one.
8. And more!

Let me know what you think of these ideas and 0.7.0b!

Cheers,

Matt (Cynapse)