2021-02-16 Startup Scenarios, Story Dialog, Sounds, Bug Fixes

[Haxus]

Startup Scenarios
Several items in my to-do list related to game startup.

When creating a new avatar, you now choose one of four scenarios to start the game.

• Reach for the Stars - You start at an indigenous village on a habitable homeworld. Targoss arrives to give a tutorial. Rocket Training starts when your city is ready. An asteroid approaches.
  
• Citizen of the Galaxy - You start as a citizen of an existing empire, at the capitol, any city, or the emperor, in that order of precedence.
  
• Savage State - You start on a habitable homeworld in the wilderness. Targoss and Rocket Training never start. There is no asteroid.
  
• Lost Atlantis - You start as captain of the starship Atlantis, lost in space and time. No trace of your former civilization exists.
  

A script function avatarInitScenario was added to test for this. It is in the wiki.

Story Dialog
The comm is inadequate when characters in a story say lots of stuff.

A Story Dialog window now appears when communications associated with a story are received on the comm. No changes to existing story scripts are required. It operates automatically.

Story choices are presented as buttons on the dialog, making them easy to select.

There is a setting on the Windows page of the Settings window to disable use of the Story Dialog.

This does not change the operation of the comm window, which continues to operate as it did before.

It would be appropriate to place Story Hint and Drop Story buttons there. I'll do that.

Saved Games
The function to clear saved games does not work.

A few changes related to saved games were made.

• Fixed the function to clear saved games.
  
• Fixed update of saved games list when cleared.
  
• Replaced the dialog with a popup menu, when clicking on a saved game. Options: Restore, Delete, Delete All Save Points.
  

Sound Shutdown
Closing the game is kinda weird. Sounds seem to hang for a while, I assume it is the local server saving or shutting down in the background but it doesn't show it in any way. If this ends up taking a long time, it might be an issue if there is no progress bar or something to show that it is shutting down still. Or maybe at least terminate all sounds when this happens.

Moved shutdown of OpenAL sooner in the shutdown sequence.

Animal Sounds
Sounds of subterranean animals get really annoying over time. The player can do nothing about them, so it is just weird.

Every individual sound effect can be adjusted on the Sounds page of the Settings window.

Flag Bug
Using a flag as an empire-less avatar doesn't open the Create Empire dialog.

Fixed.

Officers Take Crew Berths
Requesting officers to board might have them take free crew berths instead of officer berths. Likely a side-effect of recent NPC class changes.

Fixed. 

Capitol Construction
When not part of an empire, the Capitol building button on the Construction window doesn't look like it is disabled. Maybe the button and its icon should become gery so it is more clear?

Construction buttons now grey the icon when disabled.

Solo Chat From Id
Remove From Id from chat messages in solo game. This helps hide the fact that story characters may return later with a different id.

Done.

[Celarious]

About the new scenarios, what happens to avatars that were created before these were added? I assume we get the default "Reach for the Stars" one still?

[Haxus]

I assume we get the default "Reach for the Stars" one still?

Yes.

[Vooker525]

Player settings are kept in windows registry. Would be nice to move them to some more friendly space (game folder and/or steam cloud) to be able to recover it. Also Temporary files folder contains player universe files and all progress is lost if that folder is removed, though "readme" tells that its safe to remove it

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I started "Lost Atlantis" scenario and crew spawned as gen IV characters. I thought it should copy DNA of avatar in that case, which is gen III

[Haxus]

settings are kept in windows registry

I will add a command line option that causes a .ini file to be used instead.

I'm not sure where it will go on a Windows computer. On Linux it is stored in ~/.config/Software Engineering/Hazeron Starship.conf.

I made a note to add a setting for the saved games location.

[Deantwo]

Saved Games
The function to clear saved games does not work.

A few changes related to saved games were made.

• Fixed the function to clear saved games.
  
• Fixed update of saved games list when cleared.
  
• Replaced the dialog with a popup menu, when clicking on a saved game. Options: Restore, Delete, Delete All Save Points.
  

Save games? plural?
Save points?
Restore save same?
I am not totally sure what you mean by all that. It seems to contradict my understanding of how the client handles the save game.

You have explained it as the client creating a new save game when you first start it. And then you generate the universe in that save game with the random seed "42". Any avatars then created will spawn in that save game's universe. Is that not correct?

Temporary files folder contains player universe files and all progress is lost if that folder is removed, though "readme" tells that its safe to remove it

I made a note to add a setting for the saved games location.

I mentioned this in an email or two as well. Having the save game inside the Temporary folder is really bad.

I would suggest just making the default location for the save game into a folder alongside the Temporary folder. But an option to save it elsewhere seems like a nice idea.

Also if you are moving things from the temporary folder, maybe you can move the comm transcripts out too? Not as important in a singleplayer setting, but I just never liked having those saved there either.