Driftmoon Alpha 8 Build Released

Instant Kingdom’s indie RPG Driftmoon has recently reached its Alpha 8 build milestone, which contains a plethora of changes both on the purely gaming side and on the modding side, and people who have pre-ordered the game should be able to notice those changes in their experience, as they have the chance to play the game already. Here’s the changelog:

Game Changelog

‘¢ Difficulty levels were backwards, fixed. Remember that you can change your difficulty level during the game by pressing esc and going to the options.
‘¢ Changed the very beginning of the game yet again (but only for the first few minutes this time)! Do tell us what you thought of it!
‘¢ The world map now shows which areas you have completed. It basically tells you how many quests you have completed, so there may still be smaller things you haven’t completed that are not marked as quests.
‘¢ New talent: Phoenix! You gain the help of a silver phoenix, who can aid you when you are in trouble.
‘¢ Added status icons that show the currently active spells on you.
‘¢ The Stone Dwarf/Giant/Titan can now be unsummosed by clicking its icon.
‘¢ The inventory screen now has a new tab, crafting. This hosts all the ingredients, and the recipes.
‘¢ The stats screen and the new level screen now make a difference between your permanent stats and temporary stats.
‘¢ Changed font rendering engine. You can now expect text to behave well on all platforms.
‘¢ It used to be possible to break the Summon Stone Dwarf/Giant/Titan skill by cleverly leaving him behind on a map. Fixed.
‘¢ Buzz can no longer drift away on his own, and he is now blue.
‘¢ Fixed enemies sometimes getting stuck in rocks.
‘¢ Fixed crash when moving to another area while a companion was poisoned.
‘¢ Fixed player poisoned state not being restored from saved games.
‘¢ The Sanctuary talent now gives the Sanctuary skill. It is much more powerful than previously, but it uses mana.
‘¢ The sound elemental started pulsating after it was killed, and you left and returned to the area. Fixed.
‘¢ Sometimes after an explosion the screen might have shaked permanently near that location. This is likely to be fixed now.
‘¢ The Bottomless Quiver now shows the infinity sign.
‘¢ Intelligence now affects your maximum mana as well.
‘¢ The Murderer’s Axe is now counted as a melee weapon in terms of weapon skills.
‘¢ Rollos are a bit more random now, and less likely to get out of their chains.
‘¢ On very slow frame rates walking toward water edges would sometimes make you go through adjacent walls. Fixed.
‘¢ No longer crashes if no sound driver was found.
‘¢ Added a help switch to the 4*4 puzzle in the monastery.
‘¢ The rotating puzzle in the monastery now runs better with low frame rates.
‘¢ The player is less likely to go through moving doors even on low frame rates.
‘¢ Already selected combat skills are no longer reset when moving between areas.
‘¢ Elithran can now use the door in case you lock him inside.
‘¢ Unwielding the Negative Lily with the Flaming sword effect no longer results in fiery hands. Which would be cool on their own.
‘¢ When coming out of the mine in Northrop, companions will no longer get stuck behind the door.
‘¢ Small flash to indicate when items go into tabs, the food counter, and the inventory.
‘¢ Poison attacks no longer cancel the Tower Shield skill.
‘¢ Monsters now prefer paths that don’t have movable things on the way, but if they can’t find an alternate path, they will try to clear their way.

Modding Changelog

‘¢ New cheat: SHIFT-5 speeds up time. Very useful for testing slow scripts. I might turn this into a scriptable action at some point, making it possible to speed up and slow down the game.
‘¢ Arrow keys can be used in the script condition selector. Enter selects.
‘¢ The object graphics tools now fit better when an object has multiple parts.
‘¢ New condition: objectIsOnPolygon
‘¢ New condition: currentMapIs
‘¢ Attach joints are actually usable now.
‘¢ Objects in the menu screen are now clickable, if they have use scripts. Maybe it can be used to make an interactive menu screen?
‘¢ You can now attach scripts to when the levelup screen changes stat points.
‘¢ Timed scripts starting times are now staggered over the first second. This improves performance when there are a large number of timed scripts with the same timings. It will only affect the timings for the first second, so the timers should be as reliable as usual.
‘¢ Rotating joint resume angles work much more reliably now.
‘¢ Script action: Disable/enable minimap autoreveal.
‘¢ Script action: Reveal part of minimap.
‘¢ Variable choises list now has tooltips.
‘¢ The pathfinder now correctly handles cases where the bot or the objects on the path have their collisions disabled with each other.
‘¢ You can now write the name of any variable in script fields that take a number – useful for passing parameters. This means the Driftmoon scripting language is now more like a real programming language..
‘¢ If the field contains a letter, it is considered a variable name.
‘¢ Actor variable “this” now contains the ID number of the current object.
‘¢ A bot’s base object startup scripts are now run when the bot is spawned from a script.
‘¢ The player no longer attacks himself if he damaged himself as a result of a script.
‘¢ The action useObject now works better on different size bots, and when the target is a physics object, or when the target is a bot.
‘¢ Script editor no longer crashes if dragging a script action to conditions list, or vice versa.
‘¢ The attacker for meleeDamageArea and reduceHealthSweep was erraneously marked as the script target, while it should have been the script caller.
‘¢ Setting a race’s masterAttackOffset can make it prefer/not prefer a bot’s master in combat. For instance this can be used to make the player more attractive to enemies than the player’s followers.
‘¢ Fixed an infinite loop where an onDamage script could damage the bot, which would in turn initiate the same onDamage script.
‘¢ Fixed bug where bots with no deathImage would stop all sounds.
‘¢ Fixed crash if the player had reached the last experience level, or there were no levels available.