#milestone 7

Three months later! I had to spend some time on designing Necro, a massive upgrade to The Orbium, and yeah, the update itself.

We now move on to milestone 8, the completion of which will culminate in the release of GAM3. The release signals a time where the majority of work on the engine is done and we can safely give a single copy of the engine out to a developer and make project-based adjustments based on the project’s needs. Yes, indeed Summer 2016 will mean the beginning of a near 100% focus on actually making games!

Premium Currency I'm happy to announce that GAM3 can now manage premium currency! All premium currencies will be managed on The Orbium but purchasable in-game as well. (purchasing is not possible at the moment)

You can give yourself premium currency on the player-editing page, even though premium currency is account-bound. You can also give it through the "special" result: Give/Take Premium Currency. (it's nice to reward the player with game-specific currency sometimes) You can lock events out by currency and give currency via the Special result.

If you want to disable premium currency or change its name, look for the prem_curr flag in your config. Note that monetization is a fairly involved process: you'll decide how you want to monetize and we'll make a proper marketing portion in-game to explain what the player's getting. That's worked out the same way your game's style and special needs are worked out: through a Black Coat hardcoding your desired changes.

Character Sheet You'll see the topbar changed a bit: "Character Sheet" is now the player's name and has been moved to the left of the action counter.

Character Sheet was reworked to be actually relevant: we now show the active stories and completed stories a player has, as well as all quals. When quals show here, they show in a new "desc" or descriptive format, which is toggable for your char panel in your config! The idea here is that the player is coming for specific information and you'll want to give it to them as quickly as possible; it also helps to compare quals. This style is affected by major and minor classification.

Change Tag Items Previously, it was impossible to act on a tag item in any other way than to subtract through the "red mushroom" box toward the end of the req design. Not anymore!

At the bottom of the item result list, you'll find Tag. Selecting Tag 1 will act on the first tag that appears to the player, and so forth. You'll be able to act on it as you would a normal item.

The red mushroom has been removed. There was a shocking amount of performance it taxed in order to run such a small function, so this is a very happy change for everyone.

Icon Updates Our pack collection has received visual improvements. The software we used to manage icons was upgraded with a fit-to-canvas feature, so it was trivial to finally make them all a little more intelligible. No changes in name were made.

We also have a new pack and a new set: check out the School pack for school and science-related iconography. If you look in the beginning of the Health set, you'll see some beautiful, bold, minimal icons pertaining to the health industry!

General Pools can now be filtered by item requirement in addition to qual.

You can now type {itemname} in a text result to print out how many of an item a player has. Example use case: show a minion's Health Points in an "inspect" event: "This worker has {hp} health."

An "informational" question mark has been added to the top-right of every event that's played. (excluding zone 1, the tutorial!) At the moment, it's fairly useless, just telling the player when the event was last updated. It will eventually expand out with a sexy animation and a bit extra information, possibly even the ability to "remember" or "track" the event, whatever we can come up with. It may also be a premium-user-only feature. There is an option to deactivate this under the config. (wrench icon)

All pages that we use to create and edit objects have seen new functionality or adjustments. For example, the zone/locale pages now give a preview of the background they use under Transition Image. As another example, our Transition Image and Cannot Enter checkbox were in different positions on zone and locs. All inconsistencies were resolved across quals, items, zones and locales.

Started building a custom right-click menu for future use. If anyone has an idea on what to do with it, we'd like to hear it.

Bug Fixes When viewing an event in the event list, the "in" text would not differentiate between zone-only and All Zones.

Equipment is now always present on the screen, mostly because it's equipment *and* status effects now.

Fixed the dirty, rotten, noxious, evil bug that prevented our Recently Found from working properly.

Fixed an issue that could cause the "repeat pool" option to not show.

No more faint border fading on progress bars that hit 100%, causing the bar to slightly overlap its rounded border. You probably never noticed.

Security improvements for our formula parsing.

Improved UIs + Options We now offer alternative views for the inventory! Under config -> 'items', you'll find 'style' => 'list', 'catstyle' => 'dropdown'. Style is for how the items appear in under the category, and the catstyle is the category style, either dropdowns or our new tabs! Which strangely resemble what you've been working with in the backend. ;} Please note that by default, the top "pop up" inventory view will always show Tabs with Icons.

Equipment got a major overhaul, by which I mean to say it was actually made.

The "qual version" of these changes is the Character Sheet and will be addressed in the next update!

You may also have noticed that our sidebars are a little bigger: actually, I've finally made the pragmatic leap into near full-screening our base theme, which I've codenamed "Ghost". There's a lot less unused space, much more for sidebars and a bit less for the main content in the middle! Here is the difference between old and new, under 1600x900 resolution:

old: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/106067196/resp_old.png new: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/106067196/resp_new.png

Mind-blowing, I know. In the completed version of GAM3, we'll be moving away from Ghost and onto a theme that utilizes even more space and does not use the background image for flavor. We'll be using another block or parts of the UI to transition nicely from zone to zone. I know a lot of focus was once on the beautiful background transition technology we have, but the more space I utilized, the less relevant our backgrounds became. Truthfully, it was always a clear problem from the start, which is why we have the little picture symbol to view the background art. The option is always on the table for very minimalistic games, anyway.

SVG Icons! And 500 more GAME icons! We have finally stepped into 2015: we now have one single copy of each icon, scalable to infinity, courtesy of the SVG filetype. This enabled a lot of the above: we won't ever need to hold multiple copies of the same icon to serve various sizes, so it was trivial to format good-looking large icons for the inventory's "icon" style. I'll also be more comfortable making styles with very large icons. (think something like StoryNexus's image | content layout)

Nearly 500 icons were produced by game-icons.net in the past 8! months, so I updated our collection. We were long overdue for an update. This is a more manual process than I'd like as I run a custom script to stretch the icons to their max constraints, so this isn't something I can easily keep up with often. This is more of an annual deal. Take a moment to appreciate that these guys are producing high-quality icons entirely free for game developers. http://game-icons.net/recent.html

You might recall there was some anxiety-inducing bug in which our icons would look blurry on various mobile devices. I'm happy to say that bug is entirely resolved by SVGs!

Containers The container system allows developers to make storage boxes that the player can insert into and take from. The use goes beyond simple storage boxes, however: we can also use this system to "build an army" or team, and send them off to battle. (presuming your army is all items, which they should be)

To start, go to Containers under Items. Design your container and then in the result of an event, give the player a container under the Special option. Finally, select Show Container to show it. That's essentially your "box event". This is considered phase 1 of inventory management. Phase 2 will have:

- Ability to put only so much into a box, ie: a weight system. - Ability to swap a player's inventory with the contents of a container. ("can only bring these items with you" funtionality) - Probably more customization here and there

Sensible Buffs Finally, we have a sensible buff system. You can now tick any type as a 'buff' with a new checkbox, meaning we can finally have a weight system in our games. :} Works the same as before, hover on the option for more details.

The "hidden" item type is still supported and even got some helper functionality to explain how it works when it's selected in the dropdown.

Settings Update We've had a few updates to the settings functionality:

Keyboard support! You can now go to your settings (the wrench) and check "keyboard support" to activate. Keys 1-9 select events 1-9, and hitting Enter will be like hitting Continue on an event. That information is available on hover; settings will be dressed up, eventually.

Custom panels that are hidden by requirement, either qual or item, will no longer show up in the settings if the player does not have the qual or item.

Removed the dev-only "show hidden content" setting. If you want to show or hide hidden content, choose the setting in the Developer Settings icon. (top-left of Build)

Hide On Requirement Fail It's been a long time coming, but it's here! It's now possible to hide an event entirely if a certain req fails. Click the "silent/mask" symbol twice to get a third state: Hide Event. This will hide the req if its passes but will hide the entire event if it fails. The use case: in Daiele, on the main zone hub, there's an event that lets the player spend 15 Gear to build a camp. Two requirements: 15 Gear and (hidden) has_camp = 0. I need to show this event at all times until the player has built the camp. However, setting "Hide if not met?" to Yes would mean that it never shows up, even when the player has 15 Gear, because of the has_camp = 0! Now the solution is to keep "Hide if not met?" at No and then have the has_camp requirement as Hide Event when it fails!

Trigger Item On the level-up of a qual, we can now trigger an item to be set. This was built for Necro: once a Discovery qual is finished, the player is forwarded to an emergent event that gives them a blueprint. We don't intend for the functionality to actually set an item your player might use, it's mostly intended to trigger other events with this item. General The special result has another new entry: Give/Take Character Slot! It's nothing too exciting, you'll just use this if you want to end the player's game and give them another character slot to continue playing, while retaining their old character.

We have a new checkbox under the special result's "Give From Tags", titled "Unique?". If checked, the player will not receive an item they already have. This is useful for random blueprint systems, such as Necro's, or for when the player should receive important items only once.

Pool assignment now shows GAM3's very first graph: a pie chart, for event distributions! Note it's not entirely pure: some events will be locked out if you have requirements on them, so it's truly dependent on the player. It still gives a good idea of the chances of an event firing, however.

Autoplay was given some more work, now we show the current speed. We decided not to store this setting for the user because every autoplay game will start off paused and it's likely they'll want to manage how fast things are going on a more dynamic basis than a stored variable would warrant.

Adjusted how max calculations for quals are handled when you want to set over the max value. For example, the max amount of (the qual) Energy someone could have is 100 but you want a special "supercharged" state that brings it to 150. Well, if you were to ever modify that number, it would reset it back to 100. Now the only way it'll go down is if you subtract.

Improved the popup functionality for exempt events. Now auto-resizes height and the hideous x-axis scrollbar is gone.

The player now has access to character switching, and the switching interface has been improved.

Qual and item editing were cleaned up a bit, mostly keeping them in-line with each other.

Vael deployed some performance enhancements, mostly in regards to caching and dealing with cached values. In short, we were caching too high up the stream, then running the same process to organize our objects; we had to cache the true, final result. This avoids a lot of pointless looping and processing on our biggest tables: items, quals, and in some cases locales.

Setting an item amount that equals what the player already has will no longer produce a message saying the player "now has x". Nor will it update their inventory panel.

Not that anyone will notice, but I finally got around to updating the framework behind GAM3. (the engine behind our engine) It's been close to two years since I last updated, so it was definitely time.

Bug Fixes We were accidentally storing whole blocks of settings for new users, rather than only their overwrites. (backend stuff)

The code to allow selecting within text boxes on an event (rather than dragging them) was only working for editing an event, not adding.

There was an issue with cached locales causing our maps to "lag behind" when entering new zones.

Progress bar level-ups were giving bad animations when achieving the next level.

Slots on the Manage Slots page were not pulling in their weights properly.

Event icons were not getting placed in the event names when viewing in the backend.

prevent_equip_qual simply wasn't working. Remember we can use this to prevent the player from equipping in combat, underwater, while disabled etc.

Arbitrary Lists I'm very excited to announce that we can now spawn arbitrary dropdowns similar to how item tags work!

Under Reqs you will see the "List" option. It will take two options for lists: standard dropdown list and button list. Standard is the default and will send over the value you put for the option. Button will spawn clickable buttons in the req field, while defaulting your event style to 'message'. This means you essentially have multiple "go" buttons for an event, and each of them will send over a single value. As such, only one button list per event is supported. The value will be sent as {listX}, where X is the list's number, exactly how we have {tag1} for the first tag in the list. After that, it's as simple as plugging into a result or if statement.

We can also limit each option by a requirement formula in the same format as how an if statement works. Simply say "dread >= 2" to make that available to the player only if they have 2 or more dread. Note that options which fail their reqs are simply removed with no indication to the player. And note that it's fairly ugly when the player fails all options, so if you're using list requirements, try to give one default option that the player can never fail out of.

Use cases for list: Select the type of training you want to do, select the person to hire, or a list of many actions to perform. Note that these were previously only accomplished through multiple events, and multiple events do carry the added benefit of flavor text and appearance. It's up to you to decide if lists are best for what you're doing.

Use cases for button: a Talk To People event with three options as to who to talk to, or a list even that's so common that you want the player to only need to click once to make a choice. The biggest benefit here is the presentation and UI, but button lists really start to degrade after 4 choices are available.

Hopefully you can use lists to reduce some event strain while enhancing the player's experience. Can you imagine three separate events just to talk to people? Not anymore!

Buffs We finally have a sensible solution for buffs! Buffs are hidden items that change the quals of players. Previously, we had to make a buff and a slot for it, and only one buff could go into a slot. For example, Daiele had to "equip" Hungry (or Starving) into the Hunger slot. Well from now on, all buffs affect the character simply by having the item on them. This has far-reaching implications: * We can now stack buffs * Less processing per-event to "equip" it to the player, as well as checking for equips * No more of those awful Slot quals! * Speeds up project development time!

The presentation of buffs was improved. To use an item as a buff, simply put its type as 'buff'. Also, this does mean that we have theoretical support for a weight system; sadly, since buff is currently a type, we can't just have "types" of buffs, so we can't have "Food Buffs". That will be added in the future, the ability to just tick an item as buff. Daiele needs to "buffify" many objects for a weight system that adds +2 weight to their overall carrying capacity.

Autoplay We now have autoplay functionality for events! This basic system is key to unlocking a new type of genre we can produce: the grand strategy game and, of course, many others. Within your config file, you'll find autoplay_settings. Uncomment this block to have the game run an event on an interval as though the player had clicked it. Instructions are there.

This basic feature offers proof of the intention that GAM3 should not expressly make only "GAM3 games". This is the system Necro will be using to conduct most of its business. Bear in mind the engine is very customizable. To give you an idea, what will likely happen with Necro's usage of this system is that it will dump into a smaller box or "feed" running along the side of the screen, outside of the player's focus. Once an emergent event is encountered, the view of the middle will be set to the emergent event so that the player can deal with it. Get thinking! We are limited only by our imaginations... and the database.

Visual Improvements Minor quals, qual tooltips. Panel scrollbars in Play. Backend player searching/editing.

Upcoming: Container System We simply ran out of time for this milestone, but we have the nascence of a container system, under Items. It's even fairly documented. You make Containers and use the Special result to hand them out and show them. You can test around for now, but we don’t support exchanging items at the moment. Other functionality will come with this system as well, such as completely replacing the player's inventory with the contents of a container.

General Changed the way event results will show branches on failure. Previously, if a branch failed and it was the only branch available, we'd simply hide it and give the player a continue button. Now we always show the failed branches and allow the player to continue if, indeed, no branch is playable.

It's now possible to reorder requirements, just as you reorder results!

Do you have an Android device? We're now an app! Open up any GAM3 game on your browser, and on the right side under options, click Add To Home Screen. Tada! (for now, everything defaults to Daiele branding)

Repeat actions (grindables) now unlock within the event when locked. This means the player doesn't have to refresh the event or screen to play again.

"Inform 7" style input styles are now spread throughout the system wherever they make sense.

Improved the verbiage behind quals reaching their max caps in the event. Previously, only for an "event cap", we would repeat over and over that they can only receive that max from the event. Changed it to only appear once.

We no longer spellcheck on any non-RTE (boldable, colorable) fields, such as player name and event titles!

The chance_alt() and set1() functions were added. Check the docs.

Improve/changed some icons in the base pack. (some were simply awful; this was a direct replacement)

Added "Refill Actions" feature until the player editing toolbox.

You can now see the database entry for events by clicking on the data symbol near Basic Info.

Moved some "constants" out of the config file, cleaning it up a bit.

Event style dropdown now shows what color to expect as the background.

Regular mortal player accounts can now switch and make characters.

Click your character name in the char panel to open up the char sheet.

Added an option in the config: rerun_composites, which prevents us from having to rerun the calculations for composite quals on every event result. As a reminder, a composite qual takes two or more qual values into it to derive its value. So Daiele's "Effective Level" is the three main quals combined to give us some idea of the player's capabilities. Sadly, in order to have all calculations working whenever we need them, we have to recalculate that every event result. (if the event gives the player +1 Form, the effective level would be outdated) That being said, there's a chance you'll NEVER USE A COMPOSITE QUAL EVER in a formula, so this option has been made to save us some (nearly negligible) performance.

Bug Fixes Fixed "prevent_travel_quals" not unlocking when the qual is lost.

Fixed the storyline panel not being updated when a story is updated.

Fixed custom item panels not giving sexy tooltips.

It was possible to force any (!) item through a tag selection box so long as you owned it. Fix'd!

Fixed an issue with map locks and travel-lock quals.

Improved the map locking system and thereby fixed a bug related to locks not expiring on visual maps.

Occasionally, maps and zone/loc transition images would pop up over each other in the backend.

Fixed the problem report failing to load if you had no world ticks in your game.

Composite quals were not being factored into pool event requirements.

Fixed hitting "No" on the object deletion confirmation box still actually equating to "Yes"... sorry about that.

After creating a map, it would fail to redirect to the map for editing.

Settings were not being imported into item panels, causing collapse/expand settings to break.

The product of 9 weeks of development! I had intended this to be a more feature-filled patch, but bugs -- persistent gnats, really -- sapped my time. The theme lately has been that GAM3's growing too big for its own good. We're at the point where a seemingly simple change can have far-reaching implications. Where I have to start saying no to more feature requests than I'm comfortable with. Where I'm forgetting we even have some functionality in the first place.

Thankfully, what's coming up is fairly new. And very exciting. New systems, not touching many others. But the improved buff system looms over me still.

Tag Updates I am very happy to say that syntax now exists to pull other tags from an item when you use it within a formula! To pull the information of another tag inside a formula, you can use the following syntax: {tag1}[other_tag]. For example, you may want the player to use a character (who's really an item) that belongs to a class, but you want to know who they chose. The player chooses an item from the Marine tag to "Employ A Marine To Kill An Alien" and you want to give some special flavor text if they use Matt the Marine. You would tag all Marine items with who the person actually is, and give a unique ID to each. Your if statement would then look something like: "if {tag1}[marine_id] == 2"

You can now exclude a tag from a tag requirement: Vael had Clothing for Daiele, but didn't want the player to trade in Underwear. Solution: tag all underwear as Underwear and exclude the tag.

We now say which property (tag) is required on dropdown of a tag requirement in Play.

Better Object Search Rather than pop up in a little box to the right, object (event, qual, item) search now returns the same view that the default view uses. This means we can finally (at least, easily) use functions like Delete and Lookup, as well as getting any other relevant information not shown in the old search. 999 Cooldowns It had to happen sometime: you can now set the cooldown of an event to be 999 and it will never expire. This saves us making "tracker" quals and items, but should only be used when absolutely necessary. If you already have a qual that could be used as a tracker, then use it. The use case for this was trading in Daiele: when a trade concludes, we set the cooldown to 999 to imply the trade was completed and the NPC's item is gone. Without 999, Vael would have to make a tracker qual to hide the event. In the case that this is a unique trade, that the only way to get the item in the game is through trading, it would be best to hide the event by an item req.

Icon Sanity Update/Final Base Our base icon set, which is available outside of packs, was full of icons that belonged expressly to Daiele. I went through them and removed all icons best suited to Daiele, and some icons that didn't fit into any of our currently planned games. 71 icons in total were removed from the base set, and the Clothing category was removed. Your clothing and food needs will be found in the Daiele pack. Icon packs for our games are given an underline to distinguish from the other packs.

New icons were added: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/106067196/june28th_icons.PNG

Many base and pack icons were improved for visual clarity. The Animals and Winter pack saw the most improvements and removals. (we'll never need dinosaurs) Make a point to check the packs out again.

We (finally) have hover intent on categories and packs. This means you have to spend .3 of a second on a tab in order to select it, making it difficult to accidentally swap to one while navigating through the page.

Icon search now converts spaces to - and _ when searching. ex: searching "icicle fall" would previously not return icicle_fall

Feedback Tab We now offer a feedback tab if the feedback_mail field is not empty in your config file. At present, it only mails your email, but in the future it will mail your Orbium account! This is useful for giving your game out to strangers and receiving their feedback.

Backend visual improvements: - The sidebar was made leaner, the popups moved left for ease of access, and clicking on the parent category will now bring you to the object view for it. (clicking on Items is functionally equivalent to clicking on View/Edit Items) - Visually improved the green tables. - Visually improved the system log.

General Event styles now offer two options: the color and the "format", which currently offers the default, small and the new "message"! All message does is hide the call-to-action button, and is used for gamey messages that you want to give the player.

We now pluralize both reqs and item results if there are more than two items in either. Small improvements were made to the pluralize logic. You can add ignores for certain items in your config file under the ignore_plural constant.

When the player receives an item in a result, we now offer a cool little equip link for them to quick-equip within the result itself. (provided it has stats, they have the slot for it, and it's not already equipped!)

Hitting the Save button with a new branch on an event will do a soft refresh of the page to give you quick access to the branch.

Locale types no longer exist, they were a remnant of Olde GAM3 and we'll just never do anything with them. We have plenty of tricks available now to determine what "kind of" locale the player is in.

On editing a player account, we now have the ability to empty all events from pool hands. This is mostly useful for development, where we sometimes remove or reassign events that are already in our hand.

On the event results themselves, we have a cap to control the max a qual can go. Well, now if you're subtracting, it will work opposite. (won't go lower)

Expanded the width of our object view pages. (event/qual/item view) Most noticeable on events. Reduced the size of our tabs (once again) to stave off the inevitability of them sliding down to the next level when we have too many locations. Most Recent is now named Recent.

Item events with no parent branches will be given back button functionality by default.

Fixed some visual issues with Firefox and Internet Explorer on the Play side. Remember GAM3's Build is not intended for use with anything but Chrome.

You can CTRL + S to save (not "edit and go") an event.

I manually improved the cache engine behind our installations... it's nothing to get excited about until I run performance tests again, but I turned a 115k cache file to a 78k file.

Bug Fixes

- Pools - Hand pools would never fire ticks when drawing a hand. This was technically new functionality rather than a tick. Unfortunately the player will not see the result of the fired event, like Daiele's "you're getting hungry" message, but it's definitely better than not working at all! - It was possible to play a hand pool event even if you didn't have the event in your hand. - Pools events with branches were not being added to the play filter.

Send-to-top quals with value labels instead of numbers were not being updated with the label when called by an invisible result. Yeah.

Fixed an issue where searching in the icon box would sometimes make the remove-icon buttons appear without selecting an icon.

New panels wouldn't hide/show based on the contents of their whitelists.

An event could not have more than one entry for "failure", meaning the hover over a failed event would only tell you the first reason why it failed.

Fixed a rare bug in which Give From Tag would not always deliver the item if there was a result with a failed if statement before it.

Fixed an issue where two reqs for tags on the same event would sometimes cause bad dropdowns for the first in the list.

Level formulas: removed fixed_scale entirely as its implementation was shoddy from the start. Also fixed some bugs in presentation.

Fixed some discrepancies between cloning and edit an event. (a clone is basically an "edit" that makes a new)

Give From Tags Well, Give From Tag wasn't enough. In almost all imagined cases, distributing an item on a single tag was too restrictive and encouraged bad/over tagging. For example, in Daiele, I wanted to randomly distribute mechanical items that have various properties or "trade values". A toaster might be mechanical 3 and value 7, so when it comes time to trade it to someone who only cares about the value tag, it can still fall under there, rather than having to make it both Mechanical 3 (for other purposes in the game) and mech_value 7, where the mech_value 7's only job is for use in a distribution list.

So anyway, the Give From Tag has become Give From Tags. It only supports two tags. I debated over losing the dropdown boxes entirely and using formulas, but it would be: more work for me, more work for the engine, and harder to discern upon viewing. The benefit would be that you'd be able to use more than two tags, and could also compare to certain qual or item value: you could distribute items like (tagname) > 2 + [treasure hunter qual] to give better treasure for treasure hunters. You can still finagle that with if statements, though, and honestly most games won't even use Give From Tags. It isn't worth introducing a new syntax for tags. (along with [] {} for qual and item)

Layout It's now much easier to fix your Play Style around. Just put your game's name in at the top of the file and it will all magically change. Support was added for styling the top nav bar, because using the secondary color just wasn't appealing.

Increased the space that sidebars can take up. Fullscreen is certainly full-screen now. Lots of tweaks here and there, showing more where I could. Rather than a simple fade in and out, we now slide panels down.

Bear in mind that finished games don't need the three-panel layout as we have now. If your game is simple enough or you prefer interactivity through the top nav bar, you can bring the right panels over to the left. The nav bar isn't optional.

Icons Update + Announcement From its inception, GAM3 handled icons fairly poorly and I quickly realized the implications of the decision to support only .pngs; yet for almost two years I continued, and I spent a good amount of time cleaning the system up so that we can now support any image type. Indeed we can have anything from animated gifs to large JPGs.

This was all back-end; you will notice nothing different. On the subject of icons, I decided to wait on the implementation of 20x20 and higher icons. We have a pretty sleek UI right now and I love it. While there will be a definite need for bigger icons, I think we'll see them more in places that really need it, such as the equipment management screen. We may have larger UI options in the future, but for now 16x16 suits the engine base. I know I said the "Game Icons" look better at 20x20 and they do, but most of them are fine at 16x16.

Exempt Functionality On the creation of a new event, in the newly organized options, you will be able to specify it as a special new class of event: exempt. It is not available on the edit of an event. Exempt events will never lock and, by default, pop up in a window similar to the Settings menu. They're always available through the top nav bar: this means they're mostly used for help events and very common functionality you may want to hide away, but really the importance of this feature was the technology it brought for entirely ignoring locks. Storylines Remember that stories are something that will be revisited at some point, given a proper UI similar to a questlog. The current implementation is not final.Added special storyline-focused tooltips to the hover of stories on the sidebar.New stories were simply saying "Storyline updated!", rather than proper verbiage for starting a new story. "Storyline" is now "story" for players.

Action Banks Update New functionality is available for the changing of action bank names: it's hard to admit, but actions have the worst structure of any functionality in GAM3. I made them a bit better, but it's still required that, if you have two or more action banks, you'll use the new "Repair Names" functionality to fix events' action requirements. You'll know what it means if it happens to you.

You can now specify an interval of 999 on an action bank to have it ignore any time-based functionality. That is: setting your interval to exactly 999 will make it "static", only in/decrementing when changed by the game.

You can now change the interval/bank size of a bank without it resetting pools and player cooldowns. (will still set all players to max, as it should)

Setting an action bank over its max via result no longer works. We do not support overloaded banks.

General Cleaned up the documentation and added a new section: Misc -> Functions. It has everything you'll need to know about what special abilities GAM3 can do outside of what you see in Build.

Lookup of a qual will now display anywhere that the qual is on an item's stats, under Ability Modifiers. So if Chainmail gives +5 armor, Armor lookup will show you Chainmail.

The Character Switch screen's clone feature has been improved. You can now clone any character under your account, and the button was moved to represent that.

There's a new way to view the event list! You can find it on the event view page with the options. You can now view all events organized by zone, locale, or zone AND locale. Pretty neat! To set the default, go to your config file and see the setting: event_view.

Locked branches now float to the bottom of the event, even if their weight is less than another. The idea being that locked branches are less important to the player than any other option.

The equipment panel (but really "ability modifiers panel") now hides by default. skip_if_empty now works for the inventory panel.

The problem report will now tell you of broken formulas in requirements for events. Remember to hover on the X to show the problem result/req.

Item requirements are now pluralized when they require more than 1 of an item. Ex: "Requires 2 or more Soldiers" vs. "Requires 2 or more Soldier"

If you hover over the little game-monster qual icon in a result, and the qual has level labels, it will give you a tooltip with the labels of the qual currently in the dropdown box. That tooltip was improved.

Finishing a story (the story qual hits its max) would give the "you have reached your limit" message, and would further print out "storyline update!". Now the message is nulled and we print out, "Storyline conclusion: x is now y" etc. The story system will eventually become the journal system and we won't be as mechanical with our text.

On saving an object, (event included) we now handle server errors significantly better than before. We'd actually blank out the entire page, unintentionally, on some exotic errors such as "your proxy at your workplace couldn't contact its host". Now you get a noticeable popup explaining the error, and we certainly don't blank out the entire screen. :}

Three tag fields now show up by default under item creation, to facillitate faster tagging.

Strengthened our cache-clearing to include database models; basically, that little cash icon on the bottom-left of Build will now clear absolutely everything between installations.

Performance: lots of performance testing was done. Our limit before things start to get noticeably slow seems to be around 5,000 quals and items. Some small improvements were made here and there. The "characters" functionality has finally be stripped out. Performance is, at this time, not a concern. We have yet to run genuine performance tests on a dedicated web server, where our times will be considerably better, so we're likely near 7,500 quals/items with a very health amount of events before we see any slowdown in the real world and even then: things can be done. :}

Lots of little things here and there. We now apply opacity 90% on locked events.

Bug Fixes Fixed an exploit in which world tick events could be played via URL manipulation.

Fixed an exploit in which you could grind repeatable events and prolong the delivery of a scheduled event. (not world tick)

Fixed custom panels not updating on event play due to the new panel system.

Fixed bad default sort on the qual lookup feature.

Fixed an issue with changing an action bank's name causing Play to be littered with errors until playing an event.

Back button events were still locking the player out of movement. (despite there being no actual lock)

On change to a proper tag, we now remove the red error notification that's applied when tags are empty.

Daiele would be released for playtesting right now if I believed in it: the reality was I needed more tech to do what I want, so what follows is the product of that. I do imagine Daiele will be released before 7.5 is, but what do I know? The focus for the next few weeks is on Daiele, anyway. We should see the next update some time in June. With that will also come the prototype technology for Necro. Then 7.6 has the best, most interesting, most super-fun-to-develop features in GAM3.

GAME ICONS! I am elated to announce that after three years of waiting, game-icons.net finally released their icon set with transparent backgrounds! This is a huge boon to GAM3. These are 1,538 high-quality icons designed with games in mind. Check them out under the Game Icons pack. Good thing we have a search function!

You can browse their catalogue at www.game-icons.net

They are beautiful, but at our current 16x16, it may be hard to appreciate most of them. We'll be 20x20 soon enough.

aaaaand more base icons We're reaching the point where new icons will only be added on a project-wide basis, such as how Necro would need a Science and Robot pack. Until then, here are some more icons for the engine base. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/106067196/icons_apr2015.PNG

Note the action_ icons are very useful for many adventurous interactions. Most of them are new, some are replacements. (I've hated our previous explosion icon for so long) I also added a few higher-quality animals in the animal pack, toward the top, labeled under alt_. We have a great elephant.

Give From Tag In all my time developing GAM3, a few features have made me all giddy inside. Formulas, ifs, world ticks, scheduled events and cooldowns are some. Here's another: Give From Tag, which will give a player a randomly selected item from a tag.

Under the new Special option, which is just a little magic wand, you'll see a dropdown with Give From Tag in it, and some boxes. You can give a player anything from a tag where the tag's property is equal, over, or under a value, *or* between two values. Example: in Daiele, you can search through junk piles to find junk. I make a few items with properties Junk 1 or 2, and a few rare with Junk 3. If they find a lesser, basic junk pile, I'll say "Give From Tag junk where value is less than 3" and they will receive junk of that value. An "uncommon" would warrant between 2 - 4. We even have special descriptive text for finding the item, and you can hover over [item list] to see a list of items that qualify for your current parameters. Get creative with this feature, it's very powerful!

Big Panels Update Truthfully, panels were a mess under the hood. We'd store massive text strings in a user table, in order to have the player move their panels around, change them however. For most options of the panel, they'd only be matching our default, but we'd still be writing over the default anyway. The result would be that we want to add a new custom panel for a new feature in the game, (say you add the option to fish and want a whole panel for it) but the player would have to actually save their settings anew to even see the panel. Or we decide to switch the layout a bit, player has to redo their settings. How it works now is that when saving, we look at the default value in the game's config. If it's different from what the player is saving, then the player is "overwriting" and we save that one overwrite entry. No longer will we ever have to reset our settings via the wrench in order to see new custom panels. Whew. There were also some performance gains with this.

The "character" panel has been converted to treat entries as categories like the inventory panel does. Previously it would group quals by major and minor, which made a huge irrelevant mess. Remember both the char and inventory panel accept the "exclude" parameter to exclude a category.

The "whitelist" parameter has been added for custom panels. You will be able to set a list of object IDs to appear in the panel: these ignore all qual types, creating a "pseudo category" to display. It will honor major/minor as usual. You cannot mix panel types yet: you can't have a whitelist of some quals and items.

To help players understand the purpose of each panel, we now have an 'info' parameter in your config file. They are populated with default verbiage. If you don't like the tooltips, you can leave the text blank.

An empty qual class will now render as a minor qual. This means in order to hide a qual, you need to choose the class Hidden.

All Zones You can now finally specify events and pools to show in all zones. An example use case was in Daiele, collecting ash in the Burnt Land even when in the camp or hut.

Wizard Templates We now have the ability to clone an item or qual as a base template to work from when using the Wizard. Selecting an object from the dropdown will set all other dropdowns to the template's type. Use case: making various clothes in Daiele: shirt (brown), shirt (red), shirt (black) etc. More useful for items than quals, especially equipment.

Object Lookup Here's a really neat feature: on the right side of item and qual views, where we have delete and clone, we now also have "lookup"! This shows you anywhere an object is manipulated in the game: basically, if you lookup Hunger in Daiele, you'll see a list of all the events where Hunger is either a requirement or result. In this way, we have a means of knowing all "eating" events. I've been wanting this for so long and it's finally in! Quals, being the gods of all locked objects, have more to say for themselves than items.

Better Pool Filtering Previously, our play filter was fairly stupid: if you play an event in a pool, it puts it in a little segregation array that won't be called from until the filter was "full", at which point it would be dumped out and all events would be eligible for play again. This meant you could play event Dance and if it was the last in the pool, you could very well get Dance on the next serve again. Now we use a "pull" system that treats the pool as always full, and it pulls the events down by age until they're knocked off. In other words, if your play filter's 3, Dance will wait at least 3 events to be shown again.

Mobile Support Finally went through the mobile version of our site and I'm happy to say that it went exceedingly well. I did have to disable portrait mode, because we just can't fit all the text in meaningfully, but most games run landscape anyway. Visit orbium.com/yourgame and play on your phone! Or tablet! And take pics. :}

Icons For Text Results We can now add icons to text messages. This is useful for adding flavor in the form of "game messages", which the player learns are usually only shown by database updates. (that is: if they see a message with an icon, they know something changed)

General We have a new formula function! chance(). This function is to be used in formulas and will give you a set chance depending on what you put in. Example usage: chance(1, 50, 2, 50); will give you a 50% chance for 1 and 2. chance(1, 30, 2, 40, 3, 30); will give you a 30% chance for 1 and 3, and a 40% chance for 2. Clearly, the secondary numbers represent % chance and should always equal 100. If they don't, the game will scream at you.

Tag requirements in Play now have a default "Select item..." rather than just choosing the first in the list by default. If the player selects this, it will bounce the select box and turn it red, indicating they cannot continue until they put an item into the event.

It is technically possible to get a player stuck into an emergent event by having a requirement for it to pop up, but then changing that requirement in the result options, AND having that emergent event lock them into it by having a branch. So, there's now a lengthy alert that will pop up on save if you happen to be in this fairly rare scenario.

We now give the player a message to tell them that we've removed a pool event from their hand, if they no longer meet the reqs for it.

We now better handle locking travel locations. The moment the player clicks on a locale to move, it will give them an alert, rather than rushing them off to a pretend event and refreshing the page all clunky-like.

Improved hand pools' hands visuals so that they won't leave a border lacking if the player does not have a full hand.

If you accidentally have too many line breaks at the end of your text results, we now tidy them up so as not to disrupt the following results.

Bug Fixes Our code for unlocking events once the player's gotten enough actions was broken. It is now fixed. Simply that: if the player needs 5 actions but has only 4, and they're on the same screen, we'll refresh the middle content piece once they get 5, allowing them to play without physically refreshing the page.

Fixed some genuine exploits regarding pools! - You could play a pool event outside of a pool if you knew its ID and were in the same location as the pool - You could overwrite what a pool had served you by opening a new window and playing the pool again

When cloning an item, both equip stats and tags were not being carried over.

Put a case in for "setting a qual to a value that has a label" in event results.

Panel quals were not being animated properly. They are now. Also, various pieces of functionality were broken for panels: things like "left and right custom panels don't show if skip_is_empty is true" and "required: item for item panels didn't actually work". There was an issue where major and minor quals would sometimes show out of order, this has been fixed.

Reaching the maximum value of a qual would continue to give a message, "You have reached the limit for [x]." but it's been fixed to only appear when the old level does not meet the new level; ie, the first time it reaches max.

Daiele is nearly ready for playtesting, and the past months have brought many bug fixes and engine upgrades with them. This is a general patch full of things it needed. Next patch will also be a general patch, full of things that are nice to have or improve the quality of life. I'm sad to say I (Vael) am feeling overwhelmed by all of it, but I will press on. I had wanted the engine "done and ready for game-by-game conversion" at the end of the year, with Q2-Q3 offering our greatest features. Sadly, the scope of the project will push us into early 2016 that we could see the "fully releasable" product of GAM3, with Q3-Q4 (six months) offering such features. Bear in mind this includes features like social interactions + premium payments, also stuff like ensuring the layout can handle large icons. (our 16x16 default will likely turn to 20x20) Once that point is reached, everyone gets their own copy of the engine and visual/code changes can be made on a game-by-game basis! I would love to have an honest game released in 2016, and it seems very possible. I can't believe it's been over two years since I started GAM3. :} Silent Events Well, not really. I'd gone to code a silent event, which is simply an emergent event that doesn't present itself to the player or lock them into it. Handy for removing buffs/debuffs, decrementing timers, whatever else.

I realized the functionality was already available by making a world tick with interval 1. So then I had to do two  things: all "1 interval" world ticks now tick when using an item, and the back button can now be applied to a tick'd event to have it only fire off once per event, regardless of how many actions the player spent. (ex: you have a world tick every 3 actions, and the player plays 6 actions. The tick runs twice for that event. Putting a back button on the tick'd event prevents that)

Through all your development, don't forget about scheduled events, either. Also, check out our new "caveats" section in the documentation. :x

Front Page I'm proud to say it's now completely possible to sign up to the Orbium through any game! The final piece of this puzzle will be  allowing players to play our games without needing an Orbium account, and linking games to another orbium account if they accidentally made two. (ex: player signs up for Daiele and Kershka without realizing they're by the same company; or they forgot they made an Orbium account already)

Tidied up the style a bit, especially around the signup area.

Remember you can find your url at www.theorbium.com/yourgame, which is the preferred method of signup.

30 New Icons + Math Pack The past two months have churned up some good stuff: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/106067196/icons_mar2015.PNG

They're all available in the icon base, as usual. Female nurse/surgeon were added to the People pack.

The “math” pack was added, with two variations of numbers 0-9 and various symbols of mathematica.

Hand Pools Update Pools in which you draw the events into a "hand" are fun and add strategy to your game, but they needed some love. Besides some mechanical improvements, most of the work went into restyling them. The new style supports styling such as dire or main_quest. While each game will have its own needs, I'm confident the new style is a great base to work from.

Save Button We now have, on edit of an event, a "save" button along with Edit and Draft. The use is to keep the window open for the purpose of saving quickly; in Vael's case, he was making a fishing event with complex formulas and would save, check the event, then return to the Build tab and hit back, wait for it to load and then continue. A simple "save" suffices.

Locale Panel Hovering on the title of the panel (location's name) will give a sexy hover. Added sexy hovers to the locales. These hovers include the map view as well!

Locations that lock the player into them via the "cannot enter" checkbox will now give an explanation to the player as to why they can't move, if there is no map. Also, we now show Ingress on the locations view page to show the developer whether a location is like this.

Playing a move result will now bounce the player's locale box as notice that it's changed. In the future, it will likely only do this if the player unlocks a new location.

"Top bar" functionality for the locale panel was removed. It was confusing and hardly useful.

A new caveat rule was added: the world map icon will not be available if the player is ever in the tutorial zone: ID 1.  Once leaving, it will always be available.

Hotkeys In Build! Feel like a badass by pressing Q for qual, E for event, I for item, P for pools, and L for location views. And do tell us if it gets annoying. Hotkeys will never fire while you're writing something.

General When you click on an object result or requirement, it will focus input on the first dropdown. This is very handy! Most of us navigate long dropdowns with our keyboard, and this makes it so you click and then hit whatever letter your desired object starts with.

In your config, you now have prevent_travel_quals. If the player has any of those quals, they will be unable to travel. For now, it's not very sexy, just gives a nasty alert and refreshes the page. Will change in the future.

In Play, a tiny loading message will appear if loading an event is taking longer than usual. (usual: under 500ms)

Hand-pool events that the player no longer meets the requirements for will be removed from their hand.

Slightly more helpful text is available on hover of locked events now.

The panel configuration page was improved, made more responsive and therefore less likely to look like absolute ass at lower resolutions.

Can now middle-click links in object search results. (Build)

Two for player editing: We now have an icon in the top-right of Play for easy character editing, so you don't have to keep switching back and forth between tabs. Note, for obvious reasons, that it won't change anything in the UI until you run an event.

When editing a player, the blue under quals and items respectively means "major quals" and "equippable items". Rather than coloring the text, we now color the background, for easy finding. The green for minor quals was deemed to be useless and noisy.

Better error handling in Build to ensure we don't post errors to the screen on bad save of an object, thereby losing work!

Bug Fixes Fixed a serious issue regarding item tag requirements checking the number of the item rather than the value.

Fixed another serious error in which grindable/repeatable events would not re-use the item tag.

Fixed and improved the code behind our hotkey history (H) per object. Don't forget we have a handy view of what's been changed per-object by hitting H.

Send-to-top "hideval" quals were not being considered. They now update properly with the qual's level label. (it's fairly sexy, too)

Fixed an error that showed when the first result of an event was nulled by an if statement.

Sorting weight 10 quals would consider the 10 as "1", and put them first in the list. The sorting algorithm has been changed to account for such things.

Over a month of tiny fixes and critical small features have led to 7.2. There's not much to say on it. Traverse the depths of the General heading. Ignore the bug fix section if you're pressed for time.

I do want to say, though, that I will soon be posting a preview of the most exciting changes for milestone 7, mostly slated for quarter 2.

Locale Panel The panel was updated in so many small ways that I've (Vael) forgotten some of what I did.

* The World Map is no longer buggy and presents fairly well. * Zone maps' "leave" button is now on the map itself and has a sexy slide-in/out in the top-right. * While it was never possible to travel if you're locked into an event, I never got around to communicating that to the player. Now if you're locked, hovering on a location in the map will turn your cursor into a "blocked" sign and fade the location out a bit. This works similarly for non-mapped locations. * The non-mapped view of zones and locales now shows the location's icon next to the name. * Shrunk the travel bubbles just a bit for "very tiny resolutions". (considering hiding the map entirely for them)

Bear in mind that GAM3 is intended to serve maps, especially a world map. World Maps should be large -- at least 600px wide -- while zones should be between 200 and 300px wide. Height's less important. Even if you have no art for a map, you can get a decent product by just choosing the map's background color.

Icons We finally have a search function for icons! In the top-right of the view, type what you're looking for and you'll receive generous search results. Note that for performance, the search is case-sensitive. The pop-up box was made significantly longer to accommodate the search, please report if the new size is uncomfortable.

Some icons were added: dirtpile, blouse, sandals, poison, canyon, shield_forest, telescope, pot, paper_quest, paper_letter, tower_castle_alt, bag_sack, pen, maze, mirror, cross, scribble, map, dress_short, lantern_fire, mountains. We now have a total of 383 non-pack icons.

Some icons were not exporting at the proper size, and I went through the painful process of resizing them.

Newer icons (from last patch) were not categorized under our fast-tags and are now.

A new pack was added to serve as a "mega pack" for random stuff you could need: the POI Megapack. Check it out!

Finally, the "people" pack has a few additions, and some of the faces were made a little clearer. Their names are now very relevant: you're searching for either man_, woman_, or baby. It's my intention to use these faces as general character pictures for Daiele. We have a poor selection of females right now, however, and I hope that can be rectified soon.

On the subject of icons, icons were added to the view pages of items, quals, events, and zone/locs! Zone/loc view had its "type" column removed; unsure if we want to keep types at all. Label Value There's a new option for quals: a simple checkbox for hiding a qual's value to the player. This is highly recommended to be used with the "no prog" option and change texts. The use case for Vael was creating relationship quals; it's not always fitting to show the player exactly, to a number, how a character feels about them. (ignoring how silly it is, ultimately, to rely on a single Trusted qual to represent personality, but we must work within reason) Clearly, level labels will be used instead of numbers, so ensure you have them.

Text Search Under Data, we now have the ability to search the entire system as though it were a "flat text file", useful for changing a character's name halfway through the project, or seeing if you've used a word too often. Right now it will search the result of every event, but in the future it will search all objects as well.

Hotkeys We now have hotkey functionality in Play! Hitting various keys on your keyboard will open up corresponding functionality. The following information is provided on hover of the buttons:

M = Map E = Equipment I = Inventory C = Character Sheet

RTE Colors An extra row of colors was added to the color dropdown for text entries, and it's now possible to customize your installation's color! For now, you'll have to use an override as you see in the config file, but when GAM3's finished you can just replace the color's name. Use color to spice up your text!

General The 1920-width layout saw some large improvements to make use of all screenspace. It now feels very "fullscreen" and we get some exciting liberties, such as displaying three quals per line in the side panels.

Another layout improvement: the default height values of panels have been increased, as we nearly always have plenty of vertical space, thanks to our dual-side layout. The sizes went from: 'micro' => 48, 'small' => 120, 'normal' => 170, 'big' => 230, 'huge' => 300 To 100px, 160px, 210px, 250px, 320px, respectively. I'm also very happy to say this change means we reduce the heights for "small device level"; for example, big is 200 on an iPhone. If you wish to change any of these, (eventually...) you can do so in the stylesheet toward the top.

On qual and item reqs, player-side, we now display hover information on the qual/req being challenged. It's absent of any player-related information, however, like how many items they have.

We can now save equips with "0" values, useful for equipping stuff like clothing that doesn't give any stats.

The default equip/unequip-by-result message has been improved and now factors in our hardcoded clothing types. The default, "you have gained/lost the buff XX" has been nulled. You should give the player a proper explanation for receiving a buff. (ideally through the change text)

When selecting +, -, or = in a result, your cursor's focus will move to the amount box. The premise is that if you change the action, you'll want to change the number as well.

Draft branch result names now appear italicized. Draft "use event" items and quals now appear italicized in the list view.

It's now impossible to equip/unequip if you're locked into an event. I was going to make this optional for the developer, but it's actually possible to get stuck in an event by unequipping a stat boost that qualified you for it in the first place. It's just not worth coding around.

Location view now shows Event for when a location has an on-enter event.

Removed on-travel events from the problem report.

Challenge requirements now have a hover explaining what they mean. Also adjusted min-width of some tooltips.

Qual labels, on hover, now appear under the qual's name rather than starting their own section.

On edit of player, major qual names will be blue and minor qual names will be green. Similar to the blue for equipable items.

We all agreed that items with the category of "clothing" will be (wear) rather than (equip) if they have stats. This is hardcoded in the engine.

Bug Fixes Searching for events/items/quals with a colon in the search text would return all results. We now strip the colon out of the input. Max event results have been limited to 15.

Fixed an issue with level 1 progress bars in the fixed-scale leveling system not giving a bar.

Fixed bad spacing when displaying buffs and items in the equipment panel.

Setting quals didn't give a sexy hover in Play. Fixed line breaks in text results being significantly taller than you'd expect them to be.

The problem report would not detect pool branches. Check your reports.

Use events for quals and items would pop out of the view box if an icon was in the title. Also took the opportunity to sync the qual/item views.

Scaled minor quals would suggest the scaled max is the current value in the qual panel. Also reversed the value/name of minor quals.

Cloning an event would not bring over any results that were created after branches were.

Could not play branches on items. Also removed the "schedule event" option for item events.

It was impossible to remove item tags.

Fixed a Chrome glitch that would leave artifacts on the screen when viewing the background image via the button in the top-right corner. Also changed the icon to a pretty picture.