Driftmoon got into the finals! But we'll get eliminated if we don't get enough votes, so please help us! There are two places I need you to vote. The poll on the right side of the 2BeeGames site is the most important, so cast your vote there. The other is the star rating on the 2BeeGames Driftmoon page. Let's do it people! I know we can win this!

Here's something for anyone interested in making maps for Driftmoon. It's the editor interface for AI paths. Some of you may remember that Driftmoon's predecessor Notrium didn't have any path finding abilities, and as such the AI was really idiotic in closed areas. In Driftmoon the map maker can define paths that the AI can take if it wants to get from one room to another. The reason we need to have a good pathfinding system is not just enemies, but also your companions. They need to be able to follow you intelligently, and not get stuck somewhere. My original pathfinding system was based on a very thick grid, and the game would check which points were accessible from which. Unfortunately that wasn't good for open areas, as there could be up to hundreds of points within a very short path, and it wasn't good for dungeons, as the automatic points tended to be too sparse for thin corridors - the game thought they were solid rock. So now we have to place the points manually, and the paths between the points are made automatically. It only takes a few minutes time, and the AI behaves much better, so I think it's worth the time spent.

We've already hidden about a dozen feathers in the game in hard to spot places, and the plan is to include a hundred of them. Each one gives you more XP, and if you've found enough by the end of the game, you can unlock something. But what? Unlock a weapon? Unlock a party member?

Thanks to your replies in the previous combat post! I've read them carefully over and over again in the dark of the night, and tweaked and tweaked. And here's the short of how combat in Driftmoon works right now. Bear in mind that Driftmoon is an RPG, and not a very action oriented at that. This is not Diablo, and you will not be blindly fighting enemies for hours at an end: you'll be doing much more questing (eg. exploring, finding interesting places/items, solving mysteries, having deep and/or entertaining discussions - perhaps even meeting Bobby). Combat will be real time, but can be paused to use items and give orders. I switched ranged combat from Diablo style constantly clicking into a more strategic style. Now we click once on an enemy to attack it, and from there on we select from various attacks we want to use. In the screenshot we are wielding a bow and a shield, so we can select from two bow attacks (Double shot is cool!) and one shield attack (ram enemy). Another change is that we have damage types. The basic damage types are slashing, piercing, crushing, and slapping(!), and we're going to have more for magical weapons and creatures. The skeleton is pretty resistant to piercing damage, as arrows go straight through it. Flying insects are resistant to all other damage types than slapping. So you can kill them simply by slapping them real hard. The new system also allows you to wield all kinds of weapons simultaneously. Wielding a shield and a bow in the same hand is not prohibited. If you happen to find a spiked helmet, you can use that to headbutt your enemies. All weapons can have multiple different attacks. And I'm actually thinking of making the torch a weapon as well! Personally I like the new combat system. It allows a fair bit of strategy and differentiation, and it is fairly simple in the beginning while it can get more complex later in the game. Plus we've got slapping! Your comments?

Right now we're working on ambient sound. The kind that's on the background, and makes the game feel more like a living world. If you saw the video and listened to the ambient sounds there, you're probably wondering what are we doing, there was ambience on the video! Didn't fool you? Alright, I admit it, the ambient sounds on the video were an addon, so we're just now working to add them. What I'm currently planning is that we'll create soundscapes, a sort of collection of sounds that go together to create say, a jungle, or an ocean, or a cave. Then I'll create a tool to paint these soundscapes to the world, and we've got positional ambient sounds. So you can go to the beach and hear water roaring, and go back to the jungle and hear the birds chirping. The volumes of all these sounds are cleverly computed on the background, and all I'll have to do now is paint.

This week we've been busy with making this video of Driftmoon. Tell us what you think!

This is Bobby the Stranded Skeleton. He's the man (or skeleton) behind our new menu, walking around and sharing his thoughts on being stranded and life in general. So the menu is really a map in the game, only without the player. I'm sure you modders out there will love this, as you can make the menu background a heated battlefield, or a flowing volcano. So back to Bobby. I don't have too many quotes for him just yet, so if you're reading this, share your own sentences in the comments. My only requirements are that it's a really short text, and it must fit into being said by a stranded skeleton called Bobby. The best ones will get into the game! Here's what I've written myself, to start you up:

• I'm a poor lonesome skeleton.
• Is that a boat?
• Maybe I'll plant a tree here.
• Well look at that. A new seashell!
• Man, I wish I could swim!

This week we've been working on adding sounds to the game. Mostly we're using sounds available at http://www.freesound.org/, they have plenty of useful free effects available. As opposed to any of my previous games, we're really putting an effort to make the soundscape believable. This means we're using multiple samples for each action, and we're trying to find sounds for most ingame actions. For example we already have over 30 footstep samples whereas the original Notrium had exactly 6. Another useful addition compared to Notrium is that we're using different buses and different attenuations for different kinds of samples. In practice this means the sounds get bogged down a lot less, because we can dynamically reduce the range of heard footstep. In Notrium you used to hear all of the aliens' footsteps at one go, producing a terrible mass of sounds where you only wished to kill the aliens to quiet them down. For modders I'm trying to make a lot of things automatic unless otherwise specified. An example, you can drag many objects in the game with your mouse. Dragging a large cupboard produces a lower sound than dragging a chair. I've automated the pitch changing to depend on the mass of the object being dragged, so you don't have to specify a drag sound for each and every different kind of chair you make. Another helpful feature is that actual sound files are no longer used in any of the game scripts. They're just referenced with cues. For example my script could say playSound("eat") and I would have a cue in my sounds.ini file like this: [eat] soundFiles=crunch.wav, gulp.wav. Well you may wonder where's the use in that? Simply put, you can now change any of the actual sound files in one place, you don't have to go into a dozen scripts to hunt them down. And you can have some definitions for each sound, like minimum and maximum randomization volume, plus pitch. Not to mention that you can define any number of actual sound files, and the game will choose one to play at random.

Well, what can I say? You asked for it, I said maybe later, and here it is! Meet Velvet, she's likely the first member of your party in Driftmoon. She's a quick tempered Panther on a personal quest of revenge for her ex-master - your father. Velvet will follow you around, attack whoever attacks you, and she will have a lot to say to you throughout the game. You can heal her by giving her raw meat, and you can leave her standing around, but she won't stay put for long! Who have been your favourite party members? What kind of people would you like to travel with in Driftmoon?

One of the coolest parts of the Driftmoon editor is the Animations editor. You can create any number of animations, and play them using scripts, or let them just loop on their own. Animation in Driftmoon is based on keyframes. All you have to do is select the frame you want, and then select the part of the object you want to move, and move it there with the mouse. You can then preview the animation to see your changes. By default all animations return to their starting point by the end of the animation sequence, so you don't even have to worry about looping the animation. One of the things I've added lately is the ability to change the image by frame. Notrium modders will remember this was the way all Notrium animations were done, you drew up a bunch of frames and tried to make them look smooth. So this is possible even now, and I'm using it in this image to change the hand image into an orb at some point of the animation. You can also scale any part of the object within the animation. You could make a bouncy ball, or a wobbly slime monster. All characters are animated using this system, but you don't have to redo all animation to each character. All humans have a base object that holds their animations, and you can just change the textures for each of them to make them look different.