- kelly finally sent me the jewel torso sprite; so today i formatted and imported into the game that new sprite and two other ones that she did awhile ago and i never imported
- i focused mainly today on getting the system to draw jewel's torso working -- made some progress with it but didn't test it yet. we want it so that it shows up behind jewel's head, and isn't visible unless jewel is moving, and lags in location one second or so behind jewel; i'd need to tweak those numbers and make it turn a bit towards jewel's head's direction to make it feel more natural.

i'm excited about most of the creature sprites nearly being done now though. of the 50-60 creatures, the only ones that do not now have finished sprites are hippocampus, venti, solaros, ryu, and giant ember fly (right now those use scaled larger versions of smaller creature sprites from the same family, which is a good enough substitute). so that's more than 90% of them finished. there are are also a couple of sprite "parts" that need to be finished: the tongues for fin fish and pegasus. and the non-pillar part of aphrodite.

- fixed the naga movement warp in dream mode from left-right but not yet from right-left (just a matter of doing some more calculations / number experiments to get that one working tho)

- made the naga collision field correctly reflect its visual position
- tried to make naga's move left and right again, but again they seem to get stuck rather than act correctly on the edges; i believe i know what's causing this though and will attempt to fix it tomorrow, or write some workaround
- added a way to destroy inactive creatures that are scrolled off screen in dream mode (sometimes they aren't correctly destroyed and remain inactive down there)

- after some more searching dead ends in SD, finally (literally 10 minutes before the midnight report) managed to find and fix the bug that i've been having problems with for the last 3 days. yay

- the bug that i thought firefox was causing was actually not being caused by that afterall, so i spent today tracking it down; i isolated what is not causing it (projectiles) and what is (creatures, when they reach the bottom of the screen), but am not yet sure why it's happening or how to fix it. argh, i wish SD weren't so buggy. i think it's just a side-effect of it being such a huge game (50,000+ lines of code -- if you printed them all out it'd be like 1600 pages!) so it's hard to keep the entire thing in mind all at once and to make it all work together. but i shall persevere

- thought there was a new bug in dream mode, but it turned out to just be firefox taking so much ram and cpu it caused the game to constantly skip; when i closed firefox the problem was gone
- discovered that the naga collision field doesn't match the drawing; will need to fix this. drew their collision field in debug mode to help fix this.
- changed how often main_activation is called in dream mode (was happening too frequently, since i was using the same code in exploration mode as in dream mode there, when it can be done more efficiently since the camera only moves up at a set pace)
- made fiorflies appear in the game again (pretty sure what's causing it now in general but not in detail)

didn't quite fix all the bugs i intended to fix today because that dum firefox thing distracted me

- fixed the bug that caused the mammoth warning screen not to disappear in dream mode
- made creature projectiles shot by a creature destroyed when that creature is destroyed (and turn into memory cells); this may solve a mysterious bug of the player dying spontaneously; what i suspect was actually happening is that when a creature is destroyed, sometimes the projectiles it shot turned invisible, but were still there, and still capable of killing the player. now this change should avoid that problem hopefully
- made one of fleur's projectile types last longer (was disappearing too quickly)
- fixed a bug where you could enter camp mode in dream mode with the enter key
- fixed a bug where projectiles would not remain paused and would suddenly get re-activated and keep moving even when the game was paused in dream mode
- eva (testing the game / making mini-trailers) noticed a bug where sometimes esc won't pause the game / let you quit. this is fixed by exiting an area and entering a new area. not sure what's causing it since i haven't experienced that bug in like 2 years. i told her to keep and eye out for that bug, and i will too

all in all i fixed about half of the bugs i cataloged yesterday; tomorrow i'll fix the other half!

- investigated the creature activation issue mentioned a day before yesterday. i'm now unsure of this; it seems needlessly complicated of a process, and i'm not sure how it arrived that way, but i'm also not sure how it can be done otherwise. i made some changes which i suspect will improve things, though, and put in a number of debug-checks so that i can get a clearer idea of what is happening
- discovered and cataloged a number of bugs in dream mode, and discovered the reasons for bugs which i had previously known about but been unable to fix. didn't begin to fix them yet though, just organized them into a list (of about 10-15 items). tomorrow i will attempt to fix all or most of these

- imported all the particles i made over the last week into the game (now i just have to assign them to creatures/the player/etc. as needed)

note: this entry was posted at 12:06am due to me being on the phone with newy, it's backdated to when i actually finished the work for the day

- finished/tested the code for obj_proj particle drawing; works fine. haven't yet imported the particles i made this week tho
- made some more particle types (i know i said i was done but it's so fun)
- also i now strongly believe i've discovered the reason for the bugs i've been having with fior-fly, anemoi, etc, in dream mode! i don't yet know how to fix the bug but at least i am pretty sure what's causing it, which is good: i believe it has to do with the 'activation' range being larger than the 'deactivation' range

- finished making obj_proj particle types; i now have a good variety and am ready to integrate these into the game. i'll count this as a task, and i'll get another task number done when they're integrated in

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- continued creating more particle effects for the obj_proj particle types; i think i probably will have enough of them tomorrow. i probably shouldn't spend so much time doing these but this is one of the most fun parts of working on SD for me

- created more obj_proj particle effects in particle designer

- continued working on particles for the new projectile-particle system; got some really nice-looking ones made today. i think SD's particle effects are going to be the best of any GM game, haha

- started working on the obj_proj particle drawing system (basically some projectiles would be drawn as particles rather than as shapes, particularly in dream mode)
- created a new particle type to test this; 11 levels of it (for the 11 levels of ship functions), and imported that particle type into the game

- fixed the rakari egg spawning dead creatures bug -- it was related to the 'start' function not happening for any object anymore issue
- since i'm tired of searching for and fixing bugs, i just figured it's time to upload the game for eva and wynand (but just those two people). currently uploading the game. the full game is 321mb currently in a zip file

my plan now is to continue to work on dream mode -- finishing the second dream mode test level, finishing the ship functions in dream mode, starting the obj_proj particle-visuals system, porting more creatures from exploration mode to dream mode, and making the dream mode levels. this should take another couple of months. after i finish that stuff, the game will be 90-95% complete, and then i'll do more serious playtesting with a lot of people testing the game and giving me feedback, i'll adjust the game to that feedback, and then release it. so my aim is to release the game by fall, but definitely by winter

- tested the game a little further for bugs, found one with the sound function: it's supposed to create sound icons with the previous sound, instead they are always "nothing", containing no sound. investigating the cause...
- found it and fixed it. i can't believe this bug was in the game for so long without me noticing it...
- changed it so that a "nothing" sound icon can never be generated
- discovered a bug where birthing rakari eggs starts creatures out dead rather than alive (i don't think i intended it that way... but i can't really remember. i'll fix it tomorrow because i believe it's a bug.)

- again tried to reproduce the bug that slowed the game to like 1 fps during a death, but wasn't able to. as a precaution/guess, i made it so that global.shock (which is a temporary decrease in delta time) is always 1 when the player is in the .dyingnow stage
- discovered that the fix i made yesterday to prevent two overlapping music tracks didn't work, and *now* i fixed it
- made the camp mode music play when characters join (haven't yet tested for all the characters, but it seems to work for venus). the integration of the new music to the code is now complete, so that's one more task*

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- adjusted the damage value of the player's gun a bit again, and continued testing the game for bugs
- discovered a bug related to the game freezing when the player dies, but wasn't able to reproduce it... so i'm not sure what's causing it yet, and am not able to fix it until i can make it happen on call
- fixed a bug related to overlapping music in camp mode

- made the color of the chargemeter (which is only used for the phoenix battle at the start of the game if i remember?) change depending on whether the player can or can't fire the gun at that point
- made the damage of that gun in the intro depend on difficulty level
- made the 'count' variable mechanics for that gun a little different, which fixed a bug it was having

- continued working on music arrangement
- created a soundcloud account and started uploading the songs so that i can show the rest of the devteam the work in progress and solicit suggestions

- continued working on the camp mode music system -- made some progress in keeping the music going between camp mode sessions, but still need to do some more stuff
- continued to work on the orchestration of the 6 new songs

- worked on the arrangement of the songs a bit more; yesterday while going over the music with me my father suggested ideas for the arrangement, so today i implemented some of his suggestions (they were mainly: use the harp more, and add pedals to everything)

- went through the songs with my father and corrected some notes; he also gave me some tips for instrumentation, pedal placement, and arrangement which i'll put into effect tomorrow. but now that the songs are all inputted, this counts as 6 tasks complete*

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- finally finished all the music input (just need to get my father to listen to them and point out mistakes in the input)
- arranged the music a bit
- saved the music into preliminary .oggs which will be replaced after the arrangement is finished
- using those .oggs, started to code the music's use in the game -- it will play during camp mode discussions. i didn't finish coding this but made progress in it and got it started. i also want to adjust camp mode so that after a conversation is finished, it takes you back to the 'squareselect' menu and doesn't just close camp mode entirely... that'd make it feel a little better i think