Slartboz: Lots of Engine Upgrades & Game World Additions

I normally dont share details on every single thing I add or change in Slartboz dev sessions. Because the extra burden overhead on me would be too much, and I'm unconvinced it would help with growing public support.

But... I will try an experiment, ONCE. To give a taste here of recent TODO tasks crossed off for the codebase. This is a subset only.

Highlights from recent dev sessions:

* that hyper little fish in the Pell Community Swimming Pool was slowed down. (was it drugs?)

* a deadly Energy Maze was added. somewhere

* when avatar dies the in-world time flow pauses and a cool Tombstone overlay rises up via animation. showing cause of death and other details. the game doesnt FORCE you to stop playing after that point. however, your choices of action will be VERY limited. being dead. (tho the Slartboz world being what it is, NOT even Death itself is some kind of ultimate, utterly final, or irreversible endgame for mortal souls. heck just look at the career that Wudy Giulaneli has had in recent years, post-NYC/911, post-death -- the guy gets around! or Sen. Grinch McGronnell. or Ronald Jay Grump. or Sen. WhyAnne Frankstein. With the right mix of "closed trial" pharmaceutical chemicals even death itself is but a *minor* transitition, however hawkward. I mean, thats what people are saying. Just pasing it along! *cough*)

* The Tank (TM) has a visual-only prototype (it has no physics or behavior yet, this task is just a typical first stab in the dev workflow, when bringing a new "thing" to life in a game world)

* ShootPlanner, ShotPlan, and MovePlan. a new sub-mode of the main play UX that lets the user pick what direction they'd like to shoot in, by default. all subsequent shots will go in that same relative dir. also, you can instead move a special cursor around on the map to select a specific location coordinate to target with shots. all subsequent shots can use that too. user can pick whichever shoot style/strategy they like, at the moment, and go back and forth in a few keystrokes, easy enough to fast become muscle memory in one's "battle workflow"
    * and though the engine is real-time, it pauses whenever it makes sense, or even merely when the user wishes it (by hitting the T hotkey to pause/unpause the flow of time)
   * the ShootPlanner/ShotPlan/MovePlan design (on paper) calls for yet more fun sophistication and useful options to code up in future dev sprints
   * lazer bolts in flight either move in a fixed direction (either the 4 orthogonal or 4 diagonal), or, if they have a fixed target destination, they can fly along a Bresenham's path. for those unfamiliar, the Bresenham algorithm is basically how you "walk" an entity along a roughly straight line, to maintain (the illusion at least of) the shortest distance between two endpoints. and that still looks somewhat realistic when forced to discretize (what would normally be)  floating point numbers down into merely integer-expressed pixel coordinate positions, on a monitor screen. its used in most video games, whether you know it or not, and we miss it when its not present
   * in some cases, the avatar can signal (via a hotkey command) a remote bomb to explode (such as to blow a bomb planted under a river bridge (eg. in Last Ditch Defense), to make it harder for an enemy to cross it, and thus slow them down)
   * weapons have diff ranges and capabilities. and projectiles have a diff appearance in flight
   * on a toggleable Inventory overlay in the UI (reachable via lowercase "i" hotkey), you can see a list of all carried items, and nav a cursor up/down thru all of them, one at a time, for more info on each. press w to wield/wear toggle any focused item. also a list of items on the ground (or otherwise present at hand) is shown in a right side column. with similar cursor focus navigability
   * SlurmPlant: there's a Control Station where a human standing at it can press a button to turn off/on the entire factory's interior machinery network and conveyor belt contraptions. this has been hinted at in screenshots but not shown in a screencast video yet. (TODO)
   * sounds can be triggered to play when avatar enters a certain location
   * if you watched The World Evolving Over Time video  (

) then you heard "The Mad AI" character speak. he is Abro's weird-but-genius remote fren (who lives, in effect, inside Abro's CommCube, from the young man's POV). there are MANY other audibly (in the real world) speaking character voices in the game. I've picked working candidate voice styles for 3 more major NPCs and began polishing their spoken dialogue text scripts and their own speech audio files. Bonk, Fern, Traneese, and several more FUN character surprises I've kept out of public eye so far...

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