Let’s go swimming!

I realized just this past week that we’ve never shown off the cat’s swimming action that we added a few months back!

Now- before you ask: No - the cats will not be fording any choppy seas, and much like their IRL equivalents, the cats of Peace Island are not all that keen on swimming.  However - considering that the game world is an outcrop of land in the middle of the ocean, it is inevitable that cats and water will meet one way or another during the course of the game.  

Our lead coder tells me that it is definitely within scope to include this within the upcoming “Final Alpha.”  You can see a video here! 

We’re set to bring in the final deer NPC within the next day or two - this time, a fawn to round out the family you will find in the highlands.  While that is going on, I’ll be performing at least a dozen appendectomies on the project - removing vestigial, harmful bits of superfluous code.  During a recent sweep, I encountered remnants of stuff that I thought we had removed YEARS ago.

We’re also addressing issues with the sound settings.  For some reason, ambient sounds from NPCs have been audible, even if you turn the master volume down to zero.  Fixing this is a bit more troublesome, because it requires updating a system that is affected by the refactoring process. This is another place where I have to get personally involved, because as anyone who has played the most recent build knows: the sounds created by the “Invasive Species” could be a little bit less - shall we say - wet…

The restructuring of the second downtown “chunk” is proceeding.  If you were not aware: the most processor-intensive parts of the island are in the western, “Downtown” area.  This is due to the high number of structures.  To facilitate swifter performance & loading, all static structures within certain defined areas are being combined into single objects that will load all at once.  We finished the largest one over a month ago - this one should take less time overall, as there are about 33% fewer structures.

Now- despite the last five attempts ending in failure, I want to try another YouTube livecast.  Previously, the builds that we had intended to show off - builds that had run for an hour without a hitch prior to broadcast - would crash within 30 seconds when we launched them, after going live.

To say this was frustrating would be an understatement.  What is worse - because of this issue, I’ve not been able to properly do a public demo of anything we’ve done, in almost nine months.

BUT: I tried another (private)  livecast the other night, and I was able to run my latest build while broadcasting for 20 minutes straight, without the same problems occurring.  This gives me hope that perhaps we can do another demo stream - perhaps in a month or so, once the refactoring has gotten to an acceptable place…

And finally:  Last week, I initiated a contest wherein I asked readers to view the following image, and tell me what role they thought these objects played in the story of Peace Island…

Over the past week, we got a few very good guesses, but no one really came within striking range, so I’ll extend this for another week - and this time, I will add another image that might trigger an idea:

Send your thoughts as to what these images are depicting to us at peaceislandllc@gmail.com - the person who guesses closest wins a t-shirt, along with a few other neat bits of Peace Island swag!

See ya’ll next week!