As promised, milestone 8 brings with it some robust new features! The next update will be more about integration with The Orbium, as well as front-end styling.
Social Events
We are so, so, so excited to announce that player-to-player interaction is possible in GAM3, and that's it's very powerful and flexible!
Under event requirements, you'll find Social. The social requirement allows one player to send an event to another person who is on their Orbium contact list, with both followers and friends being allowed on that list. Once their name is selected, the event is played for the sender as normal. Then, the receiver will get a notification under the new social icon (for the moment, a pair of drinks) to accept or decline the offer. Once accepted, the receiver runs the same event, and you'll control what happens to who with flags.
You can add flavor text to the request, such as "[n] has a gift for you!". You can limit the list of people by formula, for example if you want to recruit only friends that are Warriors.
An if statement with "social_state == 0" will only run for the person sending the event. social_state == 1 will run for the player receiving it. This is how you control who sees what.
Most excitingly, you can also use another player's quals and items in a formula! Similar to how we use b_ to get the base value of a qual before equipment, you can use p2_ to get the opposing player's information. ex: [strength] - [p2_armor] is a simple formula to determine how much damage another player might take in a Player vs. Player game.
Exceptions
Social events are not "grindable"
You cannot test p2_'s base values like you can with b_ in the formula.
You can have branches on these events, but they'll be shared by both participants. Set a hidden flag and the branch(es) to "hide if not met", with a requirement for the hidden flag, to control who sees the branch.
Music
I'm happy to say that we now support musical transitions for zones and locales!
Upload your files via FTP and set the music as you would for background transitions. The logic for this is very similar to our background transitions. When a song changes, there will be a lovely fadeTo as we preload and play the new track. There's nothing more to be said! Realize that this is a big step forward for GAM3 as it allows us to play sounds and music as a videogame might.
Code Generation
It is now possible to generate event codes! Under System -> Event Codes, you'll find an interface for managing codes that simply run events when they are visited through the browser. This is useful for special gifts you want to give out for holidays, as a reward for finding bugs, or just a nice little surprise for your social media followers.
Try an example code for Daiele. :} www.theorbium.com/daiele/code/openworld
With this also came two new features:
* A notification popup for the player: try visiting that code again after it's been played.
* The "_nowhere_" zone, found at the bottom of the zone list on an event, where you will stuff all your zones that the player shouldn't be visiting and are, thereby, safe to put an event into, such as a code event.
General
If someone tries to access the game but isn't logged in, we now save the URL they tried to access and forward them over once they're logged in. The code feature was the reason this was made; we want to be able to offer a special sign-up promo code.
Updated our jQuery UI installation. The base theme looks a little different from what you'll remember, but it was all in the name of staying current and lightweight. You may also notice our animations are smoother!
The "history view", accessible by hitting H on any object in Build, was given a visual update. It'll never be beautiful, but these things don't need to be.
Your installation's version is now available by hovering over the "GAM3" header in Build. (and in your config at the top) For now, we're just tracking by milestone until the engine's Summer release.
