Is Gearhead still on the radar?

[Petra]

Has anyone heard anything about Gearhead since the last version? I realize that life tends to get in the way of things, but given the way that gearhead 2 had a semi-regular update schedule... I was wondering if Mr. Hewitt was still continuing to develop gearhead and or Dungeon Monkey...

[Crucifix]

Sure, here's the latest:

Crucifix- Thanks for all of this commentary. I haven't read everything yet, but one common thread I'm seeing is "less catastrophic randomness". This applies to instakills, store reloading, failed Mech Eng rolls, lancemates with useless equipment.

Here's an idea for protecting your ultra-customized mecha: Allow the player to buy insurance. As long as your mech is insured it will never be lost in combat, but once the insurance is used it must be renewed (can be done by phone or at the mechanic's shop when the mecha is restored from "Out of Action" to "OK"), and the more often it's lost the higher the price gets.

For shops, I was thinking about removing randomness more or less entirely- get rid of the useless items, stock all the items of appropriate type within the shop's quality class. Some specialty stores could still have random inventory- the exotic weapon shop, the gift shop, and so on.

I'm trying to get a demonstration of the Lua system ready for release tonight. Hopefully my plan will drum up some more activity on the forum.

As an unrelated point, exploring the spinners early on at low reknown ruins the game forever since quests like Aigaion's lair just don't spawn unless you delay and slowly accumulate your 50 reputation before switching spinners. Is it possible to get the neat reknown centric quests to generate but just remain inert until the requisite reknown? Or even better, not make interesting things dependent on the player to exist?

They should activate at the correct renown regardless of your travels. For many of them, you may need to be in town for the activation to happen. Or there may be a bug. Since all the story bits are getting rewritten in Lua, it's a moot point.

There's also been the odd update on Lua conversion in the interim here on the forum.

Unfortunately a full conversion is a slow, painful process fraught with releases which appear unimpressive (at least to the uninitiated), and involves a whole lot of downtime just trying to get the thing to work at all, definitely nothing "new" like bug fixes. When the conversion is complete, we will likely see a rapid burst of activity with a large number of fixes and tweaks as the new system updates. All in all a few months of hush isn't too bad in the grand scheme of game development.

[Petra]

Thanks. I know this is probably a long time coming, but I haven't had internet for about a month so...

Yeah. I kinda figured that a rewrite was going to take a while. I just wish he'd keep us a little posted periodically as to what's going on. I know the Toady One of the Great usually puts up a small blog post as to the progress of Dwarf Fortress updates, just to keep people interested. And it works. I'm glad he does it.