Release Date of the first public test version

Good news!

The test version (pre alpha) of GRA should be available at the end of next week. Despite having much less free time than usual I was able to code large parts of what I intended to put in this build. So here's a quick summary of what you'll get and what you won't in this very first version.

But first, for those following the blog more or less from the beginning, here are the changes from the previous version. Hospitals and doctors have been added as you can guess from the screenshot. The GUI has  been improved with support for the mouse (to select targets and give orders). The combat AI of NPC has also been somewhat improved. They can also flee when very low on health. More generally, NPC now understand when they are under attack and react accordingly (granted that running toward a sniper with a police baton is a good thing to do). There's still a hell lot of room for improvements regarding combat AI, but it will do for now. I also fixed a few small bugs there and there but nothing major. On the downside, I've noticed on some occasions relatively heavy CPU usage when passing turns, nothing major, and I'll hopefully fix this issue before release.

Anyway, 

Included

• 3 zones types: city centers, suburbs, and city streets.
• Several building types:  
•  weapon shops, houses, parks, work places, restaurants, hospitals, ...
• Mouse compatibility : targeting, looking, using, attacking, reloading, ...
• Customizable city size (but not sector size yet)
• Living citizens who work, eat, sleep and go to a hospital when wounded
• Basic combat system with a rather stupid but effective AI
• Cops patrolling the streets, looking for criminals 
• Ability to use beds and other items to satisfy your needs
• Wanted Level
• Tons of unsupported modding tools to break the game
• Debug tools (including the aLife Spy window you may have seen in previous posts)
• Fuckload of weapons to choose from.

Not (yet) Included

• Faction System, gang warfare and such
• Saving / Loading the game (yeah, I know, it sucks)
• Advanced combat system, aiming at specific body parts, using armors, ...
• The whole 'real economy' and production chain
• Group behaviors from NPC (like shooting one will make the others react)
• Skill leveling. Most of those being placeholder atm.
• Sound and music
  
• And everything not listed in the previous list basically

Of course it will be buggy and I am pretty sure you'll find a lot of creative ways to crash it. I said that already several times but it's not even an alpha version, it's just a test build so do not expect much. This project is not even 3 months old and developed on my free time. However i think it's at least a good start.