Dev Update : economics, Items, and AI

Or the weekly development update I nearly forgot to post.

I'm posting a bit less frequently than usual, mostly because the economic part is a bit tricky and takes a fairly large amount of my time without having much to show for in the meantime. However, I made several improvements related to items/effects and the NPC AI. And I fixed most of the bugs reported so far. It will probably take a little less than a month for a release including a working economy, with another release in between.

Anyway, I am done with items and associated effects. It was long and boring to code, but it's working. Up to five different effects of any duration can be associated with any item created with the editor. So it's quite easy to create an item that will increase your strength for 30 turns but reduce your perception for 50. So, yes adding and handling all sorts of chemicals and illegals drugs will be one of the things I will add once the economic part finished.

I also spent some time improving the AI logic of NPC. They are now able to shop and use most items (at least those which are relevant to them in the current environment: food, energy drinks, health packs). This and a few other changes resulted in much more variety in their schedules. Instead of always going home to eat, for example, they either use previously bought snacks from their inventory, go to a restaurant, or well, go home. Same logic applies for wounded and sleepy NPC. It's not reflected on the combat AI yet, but as this part will be rewritten from scratch at a later date, it's a low priority target.

I fixed the stacking bug in the inventory; the sleep/hunger (and others) 'needs' going into negative values causing the player not to be able to use beds and fridges; and other relatively minors glitches.

In the 'non economic' part I am also going to add pickpockets in next release, it's fairly easy to add now. The option to do so will, of course, be available to the player. It will be an agility / stealth roll basically, giving some use to the agility statistic for non melee characters. Cells phones should also be in here, randomly bought by NPC, they will be used to call the cops when the player (or a gang member) goes on a rampage.