Happy 6th Beethday, Hive Time!
To celebrate, I've put together a quick little patch that includes some minor optimisations and a new chat command.
Chat commands
There's a new !fact command that allows chat participants to have their bee "speak" one of the Beepedia's facts. !fact on its own will display a bee fact, while adding a Beepedia "world" category topic on the end will give the relevant facts for that page (eg: !fact bears).
Optimisations
Today's patch also brings some minor optimisations that may affect large hives on lower end hardware. This comprises of reducing the amount of active physics objects in the game, removing some unnecessary nodes from the scene tree, and using predefined Vector3 constants rather than calling the constructor. I don't expect any of these to have a significant impact for most players, but they're low impact changes that might help some!
A note for Mac users: I'd announced back in 2019 that I would be ceasing Mac support when I couldn't use my existing Mac for development/testing. Newer versions of Godot no longer run on my Mac. At this stage, I have no immediate plans to upgrade engine versions for Hive Time, but if I ever have the opportunity to add blind-friendly gameplay to Hive Time, I will be upgrading to make use of Godot's engine-level text-to-speech support. If/when this happens, I will cease shipping new Mac builds and leave the last one available for download for anybody who needs it (likely with the Mac box unchecked so that I'm no longer advertising support). You can read more about my rationales and my plans for this/other projects over in this Patreon post. Apologies for any disappointment this brings. It's a real bummer that Apple don't treat their users better/make their platform less hostile to developers like me.
Enjoy!
- Cheese
Full changelog
- * Added !fact user command
- * Added show_fact() and tryFact() to IRCHandler
- * Updated all hex scenes to disable monitoring and monitorable
- * Updated HexCommon::_ready() to free unused AnimationPlayer nodes
- * Optimised uniform Vector3 constructor calls slightly
- * Optimised Player::updateBirthDebtReal() slightly