Racing, racing music, and inventory problems news - Olvand

Hi everyone, this listed style of news really fits how I'm working these days, so here's another one:

• I've been working on racing the last few days. To fresh up your mind: the idea is that players can put pairs of flag flags into the ground. Every player can then go these pairs and add them to their 'track'. If you feel your track is ready, you can start a race and invite others to it. These others will then have to get to all flags selected by you as quickly as possible. This week and last week, I've implemented putting these flags into the world, and making sure they're also saved by the server, so they will be there next time you log in. You can also already make races and clear them (but they're not saved yet :P). I recently also realized it's going to be quite hard for people to figure out where the next flag pair is, so I'm also designing a turning arrow to help the players a bit:

• I'm also working on a bug that has been reported by many testers: sometimes, if you craft something, but the result doesn't fit into any of your inventories, you don't get the result, but you do lose the ingredients. It's quite rare for such a situation to emerge, so it's not a big game breaker of anything, but it IS annoying when it happens. Some research and hard thinking have lead me to the conclusion that the old calculation is both inefficient and doesn't cover all situations (which caused the bugs), so what I'm doing right now is something completely different: I copy both inventories to some invisible 'ghost' inventory, remove the ingredients there, and then try to add the result there. Only if this all goes without any problems, I do the same things in the real inventory. I think there still are situations that are not covered, but the problem should be even rarer now.

• And finally, since I got some nice responses about the WIP [fishing music last week], I decided to share my WIP racing music as well:
  
  

  The feeling I try to express with this piece (besides FASTER FASTER FASTER! of course) is that of a player new to a server who has reached a little town, and has decided to join a race that happens to be organized there. The race turns out to be a huge track that takes him through beautiful cities and nature, with all kinds of colorful flowers and animals (all randomly generated, unique to this server, of course). Maybe I'll do the new duel music next week, it depends on how much I've got by then: I decided last weekend I really wasn't happy with what I had so far, so I decided to start over complete.

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