Good news: I'm not dead! Yaaaas. I have a new (working) computer, less stressful/demanding job, and my work on Fixt should resume soon.
Bad news: Very little progress on Fixt since the last updates I posted here. No ETA on next release.
Plans are still the same: release 0.90beta on Fallout1 engine which will be crash fixes and bug/issue fixes obviously, but also more installer customization options, robust in-game customization options, and 'major' implementations such as continuing play after Vault 13 dead / continuing play regardless of ending. *After that, all work forward will be on Fallout2-engine version.
To be honest, most really annoying bugs had been squashed by TeamX / etc
Accurate, lol.
Did get quite a few memory crashes when getting random encs on world map.
Sigh... this issue has been bothering me for a while. I still haven't figured out exactly what is causing them, and the way Fallout debug logging works, I have very little information to go on when I read the logs. Clearly I fucked something up at some point because I don't recall ever getting crashes with TeamX files. #ragequit. The good news is F2 engine does encounters totally differently so I don't expect this to be an issue anymore at that point.
You seem to get some starting equipment relative to your tagged skills - and I actually threw out the extra pistol and whatever else at the rat caves. It's silly, but it's easy for the player to take care of.
It shouldn't be possible to start with duplicate of any weapons including the 10mm Pistol; I'll have to look into this.
Will geometric shapes be available?
Yes. And you'll be able to choose 'Other' for gender.
Big Guns, Melee and Lockpicking. Started the game with a flamer + fuel in the rat cave (...) this is an anathema to Fallout 1 and must be purged.
Could you elaborate more on this? The overall idea with this part of the project (see link below) was to make starting inventory vary a lot more based on what character and difficulty was chosen, thus making a more unique starting experience for each playthrough.
I can understand people disagreeing based on (for example) the item being worth a lot of caps or being overpowered at game start.
On the other hand, I personally feel it's pretty stupid for only half the skills to have any game-start item advantage whatsoever:
-- If I tag Big Guns and Energy Weapons, that helps me literally zero until mid/late-game for most players.
-- If I tag Gambling, Speech, and Traps, I get jack shit besides base items (and base items don't vary based on difficulty either in Vanilla btw).
-- If I tag Barter, Sneak, and Melee Weapons, I also get jack shit on game start for it.
^ I don't really understand how that's a "good thing" in terms of game mechanics. Just because a mechanic/experience was the way the game shipped, doesn't necessarily mean it was a good or fair or reasonable mechanic/experience.
Here's exactly the formulas for starting items:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3kd14bzwbn0li9z/Starting_Items.xls?dl=0 -- let me know
agris if you have any other specific thoughts about this sheet.
The plan for the next release is to allow players to enable or disable Base Items and Tagged-Skill Items in the installer and customizer. So if you want you can set everyone to only start with base items and tagging does not affect inventory. Or only start with tagged-skill-based items (hence why each skill has an associated item). Or can set everyone to start nekkid.