Still slowly working out those beta bugs.
Progress on Washington Has Fallen continues, albeit slowly. Minecraft has received a lot of updates since we began coding the Washington Has Fallen adventure, and some of them have changed the way parts of the game was originally coded.
We originally used a strategy throughout the world that forced key NPC characters to self propel themselves over distances while triggering events along the way to set up some of the missions players would encounter next.
It was a unique idea in which an action by a player would TP the unknown and hidden NPC Character to a special area onto a pressure plate which in turn would trigger a series of command block commands, along with moving the NPC to its next area until the player arrived.
Originally it worked, because in the first introduction of NPC's into the Bedrock version of Minecraft, they had weight and could trigger a pressure plate when they landed on them. But in newer updates of Minecraft, the player has to be present where the NPC is being teleported from, so it became no longer to self-teleport the NPC that had been teleported beyond the block limits of the player. The command blocks would return an error, "Unable to place block outside of world".
That has created a ton of extra work as we were design the missions of the game impacted by the changes.
One way it's good, because originally we were teleporting and triggering blocks every so many block chunks within the players range. Since that it no longer working either, were now just teleporting the NPC's wherever they are going, and recoding the local activity locally.
Another good thing about it, is some in-between missions required a lot of running around and searching for buildings in Washington DC which is massive. That created a lull in the adventure experience. So we've been forced to create new areas that originally didn't exist and some mini-missions that didn't originally exists.
The downside however, is its creating a whole lot of new unexpected work, a whole lot of new coding, and going through the original coding to figure out what we originally did and how it originally worked so we can write new code and make some aspects simpler.
For example. In the original final beta version, the player trigger an action that sent the NPC jumping by itself and triggering different set-ups about four times on it's way to the White House. That way, by the time the player would reach the White House, everything would be ready to go and the NPC would be in place.
But, with the changes Minecraft has made, we've had to instead make seven new mini-missions in between the location the player ends the previous mission before reaching the White House Mission which is a major mission in the game.
For example, the player originally never needed to visit the Hospital in Washington DC. Now the player has three new missions before reaching the Hospital. The Hospital never had a "Chapel". But we needed an area that made sense within the overall game to propel the game forward, so we had to build this Hospital Chapel.
We thought the Chapel would be enough, but when testing it out, it connected to the original NPC jumping points which no longer work. So several of the areas we built recently ended up being unused. Instead as we beta tested this part of the progression of the game this morning, we realized the Hospital Chapel is actually going to end up being an important part of moving the game forward.
Of course I can write about it all I want, but it won't make much sense until you eventually have a chance to play, and by that time, we'll have already worked out the new coding.
That being said, it's exciting to finally be almost to the White House. The White House Mission is one of the major missions and contains enormous amounts of coding and activity. It's one those parts in the game for those of us doing the coding that lets us know we've reached a good place.
Though we'll certainly have to do more creative work arounds once we get past the White House Mission, its a good place. Hopefully, the White House mission will require little if any new revisions. It's been beta tested more than any other mission, only uses NPC's to trigger local events and is self contained.
We'll be about half way done with the current beta test repairs and fixing bugs when the White House mission is done.
