Much time has been spent on admin lately, so not as many changes as usual for this update. The good news is I’m now working with an artist, so all the bad programmer art should disappear soon! Here are some of the new tiles:

• Object status effects – Last time I talked about items having abilities, which affected the item’s capabilities. I thought this was such a great paradigm, why not expand on it? Now all objects can have status effects such as [Wet], [Humid], [Warm] and so on. Different objects react to these effects in different ways. For example, food that is [Warm] will decay faster to simulate optimal conditions for bacterial growth. On the other hand, [Frozen] food will hardly decay at all.
• Expanded disease system – It didn’t make much sense for Stone Age dwellers to know what disease they had and announce “I have Malaria!” to you. To cure it, you just needed the right plant lying around and it wasn’t very fun. So I’ve changed the way sicknesses work. Now a sickness is made up of a set of potential symptoms (e.g Hypothermia is made up of the symptoms Confused and Shivering). When someone catches a sickness, there will initially be no effects. Over time, the symptoms will start to show up one by one and affect the person’s ability to function. The player may never be told what the underlying illness is, and have to find a way to handle the symptoms (this part I haven’t worked out yet – maybe the treatments can be randomised each game, discovered by a shaman, we’ll see what fits).
• Humidity and rain dynamics – I found a bug where the humidity would rise to 100% during Winter, did some more research and realised my simple model for humidity was way too simple. With my new, realistic calculations, the weather should be more balances and behave better. It should rain more often during the afternoon/night and hot, humid days are possible, depending on the amount of water vapour in the air.
• Humans feel “apparent” temperature – In real life, the temperature you feel isn’t always equal to the air temperature due to the effects of humidity. High humidity can make you sweat, even when the air is only mildly warm. To reflect this, I’ve implemented “apparent” temperature, which is a calculation based on air temperature and humidity. On hot and humid days, people are much more likely to suffer heatstroke. For example, 35°C (95°F) with 80% humidity will actually feel like 57°C (134°F). For the curious, here is a taste of the calculations involved:
• Did a bit of work on enemy raids, if other tribes don’t like you enough, they will appear on the map and rampage through your camp
• Graphical back-end improvements, now supports 64×64 pixel tiles and allows overlapping tiles
• Fixed UI scaling issues when zooming in and out
• Improved Query Panel for humans