2025-05-25 Control and Persistence

This week was focused on allowing players to switch control between different morlinnians and saving/loading the world state. Currently, the world state only consists of the spawned morlinnians and their inventories, but will eventually include any placeables and other changes to the environment made by the players.

Any morlinnians not controlled by a player will now wander randomly around until they see a thax. They'll panic and run away from the thax until out of visual range, then resume wandering. Players can select which morlinnian to control from a new panel that pops up whenever they don't have control of a morlinnian. For now, the button to spawn morlinnians now appears in this panel. Eventually, spawning morlinnians will happen in-game, and players will be able to "lock" certain morlinnians to their player ID.

When clicking on host or join on the main menu, you are now presented with a submenu. The host can choose hosting type (solo, LAN, internet) and a previous game-save to load, as well as their player name (not displayed anywhere yet). The other clients can only choose the IP address to connect to and their player name. Any player can save the game to a persisted state with a button on the title menu.

Other notable changes:

• The camera will now zoom out as you move, to allow viewing further ahead.
• The much-desired "faster movement" is here, in the form of overdrive. I'll probably go with 2x overdrive for walking and 1.5x for running, but I've made it a configurable setting for now because it's fun to play with. Both movement speed and animation speed are controlled by overdrive.
• Added colors to buttons and some inputs. Orange is "yes", purple is "no", and green is "neutral/options".