Welcome back to MacroFarm! It has been 6 months, that's half a year!, since the last major update, which introduced a brand new way of roaming the map and interacting with the inventory. Since then, MacroFarm has advanced incredibly, from the outside and inside. So, let's dive in.
v1.0 of MacroFarm was first written in Pygzrun, which is a baby version of Pygame, but v2.0 took a leap ahead and was written in Pygame itself, which unlocked many new features and allowed much more flexibility. However, at the time, our developers were still new to keeping code neat, and so v2.0 was just a utter mess, composed of these super-mega functions, although it miraculously worked. So, on the very same month, v3.0 was released, with clear code all in one file. From v3.0 to v5.0, the code was clear and properly arranged and there wasn't supermega functions just thrown into one file, at least for the next 5 months. During this period when MacroFarm was abondoned and forgotten, our developers were learning about Object Oriented Programming, classes, parents and child classes, different ways of arranging dictionaries, lists, and so much more. And then finally, they came back to MacroFarm with their new standards, and declared it most dissatisfying and disorganized. This brought rise to v7.0, which very foundations are based on Object Oriented Programming, with a variety of parent and daughter classes, all with their own features and jobs. It also introduced brand new ways of arranging and interating dictionaries and lists. Thus, we are proud to introduce Object Oriented Programming to MacroFarm, making everything so much more neater and accessible, for the next few months or so at the least.
After the release of v4.0, a bunch of new items and buildings were added to MacroFarm, and MacroFarm was soon faced with a problem. The player's inventory could not display all these items all at once due to lack of space. So, should our graphic designers just remove these items and limit the MacroFarm experience? Of course not. Thus, our developers were soon experimenting with all kinds of solutions, and eventually, a simple solution was found. Implement scrolling into the inventory display. The idea was great, but it took some time before our developers finally got it to work properly. This brand new solution was introduced later on with v5.0. And now, we are proud to release Scroll Plus with v7.1, with a brand new, clean, modern look to the inventory and a new way of catorgorizing and organising the inventory. These new addition arranges items into groups by their purposes, such as Food, Fuel, Carpentry, etc, so that the player can easily find what they are looking for. This brand new feature will be extremely useful for when new gadgets, animals, items, and other objects are added into the MacroFarm world.
With v7.2 of MacroFarm, we are excited a brand new feature never seen in MacroFarm before: Notification Plus. When you select an item in a store, a notification banner will appear and give you information on it's prize and name. So far, it hasn't been put to much use yet, but we hope to expand this new feature so much more in the near future and are happy to have so much progress on it already.
If you remember, v7.0 was fully updated with Object Oriented Code, which allowed it to have much more flexibilty and abilities. So, we will now address one of MacroFarm's new features which was enabled as a consequence: Universal Health Bars. When programming v7.3, our developers made a parent class called Organism, and one of the functions it contained displayed a health bar over the organism's image. Thus, every subclass of Organism would have this feature. This enabled the subclasses Player, NAnimal, and BAnimal to all have this feature in just one paragraph of code. Were our developers to implement this feature without Object Oriented Programming, the feature would probably have to take up 4 to 5 paragraphs of code. See how much easier things are to manage with Object Oriented Programming established in?! Well, you should, anyhow, and now every organism has a health bar over their head, which allows for more complex events to happen, such as animal reproduction, animal poverty, animal disease, etc.
Status Island is once again a brand new addition to the MacroFarm experience. The Status Island includes the player's health bar, the current selected inventory and store items, and current storage, and a timer. It was developed so as to clear any kind of confusion of which storage the player is currently using. We plan to extend the capabilities of Status Island along with Notification Plus to form a fully functional, interactive notification system.