Foodbabs! (Open alpha)

[Dinocanid]

It's been a while since any updates, especially since I got a cold around the time I initially expected to release the explore update. Now I bring you an ETA! Most of the stuff I've been working on is either internal or art, so you wouldn't notice any changes, but the release date (approximately at least, may be earlier or slightly later) for explore has been pushed back to March 20, the first day of spring! Hope you guys can hang in there until then.

 

[Dinocanid]

Here's a screenshot of the upcoming explore page, which might come earlier than expected. I'm thinking about adding an overlay to show how many steps you have left.

 

[Bexasaurus]

Ahhh, the coati swirl is A+

 

[Dinocanid]

Explore has officially been added! The amount of steps has been increased to 40, since 20 seemed too short. The pets themselves aren't hard to run into, but it isn't easy to get one! It may take you a quite few tries if you aren't lucky.

Also, if you are getting this screen:

Clear your cache to fix it.

 

[Dinocanid]

Bouncing ideas off the walls here, I'm thinking that, based on their encyclopedia entry, adoptables of that type with sometimes have random events to correspond with it.

Spaniel Flan: Will need to be groomed more often than other pets, when/if grooming is added.

Eggsotic Shorthair: Might pop up in a random spot on your page on occasion.

Hotdach: When/if grooming is added, the ability to remove the bun will be possible.

Ragamuffin: Possibly take care of baby adoptables? (baby babs would need to be difficult to care for somehow...)

Black Forest Dog: A random item might be removed from the inventory if the mood drops below 30% maybe? (There would need to be a vault or something to protect items.)

Chowchowder: Grooming not needed? (Or maybe grooming needed less often)

Apple pom: Trust is easier to gain.

Cranberry Tufted Deer: Make use of the unused battle system? They seem to like tussling.

Gingerbread Bear: A chance to get items from the sidebar. (More valuable items would be rare)

Pumpkat: The possibility of the pumpkin getting destroyed in explore, once disease and injury gets added. (It would be rare, like 5% or something)

Cookie Cat: Trust is harder to gain

Cherry Cheesecake Dog: Extra steps in explore

There's no telling when or if some of these are going to be added, but I'm thinking about ways to make it work.

 

[Dinocanid]

I think I figured out a way for a pet's mood to go down every day using a date function, but it only goes down when you visit their page/profile (So none of the bars can go down if you don't visit your pet) Unfortunately, this means that the pets are basically "frozen" when it comes to needs if you don't visit them, making the frozen function only work for clicks (I want it to work for needs too eventually). I'm not sure if it works yet, but I'll keep checking back to see if the mood is going down every day.

Update #1: It's conflicting with the explore system since it uses the same variable (which checks the date before updating your "lastday"), So I'm going to split the needs date variable into a separate thing to see if that works better.

 

[Dinocanid]

Overhaul time! While it is not coming today or tomorrow, I am on spring break. This means that I'll be able to get a considerable amount of work done.

You might be asking: what happened to the adopt overhaul? (sickness, death and "fairy dust") That will require more work on the needs system than I have done right now in order to work the way I want it to, so that update on the site has been put on hiatus. Hang in there!

Here is what I have planned for this current overhaul, which makes use of what I can do currently.

-Energy-
Introducing a new variable on pets: Energy. Training and entering contests will take energy (as well as exploring), and once your pet's energy hits 0 you won't be able to explore or enter contests until the next day. So regardless of whether you've explored that day or not, if you don't have at least 25% energy you won't be able to explore. Use energy wisely!

-NPC contests-
I don't have the knowledge to make live multiplayer contests between players, but it isn't too difficult to make NPC opponents to go against in contests. To make use of the unused stats on pets (they are there, but no visible as of right now), whether or not you will be slightly random based on the stats. So if you enter, say, a race then a higher speed stat will increase your likelihood of winning, but it will never be 100% guaranteed. Finally there will be another reason to breed pets besides breed-only adopts! This will also make use of the needs system, so low mood or unhealthy pets will not be able to enter contests or train.

Winning a contest will allow you to move on to the next difficulty level. They are structured like so:

• County
• State
• Regional (North, East, South, West)
• National
• International

Each level has the basic ranks: Beginner --> Intermediate --> Pro --> Championship. You must win each rank to move on.

-Residence-
Possibly the most major aspect of this besides contests. Users will be able to choose which part of the world the get to live in. This will affect the adoptables, items, and contests available to you. So sadly you will not be able to get a kangaroo adopt unless you chose Australia or bought it from another user. This in-game world will be divided into counties, cities, regions, and countries. Each will have their own leaderboard, to add incentive to winning contests. Imagine having your pet be the #1 competitor in the world! It replicates the real world, with all the major countries and cities, but counties will be fictional to avoid any issues that could be related to that. I plan to have area-specific explore zones as well.

What if you want to move though? Well you can, though it may be expensive! The farther away your next destination is, the more it will cost to move there. But beware! Moving will make you start from square one on the contest ranks, so it's back to county beginners with you! The bright side is that you keep all of your winning trophies. Maybe you can strive to get all the trophies from all over the world!

-Player Shops-
Since users will only be able to buy pets available to them in their region (besides the starters, which will be available everywhere), users will be able to sell their pets to other users by setting up a shop. Want a pet but you can't get it where you live? Buy one from a user who has it! Or get lucky and find one in the pound (which is universal), your choice. Each user shop will be able to have a custom description, prices, residence tax (you get to choose if non-local buyers have to pay a higher fee), and shop owner NPC (basically an image). Sell your prized pets!

 

[Dinocanid]

A picture of the interactive world map. Canada, US, Europe, and the UK are going to be the places I'm focusing on getting done first; and will be the first playable places. The other locations probably aren't coming until the beta stage.

I updated the css a bit too, so there should be no more issues with the favorite pet image poking out of the sidebar and the main index image doing the same. Now it scales with your screen and window size and should work better with smaller screens, but it will still look funky on mobile devices.

 

[Dinocanid]

With residence being close, I created a survey to allow users to have a hand in the new species that will come with it.

Directions: Select at least 1 (with a maximum of 3) animals from the links provided (UK|AUS|CAN|US) and come up with a wacky food combination to merge it with. The animals that appear most frequently will be chosen to be added to the site, while the food it is combined with will be randomly chosen from the entries (if more than one for the same animal exists). Having more than one entry with the same information will not count.

Link to Survey

 

[Bexasaurus]

Oh, nice! I'll hopefully have enough time to fill this out today if not tomorrow.

 

[Dinocanid]

We now have a trello board! Now you can view the progress of current updates and future, unannounced updates!

Link to trello

 

[KittHaven]

I just logged in for the first time in a while, oops XD So as you want some feedback from bug testing, etc, I will list a few things I found while exploring

Okay first off I went to my pantry to check my pets and play with them all. (cause they need my attention lol XD) I noticed that 'sex' on their profiles isn't displaying their gender and the button for removing the background is partially covering the buttons above it. And while on the profiles the avatar is a broken link (though I have this issue on my own site, so I've got a post on the mysidia help section at the moment).

Next I checked out the tea collection because I was curious about achievements lol XD That seems really cool! Especially the tooltips part! (Though I did adopt the newer adopts and another hotdach to get to 10 adoptables to unlock one and it would be really cool if it sent you a PM when you unlock one, or to notify you to check your achievements, because if I hadn't have been looking to specifically get it I probably wouldn't have noticed lol)

Then I played with the newer ones to get my karma up to 100 to join the GGBA and I successfully did! Though as I bought the new adopts and some balls from the shop I can't afford the dragon yet XD So I went exploring to get more money and thought I'd do the quest with Snuffles (that I remember from my signing up exploration a few months ago XD) but he is telling me that I have already done the quest today, even though I haven't been on his page. I did visit the holiday shop to adopt a bear, if that would help with bug fixing.

The last two things are that if you click 'remove background' while no background is selected it sends you to an error page, but it might be easier if it just told you that no background is equipped, and also I clicked explore and it sent me to an error XD (I know it's in progress, though, and that's why c

And that's about it! I haven't really explored anywhere else yet XD Hope that helps ^_^

EDIT: I've been able to adopt 11/10 pets ^_^ My shelf space has gone past the limit. Might have had to do with me getting enough money for a dragon and buying it? Maybe something to do with the shop itself ^_^

 

[Dinocanid]

Thanks for the feedback! I'm actually thinking of removing backgrounds until I can refine it because the way I have it now is pretty messy and there are lots of display issues.
Pet genders not showing is actually resolved with newer pets, but pets that were adopted/bred before the bug was fixed are still bugged. I haven't been able to go through all the old ones yet.
Profile images are acting really weird for me, some show getimagesize errors, others white page errors, broken images... The list goes on. I'll have to look into a better way for users to add profile pictures without the links breaking anything.
A notification PM for achievements sounds like a good idea, but I would have to edit the way it works since it actually doesn't acknowledge that you earned an achievement until you visit the page (IE: When you visit the achievement page, there are several if statements that show the proper achievements when you meet the conditions) I could make it so the site is constantly checking for these conditions, but I'm not sure how that would be done.
The Snuffles quest is definitely bugged. It's probably with the way I have it check if the user completed the quest that day. I think it's using the same "lastday" variable as the explore page, so if the user explored that day then they can't do the quest and probably vice versa. All I need to do is separate them and it should work fine. I never got any error messages when visiting the explore page though, do you remember what it said?

 

[KittHaven]

I was just about to update my post on it actually XD I think it's because I haven't set a favourite pet yet. I had the issue on my site. It throws you an uncaught exception that adoptable id 0 isn't displayed properly or something. I didn't read it at first lol XD But I recognise the error aha.

(Also updated my post about being able to adopt more than 10 pets, though my 11th was the blue raspberry dragon from the shop so it might be an issue with the shops rather than the pantry shelf spaces not working XD)

 

[KittHaven]

Just logged in for today! And the pantry spaces haven't stopped me from adopting more than allowed (as I thought it might have been because I bought the blue dragon before).

  Spoiler: Image 

Also, how do you get the health up? XD I know you can buy balls for mood but some of my adopts have like really low health from me not logging in and doing stuff with them, whoops.

Also! XD I'm going to be more active because I want that deer adopt Mwahaha

EDIT: Another thing I just noticed, I went to the associations page (I'm in the good one) and because all my money is in the bank it says underneath that I can't afford membership, however I'm already in it Just to let you know ^_^

 

[Dinocanid]

You can't raise health yet, but pets can't die either so there's nothing to worry about, lol. I think I fixed the pantry bug, but I might make a topic for the bank because I can't figure out why it's adding.

 

[KittHaven]

Ah okay! XD Glad to know I won't lose them lol

 

[Dinocanid]

I spent the day yesterday making a shiny new theme for the site:

-Features-

• Made with Bootstrap 3
• Finally mobile-friendly!
  • Safely view the site from any phone or tablet
  • Improved for small screens and laptops as well

This theme is also completely optional, so you can continue using the classic theme if you still want to. The site content has been adjusted to work the same on both themes without display issues or breaking.
Note: The classic theme still has display issues with smaller screens and is not mobile-friendly.

-How do I change my theme?-
Just click on 'edit my account' on the sidebar (later the UserCP from the navbar) and select 'Change Style'.

-Other news-
Pet sorting has been added to the site and variants are being tested. (You can find a berry flan and pumpkinless cat on my profile)
The survey will be open for the rest of the week before closing. Thank you everyone that participated!
The holiday shop will be closing soon to make way for the summer shop (it's long overdue). A spring adoptable will be included to make up for the missed spring. After the summer shop opens, all seasonal shops will no longer be manually opened and closed by me; they will automatically rotate.

 

[KittHaven]

Looking good Automatically rotating shops is a brilliant idea XD Less work for you XD

EDIT: This error popped up on my header on FoodBabs:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ':' in /home/adopttes/public_html/classes/class_widget.php(112) : eval()'d code on line 2

Just to let you know lol

 

[Dinocanid]

Oh yeah, I fixed it. That was showing up because I was trying to add a new module to the right sidebar and I ran into a syntax error lol.