This was another slow weekend. I managed to implement the decision event that allows tribes to improve their relationships with the clans of neighboring tribes, which would eventually make them switch allegiances. But the implementation has been riddled with bugs. So most of my time was spent fixing those.

The biggest problem so far has been that, in order to be able to recognize which clans border with a tribe, I need to store in memory every cell that enables contact between the clan and the tribe, or at least keep a count of them. Having that data in memory allows the game to evaluate the conditions that trigger the event rather quickly. But the problem with having to keep that data in memory is that it forces me to keep very good accounting of the state of each cell. I need to make sure to properly count each cell whenever it becomes a point of contact, and substract it when that is no longer the case. This can become very complicated since there are multiple ways in which a particular cell can become or stop being such point of contact, and these cannot be handled the same way every time.

Bad data accounting is a very common problem in the simulation. So it has become rather trivial for me to track those issues and fix them. Thought they still take time and are very tedious to handle. Regardless, they need to be taken care of as soon as possible. Otherwise players will run very frequently into them as it happened during the previous closed alpha. My hope is that I'll be able to fix the current issue before the start of the next weekend, so that I can spend my weekend time working on allegiance switching instead.