Ready For A Change

I can't believe that I got everything done, although after staying awake past 2:00am, I am certainly paying for my labors this morning.  Nothing that several cups of coffee can't cure!

There were two scripts that I wanted to modify and both goals were achieved. The first change concerned one of my favorite scripts which powers "itemless" quests.  One of the issues that I discovered whilst using this script is that there is more math than there needs to be: I struggled to find the sum of bit fields, such as 2^15 + 2^11 + 2^7 + 2^0.  I created a shortcut for this script which eliminated my need to provide the calculations; the script now cheerfully does this math for me.

The second change was a little nerve-wracking, as it involved adding a new feature to our filtering function.  I am always nervous when modifying any of the major scripts, and filter.func is a major script.  I added a small hook which enables other scripts (such as sayinitstring, our major speech script, or the reward script which runs almost all of the New Ash quests) to check the bits of an itemless quest.  This opens a lot of options for quests and, in a weird way, nearly eliminates the need for the itemless quest script itself.

And as a bonus I added some giant spider-chickens.  These monsters are both terrifying and a challenge and okay no I didn't really do that.  Updating those two scripts were challenging enough!

I am ready for the changes of V747!