Preview 4 Progress Update - aiming for May 1 for release

Typed up a big update talking about some of the upcoming changes but did it in the browser and accidentally reloaded and lost it all, so here's a shorter, quicker post.

I'm planning to release the next version on May 1, keeping with the more-or-less tradition of releasing on the 1st of the month. (I missed April but this update ended up getting pretty big, and maybe every 2 months is a more reasonable cadence than every month anyway)

The mansions themselves are building and populating nicely, and all the dialog and mini-quests there are done. But the scope of the update got a little bigger than that. As part of developing the non-hostile interactions in the mansion and adding related factions, I ended up expanding factions in general.

Trading with factions now increases your reputation with them over time. And if you become friendly with a faction, they'll send you gifts.

A new trespassing/authorized/disguise system when visiting locations has been implemented. Being friendly with a faction lets you freely walk around locations owned by that faction, although if you're seen committing any crimes they'll still become hostile. If you're neutral with them, you might be able to wear certain equipment to blend in and walk around undisturbed instead. But if you're an enemy, they'll be hostile to you no matter what.

The Wizards faction now starts neutral to you, and can be traded with. Wizard towers use the trespassing system detailed above, and as it happens your starting equipment makes you look like a wizard, letting you blend in at the towers.

Vampires can technically become friendly if you kill enough Grievers, and I did enable trading with them so you can sell them blood, but there's not really much interaction there with them yet. I'll be expanding on them in the future though.

A pretty nice technical change is coming in this update too: I've massively decreased the amount of time it takes for maps to generate. The mansion maps are bigger and more complex than the other maps so far and were taking an unacceptable amount of time to generate, so I decided to profile the map generation code and see where the slowdowns were happening.

Turns out that every time a tile was being changed, it was recalculating what the player could see. This is what we want if it happens during regular gameplay, and is not something that happens that often anyway. But when generating a new map, it doesn't need to happen since 1) we refresh the player's sight immediately when they arrive anyway, 2) the player isn't even on the new map yet so doing that is just refreshing the player's sight on the map they're about to leave, and 3) because hundreds of tiles are being changed at the same time, meaning the sight's being refreshed hundreds of times in a row!

The refresh sight code is relatively time consuming - quick enough that it's not an issue once a turn or when a tile changes in play, but doing it hundreds of times definitely adds up. I made it not do that and now all maps are generating in less than a second. Even the test code that generates 50 maps in a row to check for errors, which used to take a few minutes, now takes less than 10 seconds. So that'll make playing the game much nicer.