Eric Fry and the Nuvie team went dormant for a couple of weeks, from toward the end of October until early in November. However, there have been a number of edits posted to the project changelog recently, detailing the progress that the team has made on the engine in November.

For example, the team has added “use” capabilities to a number of objects (among other functions):

2014-11-08 Eric Fry r1977
* Added MD berry markers to party view.
* Show adjusted stats on Actor view.
* Added C script calls for getting adjusted stats from lua script.
* Lots of work on map x coordinate wrapping for MD
* Load MD movement points correctly from the objlist
* Added MD musical instrument usecode. (sfx aren’t done yet.)
* Added MD use hammer on oxium geode.
* Added new play_md_sfx() stub function.
* Added MD use gong.
* Added MD update_all_actors() script function.
* Added MD perform_worktype() stub function.
* Added back support for setfenv() lua function. This has been deprecated
in lua 5.2

As well, they’ve added an option to configure the game from its menu:

2014-11-09 Eric Fry r1978
* Added ‘startup game’ button to the config menu. You can now change
the startup game (‘config/loadgame’) from within Nuvie. Added a future
config option to select the game from a menu at startup. At the moment
this just reverts to U6 if selected.

The Create Food spell has also had its functionality adjusted somewhat:

2014-11-10 Malignant Manor r1979
* Increase GameplayDialog height and increase the button_index.
* Have created food go in the caster’s inventory instead of the Avatar’s.

And for those of you who aren’t enamored of the speech in the FM-Towns version of the game, there is now an option to disable it:

2014-11-10 Malignant Manor r1980
* Add speech_enabled U6 specific cfg key. This allows FM-Towns speech to
be enabled or disabled instead of always being on. This can be changed
in the menu, but speech will finish playing if turned off.

As per usual, then, the Nuvie team are making excellent — impressive — progress. And the engine’s support for Martian Dreams continues to improve.