I’ve still been working hard on the recode and I’ve made some pretty decent improvements to the engine.
- Readded Skill Screen (now it shows stats as well at skills).
- Readded Class Selection as well as proper gamestate management to make everything work.
- Readded NPC’s and rebuilt the system from scratch
- Reworked Slime AI completely
- Readded loot
- Save and Load system now working properly
I decided to go with a hitbox style system to determine the player taking touch damage and the weapon swings hit detection to make everything a bit easier.
The slime combine system is now simplified it just adds the level of the two combining slimes instead of figuring out which slime is bigger, I am going to add health pools together so for instance you have a level 4 slime at 600/800 health and a level 1 slime with 100/100 health combined you would have a level 5 slime with 700/1000 health + 20% extra health for the combine giving you 900/1000 health.
Here is a screenshot of the skills display
And here is a video of me testing out the new hitbox system and the chase AI that the slimes have, right now if the slime is close to the player it will just try to move towards him, if its unable to move towards the player it will pathfind to him, it works pretty well there are a few bugs with determining a path when the player is very close, but unreachable I will resolve these soon hopefully!
Regarding keeping track of Npcs:
I moved everything over to a Dictionary Collection so I don’t have to iterate to find specific NPC’s anymore, I also moved the map over to holding the unique reference ID of the npc so each frame I build a small list of npc’s that I process that are within a few screens of the player this dramatically sped up the game with lots of NPC’s.
Before I was getting a performance hit once I got over 1000 npc’s in the world, after this semi complicated addition I added over 1 million npc’s to the world and still maintained well over 100 fps.
Here is a screen shot of me walking into a slime orgy I think some of them are combined at 50+ or more, I am going to limit the combine to like 5 or 6 I think to make it more reasonable and any additional combine will just heal and not increase strength.
I thought this was pretty hilarious one of the big ones ended up hitting me for 1500 and instantly killed me:
Here is early combat with the first hostile NPC (Slime), they are just a bit quicker than the standard walk speed so you need to dash to get some ground on them.
I am also looking for a few people to give me some feedback on the current state of the game, send me a PM here or register on my forums at Lostgateways.com and I will set you up, mainly looking for people to play it a little and get a feeling for how people feel about it.
